 Welcome to this first seminar in our series of Fallen Landscape Ecology and Management. This series is presented jointly by the Blue Mountains Natural Resource Institute and the Eastern Oregon State College chapter of Sigma's Eye, the Scientific Research Society. I have a few housekeeping items to take care of before I introduce today's speakers. First, we scheduled one hour for the presentation itself. And that probably will include general questions. But both of today's presenters are gonna hang around for a while. So those people who are interested in talking about specific issues that they'd like to talk about, more detailed questions, feel free to hang around. I've asked these two to stay around as long as is needed, depending upon the audience. So they've agreed to do that. Second, this presentation will be videotaped. Our videographer, Dan White, is here doing that duty. Several copies of the video will be available as part of the Institute's Video Lending Library. And so for those of you who'd like to rent a copy of today's seminar for folks back home, there's a sign-up sheet in the back and we have several copies that we'll generate after today's taping. And you don't have to rent them, they're free. They're free, they're loaner copies. Just sign up and we'll send them to you. And the more that you sign up, there's a two-week turnaround time on those. Third, we have a sample of reprints published by all the speakers in this series. Just, these are short technical scientific papers for anybody who's interested in, these are related subjects, not specifically having to do with today's presentation but related subjects. The one that I've chosen for this one is a short little reprint on Bulltrap published by Bruce Ring here in one of his colleagues. And for those people who want the whole collection of reprints, the three reprints we've assembled, there's another sign-up sheet back there. We'll be glad to have a photocopy of them sent to you. Just put your address down there and we'll do that. Finally, for those interested in college credit, we'll be offered as a one-credit seminar course through Eastern Oregon State College. I'm the ostensible instructor. And that's graduate or undergraduate credit for those people building a degree. There are forms back there you can collect to register for the course. And we have information on what that requires in terms of requirements for those interested. Does anybody have any questions at this time? Okay, that today's seminar will be presented jointly by Drs. Danny Lee and Bruce Freeman, both of the Boise Lab Intermountain Research Station and US Forest Service. Dr. Lee is a fisheries biologist and statistician. And he was hired by the Forest Service in 1991. Then he got his PhD from Texas A&M in 1989 and during his student years, worked with the Foundation Resources for the Future on Columbia River basin fisheries problems. Most recently, he's helped to build the fisheries component of the aquatic assessment for the east side project in Walla Walla. So I think the comments you'll have today are pretty germane of what's going to be happening here as that product gets released. Dr. Freeman is also a fisheries biologist who began with the Forest Service in 1992. Bruce got his PhD from the University of Idaho in 86. We worked on harvest management issues of largemouth bass. Bruce has worked as a professional fish biologist for over 20 years, including stents with Idaho and Oregon Fish and Wildlife Departments. Most recently, Dr. Freeman has teamed with Danny and others to develop this aquatic assessment for the east side project. So the title of their presentation, which they'll offer jointly today, is broad-scale assessment of land use effects on fishes of the interior Columbia River basin. Thank you. Indeed, it's a privilege to be here and we hope we can sort of pull this thing off. But yeah, Bruce and I never like to talk too much before we give a presentation. That way, each of us can be surprised somewhat about whatever it has to say. What we'd like to do today, though, is to, excuse me, give you some of the, really, just an overview of some of the work that we've been working on for the last two years. And this work is part of the interior Columbia basin ecosystem management project, which is far too much of a mouthful for any of us to repeat more than once. We generally just sort of refer to it and as the east side project, the east side coming from where it was originally intended for us, a project that would look at the east side of all the states of Oregon, Washington, that is the federal lands to the east of the Cascade Crest. Now, that project was subsequently enlarged to include the rest of the Columbia River basin, which led to a much longer sort of tile than it is by now. But for those who've sort of been around with it the east side still comes out a lot easier than the interior Columbia basin ecosystem management project or some other silly acronym that you might make out of those letters. So anyway, let me just, what I want to do today is start off with, by just for those of you who are not that familiar with the east side project, to give you some background on what the project is and then what it's all about and then maybe say something about when the products from that project will be coming out and will be made available to the general public. And then specifically we want to talk about the things that we looked at within sort of the aquatic portion of that project and some of the implications that are coming out of our work. And when you take our work and put it together with some of the other efforts that's been done, what it means to the region and to the management of federal lands as a whole. All right. To start with, it's the title once again, interior Columbia basin ecosystem management project. The project really has sort of four major components or products, if you will, that it was set up to deliver. One of these is a scientific framework for ecosystem management. This is basically sort of a short sort of paper or publication that just kind of lays out the general concepts and ideas that were behind the project and what it is that we're trying to achieve with the project as a whole. The second, which is a much larger component is a scientific assessment of ecological, social, cultural and economic systems. And this will be a series of larger documents. I have no idea what the final page count is at this point. But there are really sort of five major components to this. There's an evaluation of landscape features across the assessment area. And I'll get to a little minute about this and where the assessment area is and whatnot. There's an evaluation of aquatic elements within that landscape, terrestrial elements, terrestrial vertebrates and whatnot. Social and economic elements are there there. And finally sort of an integration of all those things together. In addition, there are two environmental impact statements that have been prepared. In some sense by a separate group or team than what prepared the scientific assessment. And these environmental impact statements are currently sort of in their final stages of being drafted and released shortly to the public. And these are intended to provide then management direction to the federal lands within the assessment area by the coming years. And they were intended to be developed based upon the information presented within the scientific assessment. And then finally there's a scientific evaluation of alternatives. In a sense of sort of unusual move for the Forest Service and VLM, what we did was that the EIS teams developed a list of alternatives that were seven alternatives presented for future management. Rather than evaluating those alternatives themselves, they turned that, those alternatives over to the science team which developed the scientific assessment. And the science team then developed the evaluation of alternatives. And that will also be a set deductible. What I want to talk about today comes essentially out of, or an embrace, comes out of this second component of the scientific assessment. We're going to head upon some of the things that we looked at when we examined the aquatic system and how all we found fits in with some of the creation. All right, in terms of the area of the assessment, I already mentioned it includes all of the states of Oregon and Washington to the east of the Cascade Crest, and in the remaining portion of the Columbia River Basin within the states of Idaho, Western Montana, and then a little bit there in Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. In terms of area, it's roughly about 600,000 square kilometers. I probably should know how many acres that is. I'll just carry that around and talk to my head. I know how many square kilometers it is because much of the data that we deal with from this particular analysis comes to us in one square kilometer pixels. So by working with the data sets over and over, you find out very quickly how many pixels there are in the region. But other than that, just in, I mean, I think this particular map gives you a good idea of just how large of an area we're talking about relative in size, it's larger than the state of California by itself. Those of you who are Texans or have run into Texans, this is still smaller than Texas. But anyway, it's still a sizable land map, all the thing. There's probably a number of statistics I could just found and I can't remember most of them anyway, so I'll forget. But it does include a significant portion of forest service and build in land, roughly one quarter of all the national forest lands, for example, are found within this east side of the assessment area. Well, probably the objectives of the east side project