A Forty-Year Spending Spree Failed to Move the Wild Salmon Needle: Will the Salmon Recovery Industry Learn from History?

A Wake-Up Call

A recent study on recovery of salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River basin revealed that despite investing $9 billion in restoration actions spanning four decades, there was no discernible increase in the abundance of wild salmon and steelhead passing through Bonneville Dam.

Taking a step back, it’s stunning to consider the immensity of the endeavor. Columbia River wild salmon and steelhead have been the target of the largest, most expensive animal recovery project in the world’s history.

A forty-year-long experiment played out in front of multiple generations of people from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho.

The results aren’t a surprise to those of us intimately familiar with salmon and steelhead recovery in the Columbia River Basin, and the rest of the Pacific Northwest (PNW).
Agencies have invested vast sums of money into salmon and steelhead recovery in the Lower 48, and almost universally, stocks listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) remain threatened with extinction and are ill-prepared for a rapidly changing climate. The study helps to verify that the region’s plan for recovering fish has not worked.

Truth be told, the failures of federal and state agencies to stop the continued demise of wild salmon and steelhead is one reason The Conservation Angler (TCA) exists.
It’s imperative to hold managers accountable for violating laws, ignoring the best available scientific information, and failing to meet their conservation mandates. We also believe it is necessary to force them to formulate alternative, science-based actions rather than continue forging ahead with strategies that have proven to be failures to the fish and fishers.

In other words, we’re here to make sure the agencies do their jobs and protect wild salmon and steelhead.

Let’s be honest: If a business generated such a poor return on Investment (ROI) over a 40-year period or a sports franchise lost for 40 consecutive years, no one would be chomping at the bit to repeat the process. Those in charge would have been fired long ago. TCA sees this as a prime opportunity to learn from trial and error. A chance to implement what we have learned and truly adaptively manage. While time may not be on our side, wild salmon and steelhead remain throughout much of the Columbia River basin and their future is not set in stone.

As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

To that end, here we discuss key findings from the new research, pose hypotheses for why spending has failed, and identify what we would change moving forward.

How success was evaluated, and money was allocated

The study by Jaeger and Scheuerell offers a unique opportunity for a 40-year retrospective analysis of recovery spending in relation to the status of wild salmon and steelhead stocks, something that has rarely been done with such specificity. Though spending did not produce the intended results, there are some interesting details that offer more context.

First, evaluating conservation effectiveness is a key component of adaptive management. In 1987, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council set a goal of increasing total salmon and steelhead abundance in the Columbia basin to 5 million by 2025. Annual adult returns at Bonneville Dam averaged less than 1.5 million in the 2010s. Accordingly, recovery funding not only failed to turn an enduring ROI, but the fish are no closer to the goal that was established at the beginning of the recovery process.

Second, funding was not equally allocated among species, and not all of it went directly to restore, protect, or reconnect habitat. Per the publication, spending by the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) on Chinook salmon and steelhead has dramatically increased, and they receive the largest proportion of money, while spending on sockeye salmon was much lower and has remained relatively stable. Over the past forty years (ending in 2017), 43% and 27% of the $9 billion was for BPA and USACE programs, respectively. From 1997 to 2017, BPA allocated 36% of its money to research, monitoring, and evaluation (RM&E), compared to 21% for planning and coordination and 14% for hatcheries. Just 24% went to habitat restoration.

So, almost half the $9 billion was spent by dam and power managers, and 57% of BPA’s budget went to monitoring, evaluation, planning, and coordination. The spending on coordination, facilitation, and RM&E isn’t shocking considering the number of people employed in the salmon recovery industry, and the inherent, underlying cost to facilitating large governmental programs. If RM&E had been effective, BPA, USACE, and others should have realized earlier that their strategy was not achieving its intended goals and modified their conservation tactics to end funding for actions that were not working and experiment with alternatives that could have produced better results. The study is valuable because it underscores the need to re-evaluate our fundamental approach to recovering wild salmon and steelhead.

Third, while the overarching goals have not been achieved, there are examples where agencies and dam operators did effectively utilize RM&E, including research and monitoring that revealed extensive smolt mortality as they passed through turbines, which led to a 30-year effort to improve screening systems for turbine intakes and decrease smolt mortality. Additionally, changes in water storage and spill are now implemented each year to help reduce migration time and increase the survival of salmon and steelhead smolts. How would Upper Columbia and Snake River stocks have fared if smolts passing through eight dams were still dealing with turbine and spill problems?

