 We are here again for some of you who attended our last info session in May, we're here again for another Columbia River Treaty info session this time to hear about the indigenous led ecosystem work that is underway to determine how the Columbia River Treaty operations might be changed to benefit ecosystems in the Canadian part of the Columbia Basin. This event is being recorded and will be available to watch rewatch after the fact or share with your friends. And we encourage you to do just that. So my name is Brooke McMurchey I work with the BC government Columbia River Treaty team and I'm pleased to be your host for tonight. I am grateful to be joining you tonight from the territory of the Lagwungen speaking people known today as the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations, also known as Victoria British Columbia. I also acknowledge with respect and gratitude the territories of the Tanaha, the Shkotmek, the Silks Okanagan, and the Sinaix peoples and neighboring tribes whose territories span the Columbia River Basin. It's great to see so many of you have joined us tonight and I encourage you if you feel comfortable with it to share where you're joining from in the chat, either location or territory. So we're very pleased to welcome tonight's speakers and I'll introduce everyone before each session. But first I'd like to take a minute to share how the evening is going to run. We, we actually I'll, I'll start off by extending regrets we had planned for counselor Mark Thomas to start us off tonight. Mark is with the Shushwa Band and he was going to start us off with some opening words, but he sends his regrets he's been called away on a family matter so please extend, please, sorry, accept his, his regrets for this evening. That means that we'll start out with our first presentation as an overview of the ecosystem function work in general to provide context for the other presentations we're going to hear tonight. We'll hear that overview will dive into a presentation on operations to restore floodplain riparian and wetland ecosystems, and then we'll hear about operations to restore natural river functions. We'll take a quick break before our final presentation on operations to assist in restoring and out of salmon. We have time for questions after each presentation and then again before we adjourn at around 8pm Pacific time or 9pm mountain time. So, many of you may be familiar with these types of meetings by now but for those who aren't I'll go over it again. If you have a question, please type it into the Q&A box, there should be a little button on your screen somewhere that says Q&A so you can type your question in there. So folks, sorry, you can also raise your hand. So there's a function that allows you to raise your hand, if you would like to ask your question verbally. Please do not type your questions into the chat or they'll be missed. The Q&A box is the best place to put your questions. For folks who have phoned in, you can raise your hand by pressing star 9 during the question period or sorry and when it's your turn to speak you'll be prompted to speak by pressing star 6. I'll repeat these instructions during the question portion of the night too. We're going to be alternating between the questions that have been typed in and those who have raised their hands. Please remember to be respectful of those you are asking questions of and in the interest of time, please try not to raise questions that have already been asked and limit your questions to one to two minutes if you're asking them verbally. Please also keep your questions related to the material being presented here tonight. If you're curious to know more about Canada US Treaty negotiations or other topics associated with the treaty. I encourage you to watch the recording of our info session that was held in May, which is available on our website and did focus on the CRT negotiations. It was a great session I know many of you were there as well. We'll share a link to our website during the break so you'll have a direct access to that. We're going to make questions here tonight as we can and those we aren't able to answer will include in our summary report after the session. So, without further ado, I again, Mark Thomas sends his regret so he is unable to provide an indigenous welcome to start us off, but I'm very pleased to welcome Bill Green with the Tunahan Nation Council on behalf of the Columbia River Treaty ecosystem and Bill will be providing an overview of your T ecosystem function studies. Bill, go ahead. He's a kid kid. My name is Bill green as Brooks already explained. I am calling from Kimberly in a Marcus to know how very honored to work for the Tunahan Nation Council on the Columbia River Treaty renewal particularly on the ecosystem function work. And I'm honored to be presenting to all of you tonight and really appreciate everybody joining us and so presentation is going to be mostly kind of what why how, and then we'll be going into the deep. Each of the other presenters will be providing some details on their specific work areas so next slide please. Sorry. Okay. That's good. And those of you who have been part of the sessions you'll know sometimes we come up against technical difficulties so thank you very much for your patience as we work out sharing bill slides. Okay, looks like we're good to go. There we go. Okay. Thanks Chelsea. So the first, I said it's a bit of a who what why. And this first one is why why are we doing a lot of work around ecosystem function in the process to read to secret all of the Columbia retreating Well it just speaks to the obvious there's very strong indigenous nations and public interest you're demonstrating some of that tonight in kind of bringing together ecosystem is the third leg alongside hydropower and flood control. So the five governments, the three indigenous nations, the Canada and BC are working to respond to and realize this interest and working very hard and working very well and strongly collaboratively together. Next slide please. Well, big thanks to Greg you think who'll be you'll meet in a little while who'll be doing a presentation. He can tell you about his presentation when he gets there. But this is his diagram to illustrate the concept of ecosystem function. And I think everybody here is pretty familiar with what ecosystems are. We really turn to the question of what are ecosystem functions and this diagram illustrates that their processes and those processes control flows of energy and nutrients and organic matter and organisms through an environment. Click to the next slide please. So this is just further explanation and the Canadian indigenous nations and us tribes did a lot of work around the middle of the 2010s around the concept of ecosystem based function or ecosystem function as it relates to the Columbia retreating. And so the first off there is what emerged, or a small part of what emerged from that collaborative work between us tribes and Canadian First Nations agreement around this, this concept and, and highlight the last sentence in the first bullet, clean and abundant water that is sufficient to sustain healthy populations of fish wildlife and plants. And that's vital to holistic ecosystem based function and life itself. And I've already kind of spoken about the western science definition or on process. Next slide please. So, a lot of work has gone into this work over the years and it goes back at least to 2015 workshops back then, and probably probably further. And so, through the kind of period from 2015 to 2017 2019. One of the things that came out of that collaborative work was this set of broad goals, which are outlined there. And it's really important I think that this is an ecosystem function, obviously, is a tremendous value to indigenous nations and their cultural values line up with ecosystem function very closely, but also many many basin residents and communities. And, but also speak at the end to, first of all, the balance of between different ecosystem function objectives, and then moving to balance between ecosystem function and social economic flood control hydropower, other other values. We can move to the next slide please. So, this illustrates kind of four themes that have that have driven and provided the foundation for the ecosystem function work. So you can see in the diagram that you know we looked at three particular broad components of the ecosystems but we put that then into a broader framework around ecosystem productivity. We call these the four themes of our ecosystem function work. And next slide. So the question comes up then so how can we work towards restoring ecosystem damage or achieving ecosystem improvements in a in a renewed treaty. So there's kind of two broad strategies to doing that. And that is negotiators are actively exploring and building the concept of domestic Canadian flexibility so creating space and opportunity within the management of the reservoirs to change operations to the ecosystem function objectives. And, and to support that work. We're doing developed collaboratively this called a Columbia retreat planning model. And that model then to build in all of these ecosystem function values, but abroad, all the rest of the values as well, and then to explore scenarios, so that we can understand, you know, how much flexibility do we need and how can we use that flexibility to achieve our objectives with respect to improved ecosystem function. And the next slide. So, next few slides just give you and a little bit more detail on each of those four themes. So, the first is in the area of ecosystem productivity and the three realms of terrestrial river Rhine and reservoir. And, and then goes the next theme of course that Greg and Stuart are going to be speaking about is floodplain repairing and wetlands. Next slide please. And the third area is river Rhine and reservoir the third theme if you will, the third of the four components of the ecosystem function work is around river Rhine and reservoir ecosystems with four key elements of river functional flows that Ryan will be speaking out about later on. Main stem basically talking about river Rhine elements here so main stem side channel and low gradient tributary habitats, tributary access for fish and fish stranding. And then the next slide please. And then there is going to be a full presentation on the anatomous species work. So you'll, you'll be hearing from Richard percentage and Wendell challenger on that work. Next slide please, hopefully work. And I'll briefly go through where we're at with each of these theme areas on the in the performance measures, developing performance measures but I won't touch on the progress on the three that we're going to be specifically speaking about this evening. So for reservoirs. For reservoir this is in the ecosystem productivity area for reservoirs ecosystem productivity. We have developed a performance measure reports completed performance measure right now is just for air, air reservoir and we're waiting for additional study information. I'm going to read the rest, but we'll be hearing shortly about the, the, sorry, not the reservoir work you'll be hearing shortly about the floodplain repair wetland and ecosystem work. Next slide please. And speaks to main stem side channel and tributary habitats draft reports completed and performance measures and I guess I should tell you a little bit about performance measures which is, we have the CRT planning model which is a model that we can use to explore different