were to first broadly characterize the geophysical and biological setting of the base and our assessment areas. Identify the important anthropogenic factors of things that humans have done, the changes of humans have brought on the landscape. Provide a broad-scale assessment of current conditions and finally provide original context for federal management. That is, what do we have, where are we going, what are some things that we need to do in terms of federal management? Without providing recommendations, which is a manageable task, I should always forget that. Scientists, we don't do that. Okay, I'll mention a couple of additional sort of primary co-authors in the work that Bruce and I are talking about, Russ Thurl and Kerry Overton, they were in Boise with Bruce and I, so contributing to this. Jack Williams is with the Bureau of Land Management, is also stationed in Boise, and Jim Soudal is with the City Northwest Research Station in Corvallis, where some of the other primary authors to the assessment work was done. Focusing in now a little more specifically at the aquatic side of the assessment, some of the focus, sort of the items of the focus side, one is to look at physical habitat conditions and changes there. This was based primarily on a analysis of almost 20,000 kilometers of stream surveys that have been done throughout the base, have done both by forest service and by all this. We also use survey information taken by state agencies and private consultants and whatnot, and looked at in-stream habitat conditions throughout the region. This was not an entirely, I would say an entirely inclusive analysis, and then the screen which was surveyed entirely covered the whole basin. It was not, as we might call it, a scientific survey in a sense that you would have set out to, if you were to set out to analyze the basin itself, you might come up with a more systematic sampling scheme than what we had, which said this was more of an analysis of found data, the data that were available to us, and as such, it had some shortcomings, but all the same it provides us some understanding of some changes that have been made in terms of physical habitat. Now I'm not gonna say very much about that, you can get into that in a whole nother seminar that will be a part of the information. We'll sort of skip over that. One thing that I will talk a little bit more about was we looked at the distribution of native and introduced species, and I'm talking about fishes here. We also had some information on the mollusk and vermin, some quiet plants, and whatnot, but today I was trying to have a conversation to talk about what we did with the fishes. The distribution is status of key cell monids, and I'll talk more about that in a minute. And key cell monids are sort of broadly distributed cell monid species of, like chinook, salmon, and bull trowel, the red-banded trowel, whatnot. These are species that are widely distributed throughout the basin, they're fairly good indicators of habitat quality, we thought they're very much sort of habitat quality sensitive species, and therefore we use those as indicators of overall assistive health and get into some of the things that we found in terms of looking at these key cell monids. We also looked at the distribution status of roughly 40 sensitive species, these are things ranging from everything from a white sturgeon to a hudden to each other, or a stone or something, these are different species that for one reason or another have been identified as sensitive on the state or federal lists or whatnot. We went in and looked at, well, where are these species found, how are they distributed, where are they pressed? Finally, what we'll try to do is to link the distribution and status of some of these fishes and the conditions of the fishes to the landscape. We'll talk quite a bit about how we've tried to do that and Bruce will be getting into some of the implications of that work. And then finally, this is a synthesis as a whole, what are the implications? What have we found out and what is it about? All right, well you need a little bit of language to sort of prepare you for some of the discussions you're gonna have, I need to sort of present a kind of a hydrologic hierarchy. When we're sort of talking about the assessment area I mentioned it was roughly 600,000 square kilometers for some of the landscape data that we worked with that actually came to us in 600,000 pixels. That's a little, a little too fine a resolution for most things we wanna look at, a little overwhelming. We have essentially split up the region based on hydrologic boundaries to give us a little better handle on what's going on. Unless you're really used to dealing with maps and sort of map units you may not be familiar with what's called hydrologic unit codes which are just a designation that the USGS uses to identify watersheds and what basically they have done is gone out and split up the entire country into these sort of sub-basins where each sub-basin is sort of like a river basin if you will. And these sub-basins can then be further subdivided if you will into watersheds and each of those watersheds can then be subdivided into sub-watersheds so you can get the finer and finer levels of resolution. So in this example we take one of the roughly 165 sub-basins that are found within the assessment area. That sub-basin might be the upper grand ron which is a what's called a fourth code hydrologic unit or fourth field unit. That sub-basin is then further divided and it's actually divided in two steps. Once in the watersheds and finally watersheds and sub-watersheds, you can draw the watershed boundaries but if you could think of roughly, I don't know, 15 or 20 watersheds within here and then those are divided up into more sub-watersheds and we're actually pulling out a sub-watershed of McIntyre Creek as an example. This is a watershed of roughly 20,000 acres and that's sort of the finest level of resolution that we tried to deal with when talking about our fish distributions and what not. In some cases we looked for distributions of species based at the sort of the watershed level. That is what we did to really get this project underway and sort of compile database on fishes is that we went to the state agencies and pulled together their electronic databases into the Oregon collection records and the Washington collection records and we were able to get all the electronic information that we had spatially arrayed that to try to come up with distribution maps for all of the species within the basin and for us a distribution, if you will, is simply the presence or absence of a species within a watershed and so what we sort of look at later is the and the distributional maps of species where it's simply identified by presence and absence of a watershed. When we get down to some of the keys I wanted to be looking for even finer resolution data and I'll go talk about that in a minute. All right, well are there any quick questions while I sort of move the projector around here? Let's talk back quickly about some of the results that we found. All right, as soon as we went out and we asked, looked at the state databases, we also created a series of survey forms, sent those out to 150 biologists I guess throughout the region, asked them to go out and sort of tell us which species are found and which watersheds. Essentially give us a list of all the species present within all the watersheds that you're familiar with. So when all that information came back, we began to compile it. What we found was that there's roughly over 140 taxa of fishes within the Columbia River basin. I say taxa, but we're talking about species, in some cases we're talking about subspecies and others, in some cases we're only talking about genera that is. We might have record for something like a tilapia, you know, without normal species it is, but we know that it was found or introduced in that area. On the other hand, we may have bottomable cuts for the trout, which are the subspecies that cut from trout, so that would be a separate taxa. So we had roughly 140 throughout the basin. I guess we need to get the lights. Okay, of the 140 something species that we had, or taxa that we had, roughly 60% of those were native species, and these are ones that historically would have been found within the assessment area. And another 40% or 38.5% is that were introduced species and many of these were introduced from other parts of the United States. Some of them were on purpose, others accidentally. Many of the introduced species that we're talking about are the game fishes that have been brought in by fishing game agencies, but all of the sunfishes are familiar with them, the bass and the walleye and also the brook trout and the brown trout and the whole host of butters. These are species which are now making a huge proportion of the fauna that we have in terms of the fishes, but they're not native to this part of the sea. Well, if you start looking at watersheds, if you're talking about these watersheds, we have roughly 5,000 of these watersheds in the base. We need some way to kind of make sense of all of that. So we've got presence, active state of species for each of these 5,000 watersheds. We'd like to group those watersheds in some sort of meaningful category. And the way we do that is through something called an association analysis, which looks at the species which are present within watersheds and the species which are not present and it begins to group watersheds based on the presence absence of a specific species. And I know you can't read this back there, but the basic idea is that this is sort of like a dichotomous key where we start off with all of the watersheds grouped together and then