The study did not seek to parse out effects for specific stocks of fish, and frankly, the authors shouldn’t have to. Small victories are nice, and can be very meaningful, but more was expected from $9 billion.

Why hasn’t recovery succeeded?

Although some populations have fared better than others, we are a long way from 5 million adult salmon and steelhead passing Bonneville Dam by 2025. The big question is: Why hasn’t restoration spending resulted in more adults passing Bonneville Dam?

There isn’t a shortage of potential reasons. Based on the actions and science in the Columbia River Basin and recovery efforts elsewhere, TCA poses our top five hypotheses for why recovery spending has not achieved its goals. The hypotheses are not exhaustive, nor do they address all our concerns, and some will be highly controversial. Debate and disagreement are part and parcel with change. We welcome constructive discussions.

But let’s also be clear — TCA’s constituents are wild salmonids, and our goal is recovery to the point where stocks can be considered for de-listing under the ESA, which is only possible if wild fish are sufficiently abundant, diverse, productive, and spatially distributed. Hence, we put wild fish first, because if we take care of wild fish, the fisheries will take care of themselves.

1) We’ve underestimated human impacts locally and climate × hatchery impacts in the North Pacific Ocean.

The human population in the Pacific Northwest has dramatically increased since salmon and steelhead were first listed in the 1990s. This population boom coincided with intensified effects from climate change, including hotter, more extreme summers and reduced snowpack, leading to diminished cold-water runoff. At the same time, hatchery releases of pink and chum salmon escalated, resulting in an estimated 5.5 billion salmon now inhabiting the North Pacific.

A warming ocean and the sheer volume of hatchery salmon have likely contributed to declines in the survival, growth, and size of many salmon stocks, including those from the Columbia River Basin. The combination of increased human presence, rising temperatures, and vast numbers of hatchery-origin pink and chum salmon has almost certainly altered freshwater and marine environments in ways that negatively impact wild salmon and steelhead. These adverse changes may have effectively canceled out the benefits that might have been realized through habitat restoration efforts.

2) We’ve overestimated the efficacy of and potential for habitat restoration alone to significantly increase returns of adult salmon and steelhead.

While restoring entire watersheds would be amazing, in practice, real-world restoration often focuses on instream habitat that represents a fraction of the total salmon-bearing stream miles. Those actions may improve the productivity of fish living in the restored reach, but the rest of the stream system that supports most of the fish and the basins upslope forest and ecology remain degraded. Further, owing to rivers being rivers, some restoration projects (e.g., large woody debris structures, rock barbs) and culvert replacements may be quickly reclaimed by the river, while other actions may take decades before their desired function is realized in ecological benefits (e.g., planting riparian and upslope forests).

A study in 2008 reviewed the effectiveness of 345 stream rehabilitation projects. They found some projects increased local fish abundance, but overall, many failed to meet their objectives. This isn’t to say habitat restoration is wasteful. Rather, restoration alone cannot necessarily be presumed to always be effective in increasing overall abundance of salmonids.

However, the spending also accounts for barrier removal, which immediately opens habitat and should directly increase the capacity of the watershed. While there is evidence of benefits to steelhead and salmon following large dam removal, sustained increases in adult returns due to removing smaller barriers (such as culverts) are less clear, even if they reopen miles of habitat.
For example, federal managers estimate they have reopened or improved salmonid access to over 2,200 miles of rivers and streams in the Columbia River Basin. That is a lot of river miles. To give an example, the entire Grande Ronde River Basin contains over 2,600 miles of fish bearing streams.

More broadly, the Pacific Coast Salmon Recovery Fund has reportedly reestablished access to 11,800 stream miles! For comparison, anadromous salmon once occupied 13,000 stream miles in the Columbia River Basin alone.

Although barriers primarily open smaller streams and tributaries, the sheer mileage of newly accessible habitat is extraordinary. If the estimates are accurate, how is it possible that restoration and small barrier removal has not translated into improved production of salmon and steelhead? Perhaps, as we discuss next, it’s partly related to hatcheries and harvest.

3) We’ve underestimated the impacts and durability of large releases of hatchery salmon and steelhead.

In the Columbia River Basin, 82 federal, state, and tribal hatcheries release approximately 140 million salmon and steelhead per year. Of those, about 70% -- or 98 million – are released from facilities above Bonneville Dam.