operational scenarios for the reservoirs, but we have to link the hydrologic outputs like reservoir levels and river flows to things like well how much main stem and side channel habitat will that create. And so we do that through performance measures which, which translate reservoir levels, river flows and other things into a numerical measure of how much will that particular habitat will we get. Next slide please. I've spoken about this already a bit this pictures taken from is in the kinbasket reservoir the Columbia reach so at the kind of golden end of it, golden and Donald end of it. And it's very near to the mouth is where the beaver river flows into, but then this is obviously at low reservoir level. And so we're using what I talked about already the CRT PM model to then explore what it would be some optimum scenarios that would provide benefits across would provide improved ecosystem function across a range of ecosystem values. And so slide speaks to that we started that work, we have more work to do to get to what we think might be better operational scenarios for ecosystem function that that we can then the next step after that is then to integrate that with the work around all the other sets of values that are so important in the Columbia River Treaty, and explore. Okay, where, where's the sweet spot where's the place where we, what, what kind of operation will achieve a wide range of benefits including ecosystem improved ecosystem function. Next slide. So we have. We've been working with some success but not as much as we'd like to build indigenous knowledge into ecosystem function study. This is a really important area work but it's an area we need to continue to build. You simply mean, you can't rush Western science takes time to do the studies know we've had whoops studies for 10 years or more. And what he's planning studies and it's similar within indigenous knowledge that you can't rush it it takes time to develop that. Complete all the study reports, and, and as I've already spoken about further ecosystem function scenario workshops, and then you can all read that and then the next slide please. So, and this is perhaps the most important point we really want your input. Whatever level you want to comment on so you know at the beginning out line three ecosystem function goals. We welcome comments about that because you know we never considered them as fixed and final view them as a work in progress and something that we would welcome. Public and scientific input into that. So an online survey will be emailed to each you after this webinar. You can link to it there but that link will be sent to you. And if you want a paper copy there's an email address so there's a deadline for that survey. The game we're using this survey we're hoping you can provide information that will help us do a better job in the future. So thank you very much. And I'm done. Thank you very much bill. That was great and will also have a link to the survey up at the break and again at the end so you'll have no shortage of opportunities to fill out the survey and figure out where it is. Next up I'd like to welcome Stuart rude from the University of Lethbridge and he'll be joined by Greg you'd seek with Courtney nature investigations limited. And they'll present on the operations for floodplain riparian and wetland ecosystems. Take it away you two. Okay, which is hello from the Blackfoot territory. I work on both sides, Alberta and BC and these are shared territories with the Blackfoot and to know how. What I'd like to do is follow from Bill's introduction and talk a bit more about floodplain riparian and wetland ecosystems and what we're thinking about doing with these. Bill provided an excellent background and he finished with a slide that was to some extent pretty desolate and contrasting that Baron view that he had of Ken basket during drawdown with this view. This is a real reservoir south of Revelstoke rather nice view. We have communities of cottonwood forest and riparian shrubs. These are riparian types and riparian zones represent interface zones between land and water. And what they do also is represent the richest wildlife habitats in our region. We're interested in drawdown zones from the four reservoirs and asking the question. Can we make other zones more similar to this. I guess I'll give you the punchline right off the bat. We think the answer is probably reminder about the Columbia River Treaty reservoirs there were four dams built three in Canada one United States. The dams are big and the reservoirs are huge. These were installed to create storage capacity. The water is released to generate hydropower, not only in the dams and sales but through a large sequence of dams on the Coutini and especially the Columbia River, all the way to tide water at Portland. The treaty was almost 60 years ago. And there's a renegotiation or reconsideration to modernize it thinking about a range of changes. Upstream from the first of those reservoirs. This is a landscape that would be what the landscape would have looked like like prior to flooding. This is the Columbia Valley near Golden. Rich mosaic of the floodplain zones the benches the riparian zones of flowing water stream side zones and the wetland zones. It's really really quite something. But in contrast bill actually provided this lower view. This is Ken basket reservoir and a number of people think of these reservoirs because they see them in July or August as looking like the top photo as somewhat like the lake. However, for much of the year during drawdown, we might describe them technically as not a lake. For example, more of the same this is the Duncan reservoir. The Duncan is a tributary that's the North arm into Coutini Lake. It also has a treaty dam which doesn't currently have hydro power facility at it. And the same story we see here it looks like a lake when it's full, but during drawdown is pretty bleak. This annual pattern of inundation and exposure is lethal to all vegetation. And as a result, we what we've lost is that habitat that community that ecosystem, which we desire. So relative to the modernization, the third leg of the stool is being added or at least proposed this ecosystem function I think their support on both sides of the water for this. As a result of the river systems, we might imagine that this would involve a more natural regime reservoirs are a little bit uncertain because they're really not quite lakes their their storage reservoirs they have a natural or an artificial pattern. And so we asked the question, what can we do with these and that's the question that we've addressed. We started off with asking the question, what plants are where and why, and the why relates to their physiology and especially their inundation tolerance. But we also think about the inverse of this question and that is, where are the areas where there aren't plants and why are those areas barren. We're particularly interested in these three categories of communities and we have a cluster of photographs in the upper right of those including cottonwood forest the top row riparian shrub especially willows and riparian herb with sedges and read canary grass and horse tails and others. The three communities are sort of stratified they go from higher to lower. And so the cottonwood forest is a very, very narrow thin band right below the full pool. Below that extending further down with more inundation tolerance the shrubs, and then much more tolerant are the herbs. We take a look at the four reservoirs and we've also coordinated data from a decade of studies, as Bill indicated with the web process. What we find is that if we think about those three community types. The dark green is the cottonwood forest lighter green is the riparian shrub which is mostly willows, and then the yellow orange is the herbaceous. And in this bar graph what we represent is how far down they extend into the drawdown zone. So you can see that first of all, the patterns are pretty similar across the four reservoirs. And that's helpful because it'll suggest that we can have a common model to address the four reservoirs although there will be some refinement across those. From these elevational distributions we then take a look at the historic hydrology that the reservoir regime and asked a question at those elevations, how many days were inundated. And that leads this cluster and again we see pretty common patterns across the four reservoirs, which is very encouraging. Again we have the darker green is the cottonwood forest. We have the lighter green, and then we have the herbaceous zone and you can see that the number of days they can tolerate is much much higher corresponding to lower distribution. This is an interesting cluster of studies and in fact we had eight different approaches. There was very high degree of convergence and I think the precision here is about a half meter, which is considerably better than we expected when we started this study years ago. What we're doing is relatively novel, not a lot of people have been doing this and that more commonly people think that the solution is planting. And we believe that by management of water surface, we can perhaps have much broader responses. Following from those data we then end up generating these performance measure values as bill referred to. What these represent is the numbers that get put into the models to allow us to project the outcomes from different scenarios. If we change the pattern of reservoir regulation, what might be the response to answer that question. The model includes this cluster of numbers and in the blue with the arrow, the key numbers, some of the key numbers represent the number of days of inundation. So the cottonwood forest can tolerate on average about 25 days of inundation. The riparian shrub about double that, and then the herbaceous plants about double that. There are other numbers in here as well for recruitment you have to establish new plants occasionally, and you also have to make sure that there's enough interval or exposure for these plants to grow and become resilient. These then are the numbers that are applied in the model, which Greg will describe. Hi, I'm Greg Yuzick from Nelson DC, a consultant working with the three First Nations, and also with the upper Columbia basin environmental collaborative. We're going to do the inundation tolerance as we also have to think about the substrate that this potential vegetation will be growing in. And ideally we'd have a detailed soil map of the bottoms of the reservoirs but that doesn't exist, but we found that we can maybe use some other factors to predict where they're most likely to occur. One is slope if you've ever spent any time in these reservoirs you know the steeper slopes tend to be eroded, not very suitable for planting where our for plants to establish, whereas the shallower slopes the more flat areas tend to have the finer textures, and more likely also moisture is going to be important I'll talk about that a bit more in a minute, but we've looked at areas along streams that run into the reservoirs, and also areas where seepage occurs and in case of the seepage we're looking at seepage that was identified from the mapping prior to the reservoirs being established. And lastly, you need a seed source. So we're looking at the distance from the shoreline, where in most cases there are seed sources next. And in addition to that we're also going to look at wetland habitats, and those require basically flat slopes and places that we think