we're gonna split them and we're gonna split them based on the presence absence of a single species. So the first thing that we looked for when we're trying to break these watersheds out into watersheds that are more and more light based on the presence of that is that we look for sunfish. If sunfish are present or not, that turns out to be a very good sort of the first split in terms of the watersheds. For those who are familiar with the fishes and whatnot, recognized sunfish are primarily a warm water, slack water kind of species. And if you're finding it there, that implies a whole different sort of equalized community than what you find in other areas. So we can then work from sunfish, where we find sunfish, then we can split them further to the next on Westlil Cutthroat, which is a sort of a species at the other end of the spectrum, a cold water species. So we're starting to split them out and then next base of Cutthroat there we can look for still head, et cetera. And so going down the other way, we can look for the absence of certain species, the presence of some species. And in the end, what we ended up with, essentially these 16 sort of terminal groupings, if you will, of watersheds. And when you sort of map that distribution there, what you get is a distribution of fish assemblages. And in here, the colors reflect somewhat similarity to one another. That is that the, I'm not completely, some of these, the blue, the D, E, F and G, for example, tend to be more similar to one another and, of course, more similar to most of the ones between. So if you're looking at this sort of just category of G for like the other sort of moniker here, we see a concentration of those in sort of the central Idaho mountains. Some also, some of them in the blue mountains and then in the south, then in the Cascades. This sort of magenta color in class A, if we look at that, we're familiar with the topology of this country, what you're looking at are sort of the river bottoms in the upper end of the Columbia River and essentially the Park Fork and whatnot along that. Some of these, the old one, P's are essentially categories which are just artifacts of sampling. Those are, we have very little information about the core, but alternatively, there are very few species there. You see those scattered all over the place. Well, the spatial map is fine. We'd like to know a little bit more about these groupings or these assemblages that we've identified. Some of the different things you can look at, you can just look at certain terms of total species or species richness. How many species were found, say, in this category A, B or C that we identified? What you see is sort of in this case a kind of downward trajectory going from A to G and then we get a little bit of an upswing in the assemblages H, I, J and K and then finally the fewest species of all or these sort of artifact groups that were left over. The other thing that we can look at within and sort of use as a means of comparing assemblages is the comparison of the number of native species to the number of exotic species. And in this case, if you were to think about good or bad sort of thing, what we'd really like to see are high numbers of natives relative to the number of exotics. But there are only sort of lines through here simply to show you sort of the breakeven point. This is a point where the number of natives equals the number of exotics. And what you see within these three categories, at least, that only in category B do you have sort of the general trend where the numbers of natives exceed the numbers of exotics for categories A and C, particularly in C, you have large numbers of watersheds within that grouping for the number of exotics actually exceed the number of native species. So again, some of the other assemblages, D, E, F and G, which are some of those blue colors that we're showing you in Central Idaho, some of the higher elevation areas, here the native species do exceed the number of exotics in some cases by quite a bit. Even the scales of either different, this goes from zero to 12, this to zero to 20. We like this, in a sense, we like to see points in that upper end that show us that our communities are basically very much the same as they might have been historically from no exotic species to speak of, primarily still composed of native species. All right, we can get a little more fancy or sophisticated, if you will, and looking at this by calculating a couple of sort of mathematical expressions that you don't need to worry too much about what this formula does for you, but it's just a conventional way of calculating an index of diversity, and we can calculate various sorts of numbers using essentially a variant of the same formula to give us where one is just simply a count of the number of species in sort of an N1 and N2, or just numbers of a budget or some very abundant species either artificially defined, but still a bit useful. We can take those diversity indices, manipulate them in such a way that we created a composite index, which is measuring sort of relative measure of species richness and evenness. And then when we map this composite index then, it gives us something, some sort of indication of what we might refer to as fish community integrity, areas where the communities are pretty much in line with what might have been there historically. Again, here these sort of darker areas that we see showing up, this area in the upper John Day is an example of a very, might be familiar to some of you, home of cascades and central mountains. Okay, so that's some of the information we generated from kind of all of the species information. What we also worked with was the quay salmonics and here's the list that we worked with, bull trout, West Lopez on cutthroat trout, red band trout, native rainbow trout, still head trout, which is in the adverse form of the red band or rainbow, and in ocean type and stream type Chinook, which are equivalent to spring or some more falchionic thing on where you are in the basin. What we did with these is rather than simply as a presence and absence, we asked the biologist to make some judgment of status, and so they went out and for some watersheds, all 7,500 of them were in the basin, we asked them to tell us by the presence strong, the pras absent, if you don't know, but if you know the presence, you don't know the status present unknown, if you know they're there, but they really only use this migration corridor for that, or if you just don't know, tell us that as well. We used that information, we tried to link that information, if you will, to the landscape information, and the landscape information I refer to as a whole suite of information that described the landscape, and much of this could be the accessible information and talked about the parent theology of the landscape, it could have been physical information, talked about the climate of the area, and a lot of good information talked about the vegetation, now the vegetation that we, remember I talked about that some of the layers were coming in to us, that one square kilometer pixel information, well the vegetation people essentially had sort of three different ways of describing the vegetation, and you get them pixelated, and look at the potential vegetation type, something like the forest or not, the structure of that vegetation, and finally even the cover type of the vegetation, put those three things together in a much longer list, and you get like 205 combinations for every pixel with possible combination, we reduced that to sort of 40 functional classes in terms of how we thought they might affect the aquatics, and finally then we then clustered watersheds based on the composition within them down to 12 watershed types, so when we were sort of done with our sort of reducing the amount of vegetation information, we had sort of 12 vegetation types doing the math across the basin, and this is one of the things that we then tried to link to the issue of the information. We have similar sorts of things with the way the land is owned and who owns the land and how it's managed, so we have different management classes in terms of identifying different impacts in terms of forest service land, maybe forest service land, but it's heavily managed versus something that has a low impact on water national parks, for example, private agriculture, big Columbia plateau where it's all private ag land shows up and whatnot. So this is additional information that we use. Well, that information was tied to the status of the fish species, using kind of fish species, and I'm not even gonna really try to explain this, for those of you who are interested in the mechanics of the statistical analysis that we'll get to that later, basically, this is just a technique which allows us to make a prediction based upon the information that we have in it. We generate these models from the data where we know what the status of the species are, we've got the landscape information, and we turn around and make predictions in other areas where we have the landscape information that we don't know. So if you look at something like bull trout, what we had was that we knew that the population was strong where these dark sort of yellows are per gold. We modeled and predicted it would be strong in the light yellow areas, similarly, where it was depressed in the dark green and new, that predicted depressed in the light green. This all this did was give us a more complete distribution to work from, in terms of where we thought the species were, and how it might be written. One final example, I know Bruce has got several others, or something like red bands, St. Patrick means they occur with, still had trout. Here we've got the historical range map