Despite releasing billions of hatchery fish and reopening enough stream miles to span a large watershed, the number of adults passing Bonneville Dam did not significantly increase over the forty-year period. In the article’s Discussion, the authors note that hatchery fish have adversely affected wild stocks through competition, genetics, disease, and predation, and have set the stage for mixed-stock fisheries on depleted wild salmon and steelhead.

Hatcheries are not inherently bad and underpin many harvest fisheries, but as described below, the weight of evidence suggests they more commonly harm than help wild salmonids. Adverse hatchery effects on wild stocks appear to depend on factors such as, but not limited to, source of the stock, the scale of production, the relative abundance of hatchery and wild fish, exploitation rate, and habitat capacity. For example, hatchery fish have helped jumpstart populations after dam removal and provided a short-term boost in abundance and diversity for populations that are close to extinction.

Still, hatcheries alter salmonids in ways that generally reduce their diversity and fitness, including modern "broodstock" programs that use wild fish alone or in combination with hatchery fish as broodstock. Due to their poorer survival, hatcheries typically release relatively large numbers of juveniles to achieve sufficient adult returns. Large numbers of maladapted fish create a myriad of genetic and ecological issues for wild fish, as evidenced by a recent global synthesis of peer-reviewed science where 83% of 206 studies on hatchery salmonids reported some type of adverse effect on wild salmonids.

A combination of competition and poor survival of hatchery and hatchery x wild offspring could be impacting ROI on freshwater recovery efforts. The Independent Scientific Advisory Board (ISAB 2015) evaluated and discussed the capacity of the Columbia River Basin in relation to hatchery production. They were concerned about density dependent effects stemming from a surplus of hatchery adults on the spawning grounds and recommended better balancing hatchery releases with natural productivity.

Moreover, a 43-year-long study on 22 populations of Chinook salmon in Idaho found that any increase in spawners associated with hatchery fish disappeared once releases were ceased. Although a portion of hatchery fish and/or genes do persist in nature, poor survival isn’t unexpected because if hatcheries were even moderately successful in restoring natural production, we would have seen the results by now.

In this vein, hatchery fish may access yet fail to sustain themselves in newly opened habitats and concomitantly exert negative impacts on wild fish. Thus, as we describe below, returns on habitat investments are unlikely to be realized by wild fish unless hatchery production is better aligned with restoration goals. That was the result in a before-and-after experiment with wild coho salmon in the Salmon River, Oregon, where the wild coho salmon population viability increased after hatchery cessation. Once hatchery releases ended, the abundance and productivity of wild coho salmon improved, spawn timing shifted to more closely resemble the historical timing, and juveniles increasingly displayed an alternative, estuarine strategy. The estuarine life history strategy contributed an average of 70% of the spawners in all but one year of the study.

Importantly, juvenile coho were not observed using the estuary prior to restoration of the tidelands and reconnecting a series of channels and wetlands. Some juveniles began to use the estuary after it was restored, but adult production from that life history only dramatically increased once the hatchery was closed, ocean harvest was reduced, and wild fish had the estuary to themselves.

Hence, hatchery effects are not limited to freshwater. In fact, something similar could be happening with Chinook salmon in the Columbia River estuary, where over 90% of juvenile Chinook salmon, coho salmon, and steelhead are of hatchery origin. Per a 2021 study, wild populations have been replaced by fewer hatchery stocks with a narrower range in migration timing that has intensified nearshore habitat competition during the spring-summer migration peak and reduced life history diversity in wild fish.

4) We’ve underestimated the effects of harvest on Chinook salmon.

Chinook salmon returning to the Columbia River Basin upstream of Bonneville Dam are harvested by commercial, recreational, and tribal fishers, though most harvest occurs in the ocean, with a recent article suggesting annual total ocean exploitation rates ranging from 30-60%. The same article also reported that a “whopping” 953,000 Chinook salmon were harvested in 2019 between the mainstem Columbia River and the ocean up to Southeast Alaska (SE AK). Though not all those fish were destined for the Columbia, many were, and a mere 381,773 and 535,746 adult Chinook passed Bonneville Dam in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

I could not delineate harvest for each stock of Chinook salmon, but the SE AK troll fishery is one of the primary ocean fisheries intercepting large numbers of immature wild and hatchery Chinook salmon. An annual fishery report in 2016 indicated a troll harvest of 276,432 Chinook salmon, of which, 39% were interior Columbia River spring/summer/fall stocks, while sport fishers in SE AK harvested 70,777 Chinook salmon, of which 25% – or 17,694 fish – were also from the interior Columbia. That equates to a total harvest of 125,502 salmon (in 2016) from rivers upstream of the Dalles Dam and represents about 30% of the average return of adult Chinook salmon that passed the Dalles Dam in 2017 and 2018 (average = 290,815 fish/year).
More concerning is that Chinook salmon are maturing at younger ages and smaller sizes, which has evolutionary implications for the fitness and fecundity of the species moving forward.