our potential for establishment of wetlands are areas where there were wetlands before the area was flooded as well. And we put all this together in a series of maps using GIS systems and create an overlay and each of those little polygons in there will have a specific value in terms of its likelihood of establishing vegetation. And we'll use that to evaluate each of these different elevational bands in terms of their likelihood of providing vegetation if we can change to meet the flooding requirements that Stuart talked about next. So the way this actually comes together as both Bill and Stuart have talked about is we have this planning model, and we would introduce a scenario a particular series of pieces of information to determine how much flooding there is how long it lasts what season that is that occur in and through and then we look at that in terms of each of the elevation bands we were looking at one or two meter elevation bands in each of the reservoirs next. And we bring together the information that Stuart and I have talked about in terms of establishment sequence maximum tolerances exposures and next. And those things come together to say which elevation bands are capable of which supporting which community is under this particular scenario. Next. And to that, we apply the site factors that I just talked about in the previous slide in terms of the likelihood of establishment and next. And the output of that is we actually come up with in hectares of area with the capability of supporting each of the different vegetation types for a given scenario in each of the reservoirs. Okay, next. And the effect is we need to keep in mind as well and climate change is certainly one will certainly climate change is going to have an impact on the hydrology of the, the reservoirs and the streams, but it also has an effect on the growing potential. Just as an example, this is some mapping we did in terms of the frost free period or growing season within the southern end of the Kim basket reservoir and you can see there's quite a variation even within that reservoir next. There's all the different reservoirs and in the case of arrow there's kind of a northern and southern section and Kim basket there's sort of three sections. Northern canoe which tends to be more boreal middle Kim basket, and then the southern bush was a bit drier. Next. But as I stated climate change is going to have an impact on this is just as an example this is looking at the canoe reach and the Duncan reservoir. This is a number of frost free days over the last few decades, and the way that's projected the change into the future with the solid circles indicating we don't do anything about our carbon emissions and the lower one says that we do do something. So it's a bit of uncertainty the future but clearly the trend is that growing degree days are an increase which is maybe an advantage next. And simultaneously is another change and that's in the drought index in this case where it's a climatic moisture index that looks at the amount of effective moisture available for plant growth and you can see that's decreasing in both of these reservoirs. So even though the frost free period is increasing the season is great. We're going to have more drought, which has implications that those see pictures are probably going to be much more important in terms of revegetation. Next. So, just to kind of sum up what we're talking about this is sort of the present distribution of these different vegetation types within the reservoir next. And what we're hoping to do by changing the way in which we manage the reservoirs and amount of flooding the duration of flooding. That we're actually can extend these further down into the reservoir and create this riparian zone around the edges of the reservoirs through changes in the regulation. Next. So, in terms of the program, just some of our challenges there's, as I stated before we don't have any soil mapping for the reservoirs. So we're going to do quite a bit of work to try and upgrade that information, getting elevation bands established for the reservoirs has been complicated because there was no good mapping before the reservoirs were flooded. Kukunu is a reservoir there was almost no information although we just had some flights done this spring, and it looks like we're going to be developing some information for working in the Kukunu so but we're just starting on that. And the challenge of course is, is this active adaptive management that bill is, as mentioned, monitoring, trying things and then monitoring to actually try and verify our model that we've created to see if we actually get the reactions that we're projecting. And lastly, of course, there's going to have to be this balance between hydropower and flood control and ecological function so it's trying to figure out how we can work out that kind of sweet spot that bill where we improve ecological function but still maintain some of our values in terms of hydropower and flood control. And there's also some balancing between the reservoirs. In the end, it's in some ways like a water bed you push in one and push down on one part and the other part comes up so skeins in one reservoir might be losses and another. And just lastly to say this has been a team effort Stuart and I are presenting here today, but this is a list of the other people have been involved in this project as well. Thanks. Thanks very much to both of you. So we are going to take some time to answer questions here and I see that there's one that's been entered into the Q&A. I'll repeat now how to ask your questions and maybe go back on my comment earlier don't be too worried about whether or not your question is specifically applicable to what you're hearing. If a question comes to mind after hearing Bill Stewart and Greg's presentations please type it into the chat or raise your hand. And for those of you who have phoned in you can press star nine to raise your hand. I also meant to mention at the beginning of this evening that the presentations and a summary of each of the studies that you're hearing about tonight are all available on our website. They were posted today for the intent that you can go through them after the session. There's a lot of dense information here and so there's lots of resources after the fact that you can go through so all of that being said, we welcome any questions that you have on the information that's been provided so far. And maybe I'll read out the question that's in the Q&A box right now and then Stuart or Greg you can choose who'd like to respond. And I'm going to mispronounce a word I already know. Does wedding and drying lead to mercury methylation and is that a problem in Canada? I can take a stab at it. It's definitely is a problem it's generally associated with reservoirs that have flooded and never been cleared so there's a breakdown of organic matter leads to this it was a very serious problem for a number of years in the piece of river reservoirs because they weren't cleared. And in the case of the Kootenai reservoirs, much of them were cleared or subsequently cleared in the case of Duncan's with some underwater logging. It's, and it's generally a short lived while short lived in terms of a decade or two and since these reservoirs in general are 60 years old. The problem may have been there in the initial stages, but it doesn't appear to be a problem at present. Thanks very much Greg. Any other questions from folks at any level. Sometimes that's a sign that the presentation was super clear. I could just elaborate just a little bit on that. So Greg's got it bang on and and to some extent the mercury the source of the mercury is in vegetation that's submerged and decomposed. Methylation is a process that's anaerobic so at the bottom the deep parts of the reservoir there's that conversion to a form that becomes bio accumulated. And so yes indeed mercury methylation is a problem in Canada, as Greg indicated it's typically a bigger problem at the beginning, and especially it's a problem for reservoirs that aren't cleared, they're not logged, which is interesting you think about it it's a big problem in the sense that you sacrifice all that timber, and then unfortunately you end up with a toxic hazard. So it's an excellent question it's a very important factor, but to some extent fortunately it's not as severe for these reservoirs as some. Thanks very much Stuart. So we do have another question. What about water temperature and is it changed by skimming over the dams. And Bill sorry I see you've got your hand raised you go ahead. I'll take a look at that. And so if we talk about the Columbia retreat dams in particular. So Duncan, King decide for a reservoir and Mike and for the King basket reservoir. They all have few of them operate by skimming water over the over the dam so that's called surface spill. And it happens very infrequently and is to be avoided. And instead, the discharge. So for Micah damage from very low in the reservoir. And so if there is a temperature change as a result it's likely to be cool cooler than it is changed indeed. The average temperature through the reservoir or lower than typically, and then for the arrow reservoir skimming is kind of already happened there because there is a sill at syringe which is upstream of the dam. So, there is mixing from upstream water and when it passes over that still. And then of course, there's infrequently there's two spillways to spill methods at or discharge method that the King decide down. And they take water from fairly low but it's already been subject to the skimming mechanism. And then for Duncan tends to be low level discharge as well so for instance, there is a temperature effect of the dams. Very clearly, typically it's, it can be cooling, certainly observe that at rebel spoke downstream Micah down, where temperatures have been reduced downstream in the summertime compared to what they were historically. Thanks. Go ahead. That's a great question. And certainly for aquatic systems and especially fish temperatures really an important factor not only for growth and development but also as a cue. The fourth dam is Libby, and Libby in fact was one of the first dams worldwide to have something called selective withdrawal. And so what this is is a slotted gate structure on the upstream side. This thing can be raised or lower to select the water temperature that's appropriate for the particular life stages of the fish downstream. And so that was a pretty novel application, and to some extent pioneering. And I will say that the US Army Corps doing some pretty interesting stuff with Libby and of course keep in mind that this not only affects Coupanosa but the Kootenai River below Libby Dam goes back into Canada at Creston and so we of course are directly impacted by operation of Libby just as the folks in Montana and Idaho are. Thanks for that Stuart. So there's, there's one comment in the Q&A is providing some additional data on Lake Coupanosa so that's a heads up for the researchers. And another question here are you looking at excavations with water controls like bummers flats and other areas in Upper Columbia River Valley in the modeling. Anybody want to take a stab at that. Sure, I can, I can take a quick stab at that question. Thank you. And we're not looking at something with that detail of course bummers flats and the excavations and water control that are happening that have been constructed there are Upper Kootenai River, but we're not building a model that has that amount