which we're generating through other approaches. Where it's blue is areas where we think the species is essentially now missing from its current range. Currently depressed would be the dark blue, currently strong would be the yellow. This is some of the information that we bring to the table for each of the seven species, and as to how we think that species is distributed on the landscape. While I've used more of my time than I should have, I'll let Bruce pick up on from there. Anybody watching the clock? We've got about 30 minutes. So I'll move as quickly as I can. But that's about what it'll take. What I want to do is two things. I want to give you a little bit more information on what we've found about fishes in the base, and give you some sense of the results and sort of the big picture tying that together. And then I want to take a little time and talk about attempts to sort of integrate the results of our work with that from other aspects of this project. And principally here we're going to talk about terrestrial ecology, landscape ecology, and forest communities. What we find, if we look at management in the Columbia Revation, is that historically, management of the public lands has been sort of an exercise in conflict. We have timber harvest and fisheries management, for example, typically viewed as conflicting approaches to land allocation. One is a constraint on the other. One directly impacts the other. And so we view them as problems that are butting heads. Now as we think about ecosystem management and trying to view systems as full pieces, really we ought to be thinking about those as two elements of the same problem. For managing healthy systems, then the opportunity to harvest fish, the opportunity to harvest trees ought to emerge from that. The primary objective ought to be to manage a healthy landscape and not to exploit individual resources and fight over how much of each of those. So we tried to look at the opportunity to do those sorts of things, to see what the conflicts might be, the opportunity to do those sorts of things and how that might emerge in the kind of information that we've been able to put together. So first of all, fish and then a little integration. This is kind of a dark picture, but basically it's just a picture of the stream. The idea is that most of the work that we've done with fishes and aquatic ecosystems have been at very fine scales. We understand fairly well how fish are influenced at the scale of meters, perhaps kilometers of stream. We've worked a lot in looking at the things that influence them. What we don't understand as well is how they're influenced by processes and structure and the things going on at very broad scales. And so in the Columbia River Basin, we're starting to talk about the things that influence fishes over huge areas. What are the differences in the distribution of fishes across watersheds, not just across habitat in this room and streams? So how do we see that picture across the very large areas, a very different approach to fisheries? And so it was a lot of work and some new ideas for many of it. So this project gave us a great opportunity to do that. There's no way we could pull together the kind of information we needed over an area the size of the Columbia River Basin without the infrastructure, something like the Forest Service in BLM. Federal biologists and state biologists participated all over the area and probably many of the people in this room also participated, providing information. So it's a huge project, probably the most ambitious attempt to characterize the distribution of status of fishes that's ever been done in an area this size. So we had three primary objectives within the approach portion that Danny mentioned to you. First of all, we wanted to talk about the complete status and distribution. So we wanted to talk about what fish were where and what the condition of those fish was in every watershed in the basin. That's a big problem because we don't sample every watershed. The second one was we wanted to identify important areas. We wanted to know the areas that supported unique species or rare species, sensitive species. We wanted to know areas that supported high levels of diversity, high levels of richness. What might be areas to focus on for conservation? Critical areas for the maintenance of biodiversity and aquatic kinds of things. And finally we wanted to look at languages. What were the things that influenced the distribution of fishes and how did that tie together with land management and how does it tie together with the other aspects and the other problems and issues that emerge in land management in the Columbia River Basin? So again, the key some on it, I'm gonna focus almost entirely on these guys. We looked at all species as Danny mentioned, but these were really our primary indicators. A lot of information for these species is available because they're a major issue for fishermen, they're a major issue economically. We tend to have studied them far more than other species. They're also good indicators because they're broadly distributed and because they're sensitive to change. So that's where most of our information came from, although we do talk about all species. We looked at the characterization of whole assemblages as Danny mentioned and we used some of that information in terms of looking at the integrity or the condition of whole systems. Again, I'm gonna focus on this on it. As an example of the application of the models Danny was talking about, trying to get this complete picture, one of the problems we face is that we don't have information everywhere. This is an example for bull trout. The salmon colored areas represent the places where biologists have enough information to make some judgment about presence or absence and some judgment about the relative status and the distribution of life histories. The green areas are the places that we don't know that haven't been sampled enough or haven't been sampled at all. And so the extrapolation of those models is useful for filling in that picture and that's exactly what we did. So much of this is prediction, not known information, but prediction, but based on statistical probabilities and associational landscape characteristics. But what that does is it gives us the opportunity to look at the whole system. And even the Fish and Wildlife Service when they're trying to render their opinion on the distribution and the status of bull trout under the Endangered Species Act didn't have this kind of a picture. We can begin to paint a picture of where bull trout appears, so the light blue would represent what we think was the potential historical range where they could have been. The dark blue is where we believe they occur now and the yellow represents where we have strong, spawning and burying populations or perhaps the critical areas. So we can begin to see what the big picture is. We can begin to see what kind of contraction or change may have gone on in the distribution. We can begin to see where the important areas are. So we can do that with bull trout. We can do that with all of these seven salmonids. We can begin to paint a much more complicated picture, but indeed a much better picture of where the key areas might be and how well they seem to be functioning. This is an example where we just look at all the salmonids and the occurrence of strongholds or strong populations. The darkest green would be where we have three critical areas, three different species lining up. The yellow areas is where we have one. It's just some idea of the patchwork of environments or watersheds that are supporting the expression of healthy populations for the salmonids. So we can begin to paint that picture across the basin. We can look at individual species and see how well each one is doing. This is just an example of the distribution. This would be for the historical range of habitat that's available. What proportions still support that species and they still occur there? And what portion of that total is still considered to be healthier or strong? So we see that bull trout, yellowstone cutthroat, westlope cutthroat, rainbow, simpatic rainbow, alpatic rainbow, two different kinds of red band. They seem to be doing much better than the anatomous fish. The steel hit, stream type Chinook or ocean type Chinook. A larger portion is still strong, although the best we're doing is probably 30% of the historical range would still be strong. For bull trout, it's about 6%, but for the Chinook and steelhead, we're down to less than 5%, less than 1% for steelhead and stream type Chinook. So we have some sense of the condition of these fishes and we can begin to contrast that among species. Generally, the species that have the most complex life histories that require the largest area over their life are the ones that are doing the worst. The more places they happen to evolve in their life, the bigger the chance are that something's gone wrong in that part of their environment. We can begin to look at the whole basin. I said these salmones are good indicated because they're broadly distributed. At least one of these species occurs in virtually every watershed in the basin. We have the number that might have occurred historically. The darkest colors, the most species, up to six in watersheds within central Idaho and some portion of the Northern Cascades, only one over here in the upper snake. And we can begin to compare that with what we think the picture looks like now. We start to see some holes showing up. We start to see some fragmentation. We start to see some losses of species. So we can begin to quantify the change that has occurred in these aquatic systems using these fishes as indicators. And so that's what we've