A publication by Ricker in 1980 found that body size of Chinook salmon in the PNW decreased by 50% from 1920 to the mid-1970's. That trend has continued since the 1990's, resulting in an additional 16% decrease in egg production and 28% reduction in nutrient transport.
The level of ocean exploitation undermines the sacrifice, compromise, and habitat investments in the Columbia River. From reduced fisheries for Native American tribes to increased regulation for farmers, everyone has paid the piper. How can they expect a meaningful ROI on their contributions, and that of the entire PNW, when the fish are being exploited at such high rates in the ocean?

High ocean harvest rates were a problem for Oregon coho salmon. Ocean harvest was reduced from over 80% down to generally less than 15%, which was considered a principal factor (in combination with improved marine survival) contributing to the improvement of ESA-listed coho.

More wild salmon on the spawning grounds could also increase odds they access and successfully utilize newly opened habitats, as was recently documented in the Elwha River following dam removal. Similarly, a long-term study on Chinook salmon in Idaho found spawners were more spatially distributed and occupied a greater proportion of habitat in years when they were more abundant compared to years when they were less abundant. Simply, the more abundant fish are, the more habitat they occupy.

Can we recover Chinook salmon without rebuilding their older ages and larger sizes? Considering the large reductions in body size, why haven’t managers increased escapement goals for wild fish to compensate for declines in fecundity? It’s hard to see a path towards recovery until Chinook salmon can fully express the trait (big size) that has bankrolled their persistence since time immemorial.

5) We’ve underestimated the importance of removing the four lower Snake River dams.

Significant amounts of high-quality habitat remain in the Snake River Basin and millions have been spent to restore and reconnect more degraded areas. Despite these efforts, wild steelhead and spring/summer Chinook salmon in the Snake River basin remain threatened with extinction and are worse off than when the listings began in the 1990’s.

According to the most prominent experts on Columbia and Snake River salmon and steelhead, “[t]he weight of scientific evidence demonstrates there is no chance of restoring abundant, healthy and harvestable Snake River salmon and steelhead with the lower Snake River dams in place." Dam removal would not just benefit migrating adults and juveniles; free-flowing rivers, particularly large mainstem channels, have remarkable production potential in their own right. Floodplains, side channels, and springs would create year-round habitat for several species.
Is it fair to promise recovery of Snake River wild salmon and steelhead, and continue spending, unless the biggest impediment to successful migration is eliminated?

Learning from History for Tomorrow’s Generations

The study should be a collective wake-up call.

Despite spending 9 billion over forty years, in terms of adult passage at Bonneville Dam, not much changed since Nehlsen et al. penned their seminal paper in 1991, Wild Salmon and Steelhead at a Crossroads.

As Winston Churchill said, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Hard to argue with Winston.

If all the King’s money couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again, what might?

Pragmatically, there is no silver bullet. The legacy of impacts is too great to recover salmon to their former abundance in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do better. There are dials to turn; and opportunities to better align management and recovery in ways that would benefit the fish and fishers in the Columbia River basin in this generation and those to come.

If granted rulership for a day, TCA would start by closing mixed-stock ocean fisheries that have the greatest impact on immature Chinook salmon, allowing them to rebuild age and size at maturity. We would focus fisheries on terminal areas in freshwater where returning fish are mature and harvest is more simply managed. This would immediately provide greater and more consistent fishing opportunity for Native American tribes and recreational anglers in the Columbia River basin, while also increasing the size and number of adults on the spawning grounds.

Next, we would greatly reduce pink salmon hatchery production in Alaska, many of which were originally established to mitigate adverse impacts from the Exxon Valdez. Instead, those hatchery fish replaced the wild stocks and have contributed to a myriad of density dependent effects on organisms from plankton to birds, whales, and salmonids – including biennial patterns in abundance of populations of Columbia River Chinook salmon and B-run steelhead.

TCA would also remove the four lower Snake River dams, period. They were a mistake in the first place.

Last, TCA would significantly reduce the production of hatchery fish in the Columbia River basin to ensure their total ecological and genetic footprint is not so overwhelming to ESA-listed wild salmonids. Closure of mixed-stock fisheries in the ocean would help offset reductions in hatchery releases of Chinook salmon, both reducing impacts from hatchery fish and increasing harvest for those in the Columbia.