of detailed. It's just a level of detail that our model doesn't doesn't work at and the model is really focused on the reservoir levels and on on the river flows. And we're, yeah, hopefully in the future we can get to a more detailed level but we're really focused on answering questions pertaining to. What if we change this in the dam in the operation of the dam or in the reservoir level or in discharges. How will that affect things like the floodplain repair and wetland ecosystems and how will it affect other ecosystem values so interesting question and thanks for it. We've got time for a couple more questions here. So when is asking we got the answer for how the temperature is affected downstream of the release what about the remaining water. I can respond quickly. Yes, yes indeed. And so Greg and I are particularly focusing on the FRW the floodplain repair and wetland. I'm not sure I think Ryan will speak mostly about riverine but yes indeed. Van Munier and others are quite interested in the fisheries within the reservoirs which is influenced by water temperature that is in turn influenced by regulation. So yes indeed it's part of the consideration, and also part of the modeling. Some of you will know that temperature modeling is maybe less well developed than some other things but we know it's important and yes it's being addressed. Thanks very much. So we've got another question. Has anyone addressed any potential impact on migration and predatory patterns of elk, caribou, wolf, etc, for either flooded or empty reservoirs. I would say that there was a dam impacts series of studies that was done about 10 years ago which looked at the impacts of the construction of the dams on environmental values and migration was one of the considerations. But given that, at this point in time we're not actually talking about doing away with the reservoirs. It's unlikely we're going to have a significant impact. It's, I guess that so far the work that's been done looking at animal use within the reservoirs whether they're drawn down or not drawn down. There's very little use by large mammals made it because there's no habitat. And that's one of the potential secondary benefits of the work that Stuart and I are doing is trying to look at how we can create some habitat within the reservoirs, so that when there is draw down there is actually some usable habitat that may allow for those those kinds of uses and migration across the reservoir at that particular time of the year. But we're not specifically looking that this is very long term goal. It is one of the considerations but it's not something working at the moment. Thanks, Craig. Go ahead. Do we still have time for more questions. We do. Let's take one more question and then we'll move on to the next portion of our evening. Go ahead, Bill. Well, I'll just note to everybody that know there's a lot of questions now which is great, and they will be answered either immediately if they're not answered early during the presentation, or after the presentation they will be work doing our best to try and answer them, now during the session or subsequently so thanks for the questions. I'm going to turn to Chad Hughes question is there a need for rehabilitation restoration on dam margins or is water level management anticipated to drive vegetation growth entirely organically and I think over to Stuart or Greg and I think it's a really key question. Thanks. I could start and Greg might follow Chad that's a great question and part of the interesting element of the sub modeling that Greg described is that we are indeed quite interested in the capacity of the drawdown zone. In the case that there may be some interventions but generally speaking would start off and hope that if the reservoir regime is favorable, the vegetation will in fact naturally colonize. And to size I'd mentioned to some extent this is a systemic restoration approach. So instead of planting a few trees or shrubs here and here and here, we're talking of hundreds of kilometers of shoreline. Now, not all of them are going to be favorable and as Chad, Greg indicated steep slopes especially really, really difficult, but I think Chad we're going to try to focus on encouraging native colonization as a strategy and the tool for that will be reservoir regime regulation. I might just add a little bit to that to say that we have evidence to show that the natural stuff will come in. For example, in Kim basket there was a series of four or five years. Prior to 2020, where the reservoir didn't fill and in fact, there was significant revegetation in some parts of the reservoir particularly the upward ends. However, in 2020, or the reservoir was brought up to full pool and held there for a long period of time and killed off that vegetation, which indicates that we do have to change the regulation. And the additional evidence comes from the fact that there were extensive planting programs done throughout the arrow and Kim basket reservoirs over the past 10 years. And virtually all of them have failed, because they didn't change the regulation it might work for a year or two. But as soon as you fill the reservoir and hold it that way for a long time, basically the mortality is almost 100%. So, I think that once we get a good handle on the regulation such that we have a flooding regime that allows vegetation to occur we may in fact then begin to look at rehabilitation and restoration to speed up that revegetation. So, we know that we've got a zone where it's worthwhile to expend the effort in terms of planting. There's other potential issues as well and one of those is ATV and four wheel drive use in the reservoir, which is also been a problem with some of the previous plantations. That's great. Thank you so much to all three of you for your answers. We are going to move on to the next presentation now and I'll reiterate what Bill said. There's lots of questions in the communities. Some, some may get responded to in writing by some of the panelists, but any questions that are not responded to will include in our summary report, they'll get responded to afterwards. So, thank you again, Stuart and Greg for your presentation and bill for responding to the questions. And now I am pleased to welcome Ryan McDonald of Mac hydro limited and he is going to talk about operations for restoring natural river functions. So, Ryan, welcome, and the rest of us will turn our cameras and microphones off you have the floor. Thanks Brooke. Can you guys see my screen. Yes we can. Right on. Thank you so yeah I'll be talking about functional flows and essentially the idea around looking at how to promote flow regimes that are more natural in the system. And then at the overarching goals and objectives of the study. You'll see here they're fairly lofty and I'm not going to read verbatim but ultimately the idea here is to restore flow regimes that are important for for key species and important for river functions. And the objectives here are ultimately to manage reservoir levels that allow us to do that and promote these habitats that are lacking in the system currently. And the one way to look at that is to look at you know what may have existed there pre down. So we have some information about that and I'll talk about that tonight. But really the idea is to promote different parts of the hydrograph and one thing I'd like to acknowledge is that these goals are pretty lofty, and that the work that we're doing here as part of this modernization of the Columbia River Treaty, really is you know, in respect of it in indigenous perspectives and looking at this from a lens that requires long term thinking. These types of changes are really for our children and our grandchildren. They're not necessarily going to be implemented in real time rate tomorrow, but these types of changes are long term and hopefully long lasting. So looking at you saw a slide like this already in Bill's presentation but these gravel bed rivers, and Stu showed an image of the Columbia River upstream of all the reservoirs that these gravel bed rivers really are fundamental to ecosystems in these landscapes. They cycle nutrients as Bill mentioned they move material throughout them they move water, and they're foundational to making sure that life on earth is actually functional so promoting that the function of these rivers is really what we're after. When we talk about river function, really the flow regime or the way in which rivers behave is fundamental to how the different components of a system behave. So when we talk about flow regime so this is you know if you can envision a river flowing down the valley. We're thinking about the magnitude so how much water is there, how often water, you know how often things like flooding occur and drugs occur, the duration of those types of events. The time so when do they show up when do high flow show up, and the rate of change in the system. And what ultimately this floor regime does is it dictates you know the quality of the water so we've already talked about water temperature is also chemical water quality. It dictates the energy sources so how energy is moving through the system, it dictates a physical habitat so you know what's there for in terms of wood and rocks for fish to live in. And then those biotic interactions so the organisms that are well adapted to living in these systems ultimately are adapted floor regime. And what this ultimately leads to is ecological integrity. So we can see already that the floor regime of a system is fundamental to ecological integrity. With that context so we have to acknowledge and then regulated river systems are not natural, nor will they likely ever be so we're not necessarily talking about taking out dams in the study. We were talking about looking at components of the flow system that would help promote natural functions. This is a bit of a busy slide but I'm going to walk through it hopefully fairly slowly. So we're talking about here well this concept of functional flows and Siri Ardell and colleagues in California this graph is from California what it's showing is discharge let's flow in a river. And these lines are showing the amount of flow in the river and this is a river in California so it looks different than the way our rivers behave. So what she's showing here is essentially, we have a wet season, we have a high flow period, we have a spring flow period and we have a dry season low flow period. And again different from our system, but what she's identified is that this dashed line is showing different parts of the system that actually do something in terms of ecological ecological function. So what we can do in this work is quantify these different flow characteristics that are important for different ecosystem functions, and we can start to use these to understand how we might want to manage a system differently to promote ecosystem function. That's what I'm going to talk about here in a sec. So this slide is from Stu Rude. So thanks to this one. I'll talk a little bit about Libby and a little bit about the Kootenai River. And one of the nice things about this is it's a real world example of that functional flows are implementable. So here's the Kootenai River in 1972. And here's 1994. This is showing one of the key species for this work that we're working on right now the white sturgeon. And these plots are showing again that value discharge which is which is slow in the river. The blue line here is pre damp so this is 1943 1972. The red line is 1975 to 1994. So you can see that