spent a lot of time doing. And then the report's in a lot of the other work. We spend a lot of time trying to interpret that. Basically, the picture is that we have lost a fair bit. We've seen some contraction. We've seen some isolation. We've seen extensions in a major part of the range for many species. So things have changed. They're not like what they used to be. That's no surprise to most people, but we can begin to paint the picture in a way that we can understand it. Well, the causes of that are widespread. Lots of different things going on, certainly with the development of the Cumbiver Basin. Dams have played a major role. You know, certainly the role of dams and anatomous fishes, but dams and other obstructions have played a major role with fishes throughout the entire system. Road systems, railway systems, culverts, irrigation diversions, all kinds of things have chopped the system up and blocked access to fishes. So fishes that move over large areas are restricted to much smaller areas than they were historically. This is a major problem. Fragmentation of this basin has occurred in a major way. We have seen the influence of exotic species. This is an example, and this is a picture that Phil Hal took. This picture is probably all over the world and used in lots of different places that won't acknowledge him anymore, but this is a brook trout and this is a bull trout. The bull trout is the native char in the basin. Brook trout are introduced, but they tend to hybridize and it appears that brook trout can displace bull trout. There are other, brook trout may displace cutthroat through competition. And many of the other species will have similar kinds of effects on native species. They tend to displace them, push them out of the habitats they're in through a number of different mechanisms, hybridization and competition, predation, other sorts of effects going on. Well, introduced fishes have played a big role in the change. Danny showed you something about the numbers. This is just an example of how prevalent brook trout are in the Columbia River Basin. They are now the second most widely distributed species within the Columbia River Basin, not necessarily the most abundant or the second most abundant, but the second most widely distributed species in the basin. They're part of our environment. Introduced fishes are a big part of the change that's going on. Habitat change certainly plays a role and habitat change takes a number of forms. Habitat disruption, we have problems associated with urbanization, with channelization of streams, with agricultural impacts, with pollution, with forest practices, all sorts of things that contribute to the degradation of habitats and that's played a big role. We can't sort those out very cleanly. All we do find is that indicators of the level of disturbance or the impact of man are very good predictors of the change in these communities. Road density appears to be one of the best variables we can find to predict the condition of water sheds and the condition of fishes across the Columbia River Basin. Are roads have lots of effects on fishes or may be the mechanisms for lots of different effects? They can change hydrologic regimes, they can influence sediment going into streams. They are vectors of disease in terms of bringing new fish into the system, the introduction of exotic species. They're also vectors of mortality, perhaps, we could say, in the introduction of fishermen. So roads play lots of different roles in the influence of aquatic systems. We can't tease those out very well, but what we find is that they're a very good predictor of change in these systems and so if we just look at the probability of finding a strong salamond population in a watershed, it turns out to be strongly related to the density of roads. These are just road density classes from very low road densities to very high road densities. This is the proportion of all the watersheds in this road density class that support a strong population of at least one salamond. So you can see as road densities increase, probability that we're gonna find a strong population there is declining. Lots of mechanisms for a very good indicator of change and environmental change associated with what we've done in the landscape. So the picture we might paint then is one of change with aquatic species, but typically one of fragmentation, isolation, and a change in the spatial diversity and the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems that we might portray in a simple cartoon. Historically, we think we probably had watersheds or river basins that were a mosaic of habitat conditions. We had productive, resilient habitats that might be these brown areas. We had less productive systems that perhaps were supported. Fewer species were less productive, like these light blue, perhaps places that were unproductive. And this was probably dynamic. It was probably shifting around through space and time because of natural disturbance, fires, flugs, other kinds of effects on these systems. This was very dynamic, but this mosaic, this network, this spatially diverse network of habitats supported a variety of species. Some species here that you don't find here. Some life histories use the whole system. These have the opportunity to exchange because they're connected together. And so the system was dynamic, but it was also relatively stable and resilient because it was spatially diverse. So species could move throughout the system. If you have an extinction here, it can be repopulated from somewhere else. If you've heard about metapopulation dynamics and some of the ideas associated with that, we think those played a major role in the way watersheds and fish communities and fish populations work. Now what we have in many cases is something that looks more like this, where we have started to change these watersheds. We have degraded habitats and we have reduced their ability to recompose themselves through time. In many cases, we've isolated them. And the pattern of change has followed the patterns of access and many of the things that we do in the landscape. This is just an example with the way we have entered many watersheds for timber harvest, but if we think about it, private lands, the development of the quarter down here, urbanization, all tend to be more prominent in lower elevations and mid elevations and move up from the bottom. So the general pattern is one of isolation of our productive habitats more and more on the headwaters of these systems. So the picture that we would paint then is that in this case, we have some problems. These are not resilient systems. If we have catastrophic effects, the chances are a random effects from weather or anything else. Chances are the populations in this kind of system, if they go extinct, they are extinct permanently. They can't be refounded. So the problem is that even without further habitat loss, even with no further degradation of the environment, because of whatever we might do out there, we will continue to see extinctions. We will continue to see the erosion of the distribution species and the loss in the numbers of populations and fishes throughout the basin, even with no further change. So wherever we can, we need to try to conserve this sort of structure, this sort of function in aquatic systems. And wherever we can, we need to try to restructure that or recompose that. The expression of species and the expression of life histories occurs over space. Not all of those things occur in single watersheds or parts of watersheds. So we need to find ways to either conserve or rebuild larger, more complex systems wherever we have the opportunity to do that. And that's the big challenge, the opportunity to do that. Well, with increasing population, with increasing demands for resources, the opportunities to do that kind of thing are gonna be very limited. And so the need to look for those opportunities to recognize them and make the most of them becomes critical in what we have to face us in management in the future. And so if we're going to think about restoration and conservation, we have to look for places where we already have something to work with. Those strongholds in those areas that support high diversity are the building blocks of building something better. It makes little sense to go into a system that's completely gone and hope to rebuild habitats because we have nothing to repopulate those new habitats with. We need systems that are still connected. We have to have the opportunity for fishes to move among watersheds, to repopulate areas, to support areas in a spatially diverse way so that one goes down, it has a source somewhere else to come in and repopulate it. So the connectivity of bases is important. And finally, the opportunity and the conflict we face with other resource issues is going to be important. How many places and where can we find the opportunity to do those sorts of things? Well, that's sort of the challenge that we see in the aquatic portion of this work. What I want to do now is sort of shift gears and look at this story in a little bit broader context. Look at the same story and start to bring in this additional aspect of forest systems and the changes that occur in forest systems and how those two stories might merge and think about this idea of conflict and opportunity. So this was a major effort on our part to just start communicating with the Trestel ecologists and Lansing ecologists, fisheries biologists and forest ecologists don't often work together. We don't know how to talk to each other. The major part of this project was spent just trying to figure out how to do that. So the story I'm going to tell you up here is my interpretation of the story that the forest