Expansion of hatchery production in the Columbia River was based on the premise they could mitigate for harvest in the short term, and over the long term, with improved genetic and breeding protocols, science could develop hatchery salmon that were sufficiently equal to wild fish in survival, diversity, spatial distribution, and productivity.

Given the amount of habitat restoration and number of fish released, if even a fraction of the hatchery promise had come to fruition the rivers would be awash in salmon and steelhead.

More likely, a combination of hatchery fish and high harvest levels on Chinook salmon have limited potential benefits from habitat restoration. A meta-analysis of 32 habitat restoration projects in 28 rivers in Finland found habitat restoration had a small, overall positive effect on brown trout and/or Atlantic salmon density, but fishing mortality tended to obscure positive effects of restoration and stocking of hatchery juveniles negatively affected wild fish’s response to restoration. The authors concluded that further benefits depended on a better balance between restoration, harvest, and hatcheries, which is consistent with recommendations in the ISAB 2015 report on Columbia River hatchery and harvest practices.

Big changes would require a short-term sacrifice, something that is particularly difficult to ask of Native Americans who have already lost much of their land and culture. The unfortunate reality is that we are now in this together, and while recovery of salmon and steelhead may seem impossible, history offers examples of hope.

Over 100 years ago (late 1890s to early 1900s) Roosevelt Elk on the Olympic Peninsula were on the verge of extinction due to over-hunting, and in turn, Washington state enacted a hunting moratorium on Roosevelt elk from 1905 to 1933. Then, in 1909, President Roosevelt permanently protected 615,000 acres of their habitat (the foundation of Olympic National Park).

Would Roosevelt elk persist on the Olympic Peninsula, and would hunters still be able to pursue them and citizens enjoy their presence if conservation efforts didn’t focus both on habitat and harvest?

What if – to recover Wood Ducks – we released millions of maladapted ducks each year into their compromised habitat, allowed them to interbreed and compete for food and habitat, and continued to harvest, often at high levels?

Or had done the same for cod, striped bass, canvasbacks, or sandhill cranes?

And repeated the process each year for four decades.

For Chinook salmon, which are now substantially smaller in size, would Shaq have been a dominant NBA center at 5’ in height? Could blue herons maintain their resilience as a species if we reduced the length of their legs, neck, and beak by over 50%? Or would they go extinct, nothing more than a glorified sandpiper?

Would any person honestly expect recovery in those instances?

No. Because we know from history that rebuilding animal populations requires strong alignment between harvest, habitat restoration, and potential use of captive breeding and/or relocation.

Transplanting animals from other areas, typically for a short duration, has contributed to the recovery of other species (e.g., turkey), but those actions were not taken in isolation. They also greatly curtailed or eliminated harvest. What humans have attempted in the Columbia River basin is quite different and we aren’t aware of any instances where it has worked.

Fortunately, not all salmon and steelhead populations are in complete dire straits, and in those cases, more restrictive fisheries could be sustained through recovery.

Again, this is where history provides a path forward.

For recreational anglers, Oregon historically implemented conservative regulations that many would scoff at today. In 1959, for instance, they closed nine rivers to boat fishing to curtail catch where salmon were too vulnerable, and closed fishing at several river mouths to protect adult salmon that aggregated in the nearshore areas or lower river when streamflows were too low for upstream migration.

The Oregon Fish Commission argued that “many special regulations are necessary if proper management of this magnificent resource is to be sustained in the face of increased use.”

We agree. Recreational anglers have the privilege to fish, and we must take that privilege seriously. We also need to remember these magnificent fish are not just here for fishers, they are here for all citizens – present and future. Too often, the debate centers only around those who fish, when it should encompass the overall trust responsibility for all people. This isn’t an idea we take lightly. Changing fisheries, modifying hatchery releases, and removing large dams are contentious and generate passionate missives from both sides of the debate.

Nonetheless, climate change isn’t waiting for those in charge to figure it out. Time is of the essence if we are serious about recovering salmon and steelhead. TCA is willing to shoulder the criticism that comes with positing a different path forward. It’s part and parcel with any changing of the guard.

Just as Billy Beane found out in Moneyball, “…the first guy through the wall, he always gets bloody. Always.” If we take one on the chin, speaking up for wild fish and raising questions about the status quo, so be it. It’s the least we can do for animals that have given us so much.

And it’s our responsibility for the generations to come.