there's quite a difference between these two lines there's no longer any sort of high flow, the low flows are much higher. So what they did was essentially say okay well white sturgeon are actually a listed species so let's try and help them out. Our US counterparts actually implemented operations that allow some pieces of the hydrograph to be restored. So they have this thing called sturgeon flows and then ecological flows. And what they're doing is essentially trying to give sturgeon key components of the hydrograph that they need. What this ultimately did was help them out. So the flows are successful so as a byproduct of that we can look at things like, again this is a slide from Steve Roode's work on riparian cottonwoods. The flows can be implemented in a way that is sort of done in an opportunistic way. So here's just a plot on the right showing the red lines or red bars or your poor recruitment for cottonwoods. The green lines didn't reestablish and grow, and the dark green line is excellent so they did reestablish and grow. In the high flow years we can see that there became more of these green sort of bars showing up. So after the implementation of the sturgeon flows and the ecological flows, we also saw cottonwood recruitment improve. So we know that if we implement flow regimes that are that help promote ecological function, we can actually see an ecosystem response. So that's really important for this data we're working on. Speaking about parts of the Columbia that we're working on. Here's just a map I'm not going to go through this in any detail we've got a number of river reaches that we've identified these are just sections of the river that we're looking at. And all of these are in the modeling that others have already talked about so these are parts of models that we're able to look at these different points and start to see, you know what might our responses be in terms of the ecological function. So why you know what is the Columbia river look like right now relative to a natural system. And so why are we doing this work. I see that as an example downstream of Micah. So the red lines and then the shading around them are the sort of the current operations of the current way the system is is behaving. And then the blue line is what it would have behaved under a more natural floor regime so these are data sets actually from BPA, and we've used these data sets in our modeling. What we're showing is that we've got a, you know, much higher and more variable low flows, and we've got a much lower and less variable high flows. What this ends up doing is resulting in a flow regime that doesn't promote things like sediment movement in the system. It doesn't really promote the types of ecological functions that we're looking to restore here. So we can use this functional flow regime or functional flow concept to help restore on these systems. We can sort of see no downstream a Libby we've got a different shape. And, you know, don't show a brilliant we see a bit of a different shape, and ultimately we can use these information to try and help us help guide us. The model or conceptual model for how we're going about this. Again, I've already talked about riparian cottonwoods. So what riparian cottonwoods ultimately need is high flows, they need flows to recede at a pretty gradual rate. And then they need sort of a low flow stability and then sufficient summer flows to be able to survive. So we're looking at these types of the components of the hydrograph of the hydrologic system to help help guide us in this work. For the white sturgeon. Again, that that Libby example is a really good one. What we're looking at doing for as a performance measure for the other reservoirs is you know looking at a spawning period, looking at scouring flows that that might be needed to promote sediment movement in the system. And then looking at that again that gradual descending limb of the hydrograph to help them help the young ones, I guess survive. So these sort of concepts of trying to mimic portions of the natural hydrograph are being used in our study to help guide what the reservoir operations might be. Some of the limitations of this work are you know, we've already seen in the chat today that there are different data sets available, whereas we're still limited by the data that we have so this is really a conceptual model and that's what we're working with right now. It's pretty theoretical. We would like to implement more site specific work to help refine this work, and it doesn't necessarily and Bill already mentioned this as well adequately address traditional ecological knowledge and that's a piece of work that we're working on right now. So, yeah, with that, that's sort of the functional flow concept. And thank you. I think I was on time. Yeah, you did great. Thanks very much, Ryan. There's a lot more questions or a number of questions in the chat or sorry in the Q&A is what I did want to remind folks of is I see some questions in the chat, please make sure you put your questions or the comments you'd like addressed in the Q&A box. The chat is too difficult to monitor and sit through the questions so reminder to folks who are typing into the chat. We do, we do have some questions and I am going to pass it over to Bill to select some questions for Ryan on this one. So Bill, Ryan you'll still be answering questions but Bill, are there, are there anyone to raise at this point in time. The first one that's come up in response to Ryan's presentation is I'll read that one out. Will it be possible to secure additional spawning habitat in the Revelstoke reach. Even as Revelstoke Dam re-regulates the flows from mica for additional power generation, perhaps a similar type of flow management used for the Hanford reach of the Columbia River further south. Ryan, can you take a stab at that one. That's a tricky one. So, I guess, at a high level, conceptually you could probably restore spawning habitat. Revelstoke is used in a bit of a different way relative to the tree reservoirs so we're not necessarily looking at it in the same way. But if the Revelstoke reach is a reach that's been identified as key importance for here it's fairly well studied reach. So it is one of the places where we have good data we can probably test some of these things. So I guess conceptually yes you probably can restore some of the habitat there, but we're not specifically looking at that in much detail right now. Just one comment to add on that. The biggest, when we did the mid-arrow study looked at changing the way the aero reservoir is managed that has a big bearing on the Revelstoke reach because if you need to lower the aero reservoir to expose some of the Revelstoke reach. So if you don't change the Revelstoke reservoir there is no Revelstoke reach. The second thing is is that the biggest problem identified in the Revelstoke reach isn't actually the seasonal flows. It's the peaking out of the reservoir. And that's something that's a serious issue and there's we've had some discussions about things that might be done in terms of changing the way we manage the Revelstoke reservoir itself to try and diminish peaking but those are things that are literally just into the discussion stage at the moment. Another question. Yeah, go ahead. Okay, there are lots of questions coming until thanks everybody and we don't have time to answer them verbally. We'll do our best to answer them online. How do you think the flow regime that you're suggesting will affect the ability to grow food in repairing areas that currently get flooded for short periods of the year. The area so the Revelstoke lost hundreds of farms with the creation of the Aero Lakes. So back. So part of the flow regimes and this is maybe more related to the footprint repairing wetlands study that Greg and Stuart leading is looking at how we might manage reservoirs at say like a lower pool as an example. So in that case, if you were to manage the reservoirs at a lower full pool, you could probably you would restore some of that habitat. So one of the ideas that we've been looking at is trying to restore the upper ends of the hydrograph so that we can help promote some of the sediment movement through the system. So in that case we'd likely have, you know, yeah higher flows potentially in some of those downstream areas during certain times of the year to help promote some of those repairing and revering functions. So, yeah, I think there could be some food opportunities. I'll just add the quick answer to that the there are some socioeconomic performance measures we're not discussing those tonight. And one of those. One of those performance measures is looking at the potential for restoring farmland in the upper arrow reservoir. If you look at the mid arrow study that was published a couple years ago that there's some estimates on potential area that could be gained under that particular scenario as well. Thank you very much you too. Bill go ahead we've got about another six or seven minutes for questions so, so how about her. Okay, well I'm going to the question that it perhaps might best be answered by our subsequent panelists like Richard percentage or Wendell challenger. Just what is the outlook for seven rehabilitation and Richard I imagine you could go on Richard or Wendell could go on that for a long time but can you give us a short and busy answer. Yeah this short high level is good evening folks why rich percentage you're calling in from the silks Okanagan territory. We, if you look at a landscape level bill, we know that well over 50% of available habitat is upstream of the current dams and extended range of salmon, especially with it, you know, within the Canadian portion. From a historical percent percentage or abundance of what does that translate to well within the context of the last 100 plus years. You know we're talking about if you could break up just for sockeye per se across the entire Columbia, and you have 100 sockeye spread out amongst 18 key areas in the Columbia basin. The Okanagan and arrow system produced probably anywhere between 30 and 50, 50 of those hundreds sockeye. It was a very dominant fish producer, historically, and, and, and this also can speak to Chinook as well as steelhead within this area so I'm not sure if Wendell has anything to add but this was a dominant area. It's a high producing area, cold water refuge and it offers hope in terms of sustaining and persisting salmon runs in the Columbia. Thanks. Thanks so much Richard and we'll hear more on that more from you and on that a little bit later after the break. Well, do we have another question. Sure. This one is the Cookinosa Reservoir will not have any vegetation if there is no water for the growth. What is planned for that. And I think that maybe Greg and Stuart and Ryan can provide that to that who so who's first up. I could, I could start with that and that is has a somewhat different cluster of challenges than the other, the Canadian Reservoirs although the southern end of arrow has some commonalities and the key reason for the differences that it has much warmer drier summer. And so there's a change in the Euclid region it's ponderosa pine and grassland is tougher, much drier, warmer summers. And so drought becomes a more prominent limitation as opposed to flood, which is a prominent limitation up in the veil mont area of Ken basket and so relative to this we to some extent focused on on flooding regime and inundation tolerance relative to Cookinosa. The prospect of drought tolerance becomes more