ecologists are telling us. So if any of you are a forest ecologist or a botanist or landscape ecologist, you may know this story better than me, but this is my interpretation. This is a fisheries biologist trying to tell their story. So they test this once in a while to see how well we're learning it. And I think we're getting there. But the idea is that there have been dramatic changes in forest ecosystems as much as there have been in aquatic ecosystems. We have lost throughout the Columbia River Basin much of the old large structure, the big trees, the old trees, the old forest as a result of selective harvest. We have also lost much of the young forest as a result of fire suppression and selective civil cultural practices. What we have as a result in many cases are forests that are dominated by high-density stands, even aged stands, middle-aged stands of a few species. We have lost the diversity. We have homogenized forests. And we have creative forests that are much more prone to disease, to pest infestations and to fire. So this change in the structure and the composition of the forest are very profound across the basin. Some of the implications lie in disturbance regions. Now, when we think about the way fire influenced many of these systems, historically it was a mix of fire regimes. We may have had in low and mid-elevation forests fire regimes that occurred with high frequency, fires that occurred with high frequency, but low severity and low intensity, ground burns that did not replace whole stands. We had mixed intensity fires in much of the landscape, this lighter color perhaps, where we had both high severity fires and low severity fires. We had high-frequency, low-frequency and a mixture of conditions. And perhaps in the higher elevation in the cold forest, we saw low-frequency, but high severity, high intensity fires, standard-placing fires, but very infrequent kinds of fires and mixed conditions. With the changes in the forest, the picture that we understand is one that's changed perhaps something like this. We have tended to homogenize the system, we have increased the density of forests and we increased the vulnerability of fires. So we started connecting this high intensity, high severity fire. And so now we're getting these large catastrophic kinds of fires. That's the story that we're getting, the story that we understand. And the implication of that is that there is a need and an interest in recomposing and restructuring forests. And that the changes in forests have occurred predominantly in the mid and low elevation forests, and less so in the high elevation forests. And they are largely associated with our patterns of access to these spaces. So the pattern and the change in terrestrial systems in forest communities is very similar in the pattern and change in aquatic systems. So that's an interesting sort of point. What we wanted to do then was to look at the common elements there and try to think about that and talk about that. Do we have common elements and what might that mean for management? So to do that, we tried to tell our story to the terrestrial people and they tried to tell their story to us in a way that we could merge those stories. We had to come to some common unit of expression. So we used our watersheds and our sub-watersheds. So we summarized the information we had from the six-coder, the sub-watersheds that Danny talked about to a level of a sub-base. And they did the same thing. So we were both talking about the characteristics of sub-basings. There are 164 sub-basings in the Columbia River in the assessment area. Do you know how many forests it was there? There are less than that, roughly 120 perhaps forested sub-basings. Those are the ones that we looked at. We summarized, we both summarized information to this level. This is a river sub-basin, the upper Grand Ronde, the South Coast of the Salmon, the upper Wenatchee are examples of that level of resolution. What we did was to take the information that we were reading, talked about strongholds for Salmonas. We talked about these measures of diversity and evenness, the influence of exotic species. And we talked about richness. We also talked about connectivity, how well these systems were tied together. And we tried to boil all that information down into a relatively simple package that we could put on the table and try to explain to somebody that didn't know anything about a product ecosystem. The picture that we painted looked something like this. Remember, this is as simplified as we can get and try to tell the story that we thought was meaningful in terms of the change in the conditions and the problems and the issues that we had. What we said was that we have three types of water sheds out there, three types of sub-basins. Our class Ronde, these dark blue areas are places where we said things are working pretty good. We still have most of the native species. We still have strong populations. They're still well connected. And for the most part, exotic species haven't taken over these systems. These are probably the best examples of functional aquatic ecosystems at this scale that we have in the Columbia River Basin. They work pretty well. These are places that we'd like to conserve. We'd like to hold together. We'd like to see them continue to work this way. And they're templates for what we might do on other places. Conservation would be a key issue for us in these areas. What we said was that we have other places, these lighter green areas, where we still have important elements of aquatic ecosystems. We still have strong holds for species. We still have a relatively intact native communities. We still have connectivity. But we have disruption. We have blocks of habitat that are good and blocks that are bad. It has started to fall apart in some cases. And if we could, we would like to rebuild in these areas. These are places where we have the elements of much more functional systems. We still have the key pieces to build something back. But this is a place to start. This is a place where we might focus both conservation and restoration. And finally, we have places that are like this, the lighter color where we sit, things have changed dramatically. The connectivity has essentially gone, either because of extensive habitat loss or because of exotic, because of dams and irrigation diversions, loss of water, persistence have changed very dramatically. Now this is a very core sort of picture. And if anyone looks at a single sub-basin and say, well, wait a minute, I don't think it fits into that category. This is the kind of thing that was done to try to tell a story. We can mix and match and change these a lot to try to fine tune it. But what you'll find is that that's an approximation of what we think is going on out there. Well, the forest people can do the same thing. Things they wanted to talk about were changes in fire gene. They wanted to talk about roads and the distribution of wilderness because they thought roads were major indicators of the change in forest health and the structure and condition of forest. And they wanted to talk about vegetation types. They thought that dry forests and cold forests and wet forests were fundamentally different in terms of the opportunities they presented, in terms of the needs for management and the way they ought to be worked with. So they used those kinds of things and they tried to paint a similar picture. And their picture was essentially that the dark blue areas were places that have changed the least. The template we'd like to hold up as the best example where we don't need to go in and do a major restructuring and reposition. The lighter green areas were places where they have changed more. And these areas were places where they don't resemble much of what was there historically. That's the picture that they tried to paint. Well, those two stories then we can start to see, well, maybe we can try those together. Maybe there's some similarity. All we did was a simple intersect for the sake of discussion. So we have our high, medium, and low from the aquatic and we have the high, medium, and low from the forest. And what we find here, there's a big green block here and a big green block, the biggest one right here. This is high, high, and this is low, low. Those are the common areas, perhaps. These are the areas where conservation, and we want to hang on to what's there. We don't want to go in and rebuild it completely. We think we're trying to maintain natural processes and the systems seem to be working. We're coming at it from both coming to that same conclusion. These are areas where, in some cases, it's game over. In some cases, these are so far gone that we can't hope to rebuild something like what's there historically or something that we think is going to be much more functional. We may have conservation issues in some places, but it's a very different picture. There's a big block in the rest of this that represents a mix of conditions. And these are areas where we may both be interested in recomposing and rebuilding. So the challenge, then, the interest is to be able to identify those areas spatially and start to talk about how we look at the mix of that opportunity. I'm going to skip over this. We actually tried to make this a little more quantitative and use cluster analysis. We talked about themes where we pull all this data together and actually define watershed based on all the variables. And we came up with six different themes that sort of follow along this line I'm talking about. And if you're interested later, I'll talk about that where we can actually talk about these elements and how they sort of pattern out across the basin. But I think the bottom line is that we see some opportunity. If