important. I might say that the current situation relative to Cookinosa does involve some very promising zones relative to riparian vegetation, especially at the delta of the Elk River, but also the Sand Creek and Gold Creek. And relative to those and also the Kootenai delta. There's a fair amount of livestock raising. And so it's possible that some coordination of livestock raising might actually complement the revegetation or re greening up some of these zones at Cookinosa. Thanks very much Stuart. Bill we've got time for a couple more questions. Okay, I think this one I'm throwing right at Brian now he's ready. Why are most numbers for more than 20 years ago, the change climate changes everything. That's a really good question. So the data sets that we're actually using in the modeling and in most of this work right now are actually derived by EPA. So what they're what they do is essentially rebuild the naturalized hydrographs and those are actually used as inputs into the modeling that we're doing. There are updated data sets that go to 2018 that we're looking at updating our modeling to. So that's one of the main reasons that we're looking at those older data sets is a, they're kind of a standard set of inflows that we're using for the modeling so they go from 1928 to 2008. And we're looking at updating potentially to more recent time series. I might just add to that, since the question also talked about climate change is that we will be running a projected climate hydrograph into the future based on climate change models as well. And so we're not ignoring the fact that the climate is changing by animates. The next question is from a golden kin basket guy, the mica hydrograph peak is months later than the model and reaches the peak when planting might want lower levels. I suppose to release this much water to obtain planting levees, and I think, perhaps either Gregor Stewart can start by answering the question of no. It's not really a planting levees approach, but what levels might be. You might be hoping could be restored to lower water levels. Thanks. I could comment a little bit. Yes, the North North end of kin basket does indeed have a different natural seasonality so if you look at the hydrograph of the canoe river which is that northern inflow. It's it's much different than for example the elk or the Courtney. And I think it's likely that the native vegetation are also somewhat adapted to that different timing. So one element of the field studies that were have been working on now for a few years is phenology, which is the categorizing the timing of the biological processes. And we certainly need to pay attention to that. And it also means that there won't be a one size fits all solution. Because the scenarios yield some promising opportunities will need to make sure that for those particular cases, we do have correspondence in timing, relative to the patterns of rise and recession. I could just add to that we didn't have time to go into great detail but as I showed that one slide of different differences in the growing season between different parts of the, the micro reservoir. And we also are looking at that in terms of fine tuning our projections in terms of plant plant, encouraging vegetation around the edges of the reservoir. So, yeah, definitely we need to take into account that seasonality is quite different in different reservoirs and even in different parts of some reservoirs. I would say that, you know, we're not worried so much about the flow rates, as we're talking about the upper, you know, one to 10 meters in the reservoir itself we're not actually talking about necessarily working along the rivers we're talking about within the reservoir boundaries and it's only the upper fringes that we're talking about. So it's keeping them from being flooded no matter what the season. Thank you so much, Greg and Stuart, and also to Ryan I think we're going to break now. So, so really I thank you to Ryan for your presentation and bill for fielding these questions. We're going to take about a five minute break and when we come back we're going to hear our last presentation of the night on operations to assist in restoring and address salmon. We'll have, you know, time to answer questions on salmon reintroduction and we'll also have time at the end to circle back to some of the questions you guys have posed that haven't been answered yet so stay tuned. Take a minute to go, you know, grab glass water or something stretch your legs, and we'll be back in five minutes. Thank you so much to introduce the next presentation and our next presenters so Richard percentage who you've already met from the Okanagan Nation Alliance and Wendell Challenger from LGL Limited are both going to talk about operations for restoring and address salmon. So Richard, I'll pass it over to you. Carry on. Thank you so much for being folks why it's a privilege and an honor to be speaking to this subject with a great team of folks that helped put this together. Bill started us off speaking to what was labeled anadromous species. We're not going to be talking about transmigratory sturgeon that make historically could have made their way to the Pacific. We're not going to be speaking on the seven species of anadromous salmon that historically made their way to the the upper Canada portions. We'll be speaking later on Wendell be drilling down specifically into a program and and a and an example of Okanagan sockeye specifically to this subject. And really hopefully the first half year my introduction is just established relaying and establishing our relationship with salmon. So yeah next Wendell. So we're talking about not only are we talking about an iconic creature, but we're talking about a people a salmon people a salmon landscape. To some it's a metaphor of hope and survival. It's a teacher it's a spirit. It can be a data point to scientists. These animals to a nutritionist is this we could measure it as 3700 kilojoules per proportion of fish or X number of omega fatty acids or DHAs for brain development. To a First Nations people this this is like this is this is essence to life and the first first half year I just want to speak to to pause and for folks to just look at these images historically that speak to community to speak to relationships speak to the land and water. Just speak to what was abundant and speak to the technologies and the innovations and the knowledge that's been translated thousands of years. Next. So there's in addition to time immemorial memories and lessons and teachings and ceremonies. There's been a lot of active work more more active work since the 1970s forward, some key milestones, some key collaborations that have happened over the past 30 to 50 years. In the from about 2004, there was the three try the three First Nations established a workshop back in 2004 just to engage the conversation upper Columbia salmon. In 2014 what you see here before he's an example of a joint paper that was presented on the concept and the feasibility and the idea of passing salmon back to their relic range. And the importance of ceremony and and that connection again. More recently over the last five years, adults and juveniles through the tribes in the US and and the First Nations groups in Canada. That reconnection is living fish are are being presented back to their natal waters and and reestablishing that connection. Next, you know very proud of what is pretty much a similar canoe a parallel canoe that's being integrated into CRT, and this is establishing what we call the big five, you know BC and Canada and the three nations reconciling and finding truth and finding a way to get along this motif the language and the words that are shared. Next, we need to the salmon chiefs speak to the story of reconnecting. Next, these illustrations of unity of finding a way together are representations there are creative stories that are shared from the three nations from left to right. They're shared from left should look in the center and should look on the far right from artists that shared from Sequebac. Seelks Okanagan. And to know specifically Kelsey jewels spirit peoples and Darcy Luke. These represent relationships caring for the relationship. There's a lot of messaging of coyote and the Eagle staff of calling back the salmon and the bear prints, establishing the four food chiefs of nourishment. They symbol life and the regeneration of life and the hope. Next, there is just one slice of a vast area of hope. There are two specific, what we call salmon planning units. Watersheds salmon landscapes within from you can lay down to the border, and within the slow can watershed. This is just one snippet of data that outlines current potential habitat for spawners of Chinook, just alone in these areas. There's a community to learn from the fish and give them a chance to tell us where they want to go. Next, so not only there's their hope for plenty of habitat to be renourished by and reconnected with salmon. The studies that we're going to share the information that's being shared is based on quite quite a good baseline. They're full accolades to fisheries and oceans and Dr. Kim Hyatt, Margo Stockwell and their team that have been working not only within our basin, but establishing what we call a baseline of multiple years. What some scientists would say is data rich. Not only does this include Okanagan sockeye, but since 2005, similar baselines have been established for Chinook, so that we can learn from this past information moving forward. As well as all the good work that's been happening in the Columbia basin within the arrow and Cootney system since the 90s onwards, a very data rich environment and data rich base for us to learn from moving forward. I hope there's a lot of uncertainties. We have what most people would consider relatively good data moving forward. Next, and so Wendell will be taking us through a series of slides and speaking to the following objectives where he's going to share with you how we've broken out and trying to dissect across marine and freshwater stages of these fish. The dynamics under various life stages from eggs through adults and then how this integrates and relates to the management decisions for hydro regulation. And I think just before Wendell gets into this, this is one of the things I reflect on. I remember Kim Hyatt talking about establishing cumulative models and why he thought salmon was such an amazing animal to represent a cumulative model of what happens not only in thousands of kilometers of freshwater environment shared mutually between the US and Canada and this salmon landscape from headwaters to the estuary. But the thousands of kilometers square kilometers of habitat in the marine environment, and what we can learn in terms of that holistic and cumulative perspective. That really has been at, I guess, the challenge, the rub, if you will, between the western lands and the indigenous lands of learning and knowledge systems and that connection and where we center ourselves so I just wanted to say that as Wendell takes us through some some of the data that's being worked up and examples moving forward so Wendell over to you thank you folks. The ecosystem functioning that we're investigating as part of the CRT work comes from a much bigger modeling project that's being led by ONA. And it's, we want to simulate the salmon population dynamics, all the way from freshwater through the marine and then back. And so that we can set as Richard was referring to a cumulative impacts. So this this bigger model that this works pulled from is we're building a large scale model that will be integrating in all sorts of different type of management inputs from water management, which we're discussing here today, fisheries land environment and climate change predictions, and this feeds into different components, where we model each of the life's history steps and we basically integrate in all the research that's been going on for decades and decades now and trying to build this large cumulative effects model this outputs metrics of interest that we can then use to help advise. And if you're not familiar with an Agama salmon in their life cycle, there's, they're quite complex. And there's all sorts of mechanisms and of interest that we have working to include and that researchers have documented and worked on over over the last 20, 30 years, 50, 60 years, really. So, in terms of the CRT modeling, we wanted to look at how impacts of flow regimes and flows affected migration of an Agama salmon through the Columbia basin. And specifically, we want to understand the impacts on earlier and later time fish, because there's a distribution of fish that move through over time, and we'd like to know whether or not certain flow regimes would be disproportionately impacting earlier later migrants because they can be important life history variation. And we also want to be able to derive sort of an integrated assessment across all these different timing groups. So what we're looking at is mainly the survival and movements as they leave Canada and move through the US and then how different flow regimes and management decisions can impact the flows that they're going to experience, and therefore they're the success that they'll have in the Columbia system. We were also looking eventually to under development also start to get at the timing of when they're leaving and returning to the basin. And that's ongoing work and will be integrated in the near future. So the way we do this is we create, we track what we call virtual cohorts so we create pretend bunches of fish that will go down through the system. And that's designed to represent the natural timing and abundances that historically we're seeing. We then look at what the daily flows are that they're encountering and we predict the survival of these fish, these virtual fish as they move through the system. And from that we derive our metrics of how we think a particular flow regime will do. So, you know the structure of it we take in, we have information about species we're considering more than one species. We look at what the migration windows are when the abundance are coming through to sort of generate these cohorts. And then we look at the management operations in the system, and use regression models based on long term studies of survival and the flows that were encountered during those survivals to predict what these future virtual cohorts will survive. And then we then combine them to understand how it impacts the early and late timed fish how it impacts run overall how it impacts different species. So, this all works from once we, you know, the models, the flow models working on right now they predict how the dams and the discharges may change under different regulations, or different management strategies. And from that we understand the flows and the timing and we use that to predict how this is going to impact anadromous salmon both in their travel times or transit times and and subsequent survivals, and how it may impact and affect certain groups, timing groups more than the other for example if we're shifting flows from later in the earlier in the season, we can understand how that could impact the certain portion of the migration window. And from that we generate performance measures to help assess whether or not a particular flow regime is a sensible one to to do. And that sort of gives you a summary of this just the start of our work. We're definitely delving in more and as time goes on and we further develop that large scale integrated life cycle model I think more components can be integrated into this modeling work as well. Thank you. Thank you both very much. That was great. And I know that we've got some questions. And we also have somebody who's raised their hand so bill I'll pass it over to you to read out one of our typed in questions and then maybe we'll go over and answer a raised hand here. Thanks. And yet there are quite a few questions still many unanswered some answered. But I'm going to turn my attention to those question turn our attention to those questions, responding to this recent presentation about salmon so I'll start. If time permits we can get back to some of the other questions. When can we expect the salmon cheese back in the arrow reservoir. It's the right thing to do especially under the UN declaration. I can't speak for each nation. But we are, we do know that Mark Thomas recently was named the salmon chief for the shoe shop. There were ceremonial releases this past year up in the headwaters. And we are aware that his community endorsed that and each community obviously has their ways of doing that through ceremony etc. And so can't speak specifically to arrows but I will make we can make that comment and it's active it's alive and the nations. The nations will continue to build out bottom up from their members and and so forth. Thank you for the thank you for the question. Thanks very much Richard and bill. I'm going to move over to somebody who has raised their hand buzz I'm going to allow you to talk you'll need to unmute yourself. And then go ahead and ask your question. I'll give it a minute here. Okay, there might be some technical difficulties there so building and pass it back over to you, and we'll, we'll come back to buzz in a bit if, if he'd still like to ask a question. Go ahead. Another salmon oriented question. I've heard concerned that the salmon being reintroduced into the Columbia and Cootney rivers come from polluted waters, and therefore talks. Is there any truth to this. Well, if we're talking anadromous salmon. The couple of case studies. This came to light under the Fukushima Japanese nuclear meltdown that happened years ago. ONA, as well as several of the Columbia lower tribes did sample fish that were making their way from that. That would have been exposed to that event over a two year period and DFO also. We were aware that DFO also conducted some studies and some of the Northeast Pacific agencies and the ones that came back to at least Canada and mid Columbia. There were non detectable levels of those fish that had entered the river from those sampled and so it just big the question that perhaps those fish never made it back to the mouth of the Columbia or just, you know, didn't make their way to some of the areas. That's one example. That doesn't certainly speak. And so as adults going through, they only spend such a very minute period of time that, you know, I know there's some of the responses from various experts have said that continued sampling of those fish over time. That is repeatedly shown non detectable levels. That's not to say that there isn't a concern. And so I know that the three nations, there's a whole group working on this very question of risk assessment under the Tanaha. Another group looking at the topic of risk analysis. These, this is one of the things that have come up through that exercise and we'll be taking that group will be taking a closer look, a more detailed look at these questions and formulating some of the studies that might follow. So hopefully that answers that question. It's a good question. Thanks Richard. Okay. No more seven questions right now so I'm going to go back one and lob it. I hope Greg is ready. It's actually formulated by a colleague and I think it's custom made for Greg so here goes under the best case scenario of these proposals and assuming that say 80 to 90% of present hydropower and flood risk management continues to be achieved. It's a very rough estimate of the percentage habitat recovery that may be possible across all these reservoirs. Just a ballpark to better understand the extent of what will still be lost. Thank you. Greg, are you able to take that one on as a start. It's a big, a big question. I can't give an exact number I would have to go and have a look, but we've recently been doing some calculations to look at number of hectares of area that may be revegetated, assuming we got one meter, two meters, three meters up to 10 meters below full pool in the various reservoirs. To really say what the potential outcome is the total amount will depend on the outcome of the treaty negotiations and the outcome of the treaty negotiations are unknown. But, you know, realistically, assuming that hydropower and flood control are still major concerns and both sides of the border. So it is, you know, achieving 10% of any given reservoir would probably be a very large gain, because basically every meter that you don't fill reduces flood storage and has some impact on power production. So there's lots of trade offs to be made, but I would say it's probably in that less than 10% sort of realm. Ready for another one Brooke. Okay, I think this one's tossing coming right at Ryan. And has there been much thought about the downstream fluctuation impacts on habitat and I'll give a quick start to that which is the work that Ryan reported on about functional flows is about exactly that question but I think Ryan can provide a much more Yeah, thanks Bill. Yeah that that's exactly what we are looking at so we're looking at specifically what types of habitats can we reestablish for key species and that's the approach that we're taking in this work is using those key species as surrogates or analog score ecosystem function. There's been a bunch of work done on evaluating you know what types of habitats have potentially been lost and how they've been altered. There's been a bunch of work done on sturgeon. And yeah so there are numerous studies and a lot of them are actually available in the public domain online so I'd encourage you to check those out. We do have a couple more salmon questions. Thanks, folks, and they're pretty linked so I'm going to read both of them out and hopefully Richard and or Wendell will take a stab at them so if salmon are introduced first question into say the arrow lakes region. How do they get back over the dams to the ocean to complete their cycles. If they're trapped in a region, are they facing predator fish. And then a related question. I'm not clear how juveniles salmon make it back to the ocean to dam intakes exclude the juveniles. Well I'll start off and then Wendell can add items so the first one was the arrow lakes. So these fish. Can you repeat them in succinctly again bill real quick what was the first one again. Sure you can also see them in the Q&A but here. The first one was if seminar introduced into say the arrow lakes region. Oh I see it here sorry. How do they get back over the dams. Okay so yes currently. There's been a lot of studies and a lot of examples. Through the mid Columbia and lower Columbia where there's actual passage that experimental passage and then standard passage techniques that have been used largely for salmon and new developments for non salmon species over the last 50 plus years. And so learning lessons from the US Army Corps and folks to the south, as well as some key studies here in Canada. We'll be looking that we will that'll be one of the first things one of the key threats that will be