we look at a basin with this original graphic, our patterns have changed, where we have perhaps the functional watersheds and we have a heavy development pattern in here. These would be places that we think are key for conservation, the strongholds that are going to get us through until we can rebuild something more functional, perhaps, or healthier. These are places that we're very concerned about. These are not places to take large risks. At the same time, we have a large road system out here. We would like to rebuild. We'd like to see more productive watersheds further out in the system. We would add some diversity and would build up large areas to support these. So our interest would be in staying away from here and building out here. If we talk to the forest people, they suggest, well, we need to go and restructure and recompose forests. And often what we need to do is associated with existing road systems or highly developed areas. Perhaps there's an opportunity to focus our work here and by focusing it here and now, we can avoid having to put a lot of work in here and still gain benefits from starting to disconnect the system. By restructuring and recomposing forests and focusing in a basin in a short period of time, perhaps in the long period, we can begin to allow that basin to recover. Rather than spreading our activities out over this entire thing, we can focus it and perhaps we can use existing road systems to do that. Much of the discussion we've had has tied to those kinds of ideas. And so what we're suggesting is that we need to look more at moving from a management scheme that has done something like this, where we spread our management out across the landscape to a management scheme that looks more like this, where we focus our management at one time in a particular basin. If we can restructure and recompose forests, do a lot of work here and move to long rotations and move out of that basin for an extended period of time, that basin can begin to recover. We can focus our activities on the forest without focusing on the critical watersheds initially. See if we can restore watershed characteristics and watershed function before we try to deal with this. By doing that, we begin to disconnect some of the problems in the forest and allow for a better mosaic that's going to change some of the fire regimes. That's the general nature of the discussion that's going on, some of the ideas that are coming out of it. We need to explore those a lot more fully. I'm sure to get the sense of what that may mean for each of the disciplines and perhaps to give a better idea to you, but that's about what I wanted to give you, a sense of what we're trying to do and a sense of how this information can be used. So the intent then is to broaden the picture, one where we have focused at verifying scales and aquatic systems and try to incorporate that into a larger context. We think that healthy forests probably mean healthy watersheds, that if we can get the healthy forest without taking them apart by building extensive road systems, that's going to be much more desirable than it is some other way around. I'll hold it there and we can start with some questions and perhaps some better explanation. How you lived in the West for a while, was I correct when you put that map out? Most of the undisturbed areas are in wilderness and natural parks, but just a first glance on the map, most of those dark areas appear to be not going to allow. The which undisturbed, you mean the strongholds? The strongholds. They are strongly associated with wilderness areas and wilderness areas, but not entirely. We actually have those statistics, what proportion are in wilderness and not. They are strongly associated with low road densities, whatever form that may take. Yes, sir. This is very specific, but there was, one of the slides, I think it was where you were, you were showing ecological classifications and it said wood loading. What do you mean, did you mean wood loading in the streams or is it wood loading on the forest over the stands themselves? It was in the ecological classification part. It said wood loading, you know what I mean? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. We use the term wood loading in some of the habitat evaluations, the amount of large wood that is in a stream channel is often referred to as wood loading. So it's only in all likelihood it's only in the stream channel and it's not in the surrounding forest. Well, we have tried to link the idea of wood re-recruitment from the age structure and the stand composition. Structure and composition is worse to habitat conditions, but we have not done that. We're explicitly in analysis that's here. You think that's probably an important element, an important mechanism for the link between terrestrial and aquatic systems? It occurs to me that in your discussion that some of the things that have happened are irreversible. And I mean, I'm not talking about dance necessarily, I'm talking about especially the distributional shifts of species, for example, of rope trout. Did you make any attempt to understand the potential for recovery given the fact that some of these things, we're just gonna have to live with? Well, I think in some respect, the classification scheme we use, the very simple three class of aquatic systems, blue, light, the dark color, the light color and the white, it tries to incorporate some of that more of a subjective way. We don't understand it in a quantitative way to model it very well, but essentially if a system is dominated by exotic species or by species that tend to have very strong influence, we might expect them to disperse widely in a basin. That certainly is a problem. We're not gonna eradicate them at this scale. If we have lost connectivity in the system because habitat disruption is so dramatic, we have so channelized these main stems, dewatered them to the point or placed dams that we're not easily going to remove in them, then that was a major issue. And so that was part of that scheme, to try to identify areas where we think we're well beyond recomposing something in the sense of a functional ecosystem we might define as the full expression of life history dominated by native species and all of that kind of stuff. Certainly we have aquatic ecosystems in any case, but they're going to be very different. They're gonna be less resilient or they're gonna be less productive in the sense that we're used to demanding services and goods and other things from our aquatic ecosystems. So that was part of what we were trying to do in the classification. So that in part explains the discrepancy between the terrestrial and the aquatic assessments in terms of some cases the terrestrial assessment might give a thumbs up and then at the same locality a thumbs down. Yeah, and I didn't go through that figure in any detail. There's actually a portion back there that was red. We had the green portions where it was up, up and down, down. We have a portion back there in the corner that was red and that's essentially where the fisheries aquatic things seem to be doing okay, but the forest is way out of whack. And what we said is well, we're not sure what's going on here. Either it's not just clean human disturbance is bad for all things. They may be relatively resilient systems and they haven't caught up with us or they're productive enough to allow the kind of disturbance that might be associated with that. Those are places where we really gotta do our homework. Well, we're gonna be butting heads because the aquatic people are gonna say, wait a minute, these are really important places and you're telling us you've gotta recompose the world here. Can we do that without taking risk? How do we do it? That's yes, there are places like that. So it's not a perfect picture by any means. It's not a nice clean correlation of where everything is gone, everything is gone downhill. It's a mixture. What we need to do is understand more of what sorts of things emerge in different environments, which kinds of landscapes are likely to be more supportive of restoration from both perspectives. Where do we have this mix of opportunity where we can start to do some trade-off and say okay, let's work here. It's a low risk for us, a big benefit for you, and perhaps a benefit for us in the long-term. And where can we start to look at long-term sorts of solutions where we both are working in a positive way? These places we have, we want a very intensive restoration efforts, it's about fisheries and forest habitats. Do you think restoration time would be faster if you just cut off the system altogether and took out the roads and left it alone versus leaving access to fishermen and people and scientists as you go in and try it? I think we don't know very much about restoration. I think we might be able to learn. I think there's a lot of experimental adaptive management that has to be built into that. I think that's part of the idea, but we don't have the answer to that. I think the idea is, we've got to get something better or we're probably out of luck in the long-term. We need to take some big risks to get something better because we've got to do some big things. But where can we do that to learn the most and risk the least? And as we learn, then we can become bolder and less conservative in the way we do it. But I think that that's the major, I think that's a big area that we've got to face up to somehow. We did this presentation and a lot of this work as a paper sustainable fisheries workshop. And the idea was essentially that most aquatic systems are not sustainable the way they are now. Most forest systems are not sustainable the way they are now. We've got to do something different and we've got to view them as