working with the, you know, the big five but also with the utility hydro operators on establishing juvenile passage bypass passage collection of fish. And then through a variety of techniques whether it's by barge or truck or through structures through the dams over the dams and similar with adults vice versa coming back. And so there are various technologies that are being explored with these high head dams, largely out of the US and lessons to be learned. Yeah, so that's hopefully that speaks to that one if they're trapped in a region facing predator fish. Yeah, that's a complicated one. I've been in meetings where people we pointed headed scientists try and dumb it down for ourselves to say everything eats everything. So, yeah, there's quite the composition of fish eating a variety of fish top apex fish. That'll definitely, you know, from a sockeye perspective will benefit in the ska program here. If you talk to locals, some of the, there were some key concerns about sockeye and Kokini competing many studies over many years and can definitely tell you that a lot of fishers here in the Okanagan are very pleased that in terms of the quality of fishing that's going on with rainbow trout so not saying that each lake is a replicate of other situations but that is a good news story so it's complex but there are there are some definite benefits via say sockeye to rainbow trout and other species there in arrows. Making it back to the ocean do dams intakes exclude the juveniles. No, some of the dams in the US so there are specific dams in the US where the turbines that the testing of fish passage through the turbines as opposed to spillways or other routes via the the structure itself is shown to be a better course for these fish to go at specific sizes by species and by time of flows and so this is an interesting question because each project site is very unique and these are one of the complex things that we as a modeling group will definitely be challenged with moving forward but we're confident that the scale and the type of question that we're asking will still be able to answer questions but this one here dam intakes sometimes in some situations it's better for the fish to go through the turbines believe it or not it's in other situations it's not good for fish to go through the bypass structures because of descaling to the fish and so it's complicated but there's been a tremendous amount of work through again the US Army Corps dealing with these very questions and Wendell I don't know I know that you and your team have looked at these specific questions would you like to add or clarify anything to that. I was just going to add that it depends which part of the Columbia River you're speaking of them. There is different amounts of studies that have gone into fish passage through it and and success rates by pass by pathway, especially in the lower Columbia and then Snake River that's been studied quite thoroughly, less so in the mid and upper reaches of the Columbia River where we have just more baseline survival estimates, but not by pathway we can tell you approximately how many juveniles will make it through the system. It's about 30 40 50% somewhere around in there from around the basin through to close to the ocean. So you have to realize that there's about a million or so smokes leaving and that there's a lot of mortality to these reproductive strategy for salmon is to produce lots of small babies that unfortunately do not do well so you often see high mortality rates even in in natural conditions. So what what we're trying to do is actually quantify that and understand all the factors, example temperature flow, etc that can predict whether or not you're going to have higher or lower amounts. And all those type of modeling we're also using when we're looking at reintroducing species so we know you're you're all the questions were correct there's a lot of challenges they face and when we're considering reintroduction we try to put numbers to that and see how variable. Those could be and therefore how successful reintroduction could be or how much effort we'd need to introduce to offset against all those sources of mortality. So yeah there's a lot of ongoing research a lot of work to make sure that we can understand where we lose fish and the ranges. Go ahead Richard. Yeah, just to that. I think this is a great opportunity to demonstrate the power of ceremony. So adult fish from the UK tribes adult Chinook and sub adults have been released within the within their portion of upstream of Grand Coulee and Chief Joe and we know that over the last few years adults have made it up into Canada, and we've recently learned that adults are actually being caught. Some adults are being caught in arrow lakes, and this is something we had no idea about over the last few years, but recent reports from anglers not just in the trans boundary but out of Edgewood and so forth have been reporting on the changes and so it really activated us and the group that's working together the the three nations as well as the agencies to start us, you know, begging the question well obviously fish made it through adults made it through the locks as incredible as that sounds. These are the things where fish will tell us what they're going to do and so lots to be learned. Definitely the presentation today focuses mostly on the downstream aspects but knowing that we're you know, there's going to be a horsepower put to this to start using this model for the upper Columbia and stressing salmon recovery opportunities there, as well as the juvenile releases that Okanagan have been providing and more recently, the shoe shop in the headwaters opportunity to learn from fish that have been released over a two three year period, even though these are small numbers of 1000 to 5000 fish that have been ceremonially released a castle gar rebel Stoke and more recently at slow can. We have yet we've picked tag these fish so that there's an opportunity to learn and what we've learned over these last few years is that small numbers we anticipated low low numbers. Currently, over the last three years from the various releases we're seeing above anywhere between one and 3% survival through grand Cooley through chief Joe down through rocky reach, and so there's always hope. These fish are amazing they find a way. So yes, really low numbers as to be expected, but what we, you know, what we haven't what we didn't expect to date was just what the fish have taught us is that there's a group of fish that move out right away. There's a group of fish that hang out for a year and then go out at a different time of the year so the ones that we release ceremonies in June. Typically the sub year what we call subs that year release go out in August and in the following year there's a group of sockeye that go out in April. A whole month before our Okanagan stock go out, as well as this year follow up year two years later after hanging out in Lake Roosevelt, a portion of fish that are making their way out to see two years later and this is coming from a stock that typically predominantly only stages one year and so it's exciting. It's in terms of the, you know, being a biologist or recovery biologist. This is we're on the cutting edge of, you know, a new frontier and very proud to share these types of things and learn and so the light hopefully this kind of translates a little bit in terms of what Wendell shared why we're looking at different life histories, trying to encompass the freshwater and marine, knowing that you know what is what was and what could be these are these are some really interesting unknowns and really learning from the fish so I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you very much Richard for that. Yeah, it it's important to remember all of the studies that can be done really the fish will do what they're going to do and they'll show us the way. Stuart you've got your hand up before you you jump in I do want to note that it's two minutes to the hour and I and I think that there is some interest or maybe some interest from the panelists to stay a little bit longer and answer some of these questions. But just noting that we've got two more minutes or maybe you can say a few words and then I'll I'll share a few closing comments before transitioning to answering questions after the fact. Stuart go ahead. Thank you Brooke I wanted to cycle back to a question that I thought was really a tough one that was Martin's question about what might be the perspective from expansion and I thought it was noble for Greg to give it a go and he's the person really who's most familiar with this. I might say that the value if we go from vegetation to habitat value is not a linear function it's proportional to scarcity. If you have a million cottonwood trees and you add another thousand. There's really no big deal. If you have very few cottonwood trees and you had a thousand. You have a thousand potential roosting trees for Eagles or Osprey and cavity nesters and the list goes on. And so we will indeed think about areas of habitat, but when you go from vegetation to wildlife, it turns out that I think that there may be some amplification that we need to pay attention to. And that's kind of a promising element. Thanks very much for that reminder Stuart. So at this point we're almost at the hour and I want to extend my deep gratitude to all of the presenters tonight for putting together presentations that explain such complex information in a way that that can generate discussion so thank you all. And thank you to everyone who's joined tonight so there's still you know just over 90 of you who are still listening in and we always appreciate your time and your ability to listen and please again encourage folks to watch the recording when it's available. And if you have questions that come to you after you leave here tonight, please feel free to send them to us. We're going to put a slide up in a moment that has our email address as well as the website where you'll be able to find all of this information from tonight. As well as a link to the survey that we really really would love for you to fill out so when you close the meeting tonight there'll be a little pop up window that asks for your feedback it'll link you to the survey. You can either answer it then or we'll be also emailing it out to everybody in a day or two. And you can you can fill it out more than once so if you don't want to finish all the questions and when sitting just submit what you can, and then you can come back later and submit the rest of your questions. It's not a long survey but it just depends on how much time and energy you want to put into the comments so any and all feedback is welcome. Let me just double check and make sure I've covered everything here. I do want to invite the presenters to turn on their camera one more time and give a little wave and maybe a silent applause from the audience here. This has been a really great session and for those of you following along with these these types of sessions or even our public meetings. You know, we've often received comments about presentations on the ecosystem function work that people would like more detail and and certainly really difficult to do that in a short amount of time when we're covering the CRT negotiations so this year. There was a great suggestion to hold a separate session specifically on this important work, and I'm really really impressed with with how it went and by the fact that everybody's still online that shows that