one piece somehow. How are we gonna do that? We have not, that's not our history. It's gonna take some real hand-holding and some fairly dramatic sorts of attempts at something new. But if we just maintain the status quo, we go into strictly conservation sort of approach. Certainly for species like bull trout and probably for many of the other species that are using high elevation streams, it's just a matter of time. Talk about sustainability then. Could you discuss how the production of hatchery and artificial signal systems might influence how you might actually pick your data? And how those support myelitis might turn strong? Okay, I mean, how did we incorporate that into our interpretation of this? Well, we did the best we could in terms of providing guidance to people on how to interpret that. What we said was we wanted to only talk about self-sustaining populations. So where we said they were strong was it was a wild population. It made me have been influenced by hatchery fish that was predominantly wild. We also said if it's been strongly interdressed, and we have lots of cutthroat populations, they're heavily influenced by hatchery introduced rainbow. The number one most widely distributed fish in the Kalmyra basin are introduced rainbow trout from outside the system. What we asked them to do was to the best of your knowledge, if it's heavily interdressed or strongly influenced by non-native fishes or introduced fishes, then it shouldn't be a strong population. So to the extent that that's possible, it's incorporated in information, but that's a very gray area. We did not try to consider if a system of hatchery supported when it would not have been strong in the sense that we're talking about. It created a lot more controversy in other places. I just wanted to give you a general impression and not surprising, but your presentation makes me feel like we have a sort of a bleak future here. Not only here in the Kalmyra basin, but in other parts of the world where we're doing these kinds of things. And I'm wondering if this approach of taking a look at a region like this and sort of a triage kind of approach where you conserve the best and then you really work on that middle part. Do you have confidence that that kind of approach is going to work elsewhere? I mean, outside of the Kalmyra basin, here and here or, I mean, I'm assuming this seems like a good approach. I mean, this triage approach has been used in many other issues. And it seems like a conceptually a good approach, but given the fact that most, as the gentleman here pointed out, most of those areas, the pristine areas, are areas where people aren't. Well, but within that, I guess the first answer is, I think it's the best alternative, the best approach, but it's certainly debatable. I mean, there's lots of expression of that sort of approach in other places in terms of conservation strategy. But I don't think it's necessarily that bleak. I mean, one of the striking things is that when I showed you the relationship of strong holds and row density, the probability is that you will not support strong populations where you have high row densities. It does not say you will not. One of those striking things is that there are places that are fairly well developed that have been strongly influenced that still support healthy populations, still support functional systems. What is it about those places? Is it just unusually productive or are there other things that we can learn about either how we've done and developed those areas or about those areas themselves that allows them to persist? And I think there's a lot of that kind of stuff in there to say it's not just hands off, stay away from it. You know, we don't have that alternative. It is in most cases. So I think it's more hopeful than that. I think the other thing is is that the Columbia Basin is in much better condition than most of the rest of the world. When you look at the distribution of salmonin or fishes at least from an aquatic perspective in other parts of the United States, it is far more fragmented, far more isolated than what we see in the system. We have a lot to work with. It's really actually quite striking. Many of the summaries that we did for these species were much better than we anticipated. I've worked on bull trout a lot and we all know the discussion that's going on with the listing of bull trout. I was actually surprised to find the distribution that we did. It was much stronger than I anticipated. I think that's encouraging. Certainly things are going in the wrong direction. Can we do the right things and figure it out in time? Who knows? But we do have something to work with. I guess I would just sort of second that. I think one of the conclusions that we actually drew in the aquatic assessment was that, yes, there have been major changes, but the core for rebuilding is there. We have something to work with, which is something that I think in other parts of the country in the world don't have. And it's sort of like, if you're going to pull off ecosystem management, try to restore a historical type sustainable system, if you can do it at all, it should be able to do it here. I'm glad you're optimistic, but I'm still really nervous. I didn't see how I meant it. I sat here and watched one of the local fisheries biologists counting reds on one hand for, I think Steele had it in Chinat. It was really clear that the best, and when I say the best, it's maybe I can count, I can get it off of one hand for the reds, say the mine, which are coming out of Wilberts. And so some pieces are starting to fit. But to me, it looks pretty grand. Even Glutman is saying that, gee, we've discovered something here that our best resources are recreational fisheries and wildlife in the future. And I hope we have that to work with, but I'm not very optimistic. Maybe we were blowing, I don't know. I guess, yes, you can look at the bull trout, or you can look at salmon, and you can see that we have lost a tremendous amount in terms of what probably was there historically. There's no question about that. And the salmon are on the brink of extinction. There are many places where we're doing work on salmon, looking at something that we think is very on the edge. Yeah, I agree totally. I say I'm optimistic in the sense that we still do have something to work with. It's not game over yet. It's not going in the right direction. We haven't turned the corner and gone back. All we're saying is, we've got an opportunity. Yeah, we're not arguing status quo over here. By any means. Our argument is that if we stop now, it's going to continue to go downhill. We are going to continue to extinction, depoverishment, loss, and function of these systems. If we just walked away today. Emphasis. There's lots of isolated populations. What's emphasis in trying to connect those to other populations, or is it being possible? I mean, all we can try to do is take the information. And when it comes down to fine scale, I mean, we're looking at a very core scale. I mean, what the actual structure of populations and the nature of the disconnect in some basins might be is beyond us that will take people on the ground trying to figure that out. All we can say is that some places are far worse off than others. Is there some pattern, is there some sense that we can use from that picture that can help us figure out where and how much we have to try to do things? But what actually is done with this, we're going to go back and do research. Yeah, but just to pick up a little bit on the EISs that came out, I think the critic had made some attempt to pick up on these ideas in the sense that they're very strong into some conservation of the best that remains. It remains to be seen of which the preferred alternative will be, but in some of the alternatives which have been talked about the most, there is considerable interest on restoration. And so I guess we are regarded the optimistic that at some of the discussions at least, there's a movement towards that type of strategy. But as Bruce says, how far is still anybody's guess? A lot of it will just depend upon political will and the resources that are made available. It's going to be a very interesting time. Obviously there's a real conflict between doing wholesale restoration and continuing development. We know there's going to be a lot of different pieces of things to match. We've not done it, we really don't know how it may be at this point. But there's a lot of interest in even... There are a number of different things going on in the basin right now. There is a lot of work going on in the Columbia River dealing with sand and steelhead and the influence of dams and talking about trying to move towards more natural kinds of riverine conditions. Much as we're talking about trying to restore more natural kinds of structure and function in habitat conditions. I mean, the sort of understanding of where we are in that there aren't simple technological fixes. We're not going to do it with hatcheries. We're not going to do it by just putting logs and streams of watersheds that are fundamentally not functioning the way they should or could. I guess we can't use force like should and talk about natural systems. But we can't go out and just throw dollars at it and put structures and engineer to fix. It's going to take something allowing natural processes to reemerge and create and maintain habitats. Instead of fighting it, we have to work with it. Not just on habitats on federal lands but on whole river systems. That discussion is going on, how far it goes and how far we move with that is... That's political, policy, social kinds of vague discussion that's going to have to emerge. Okay, I think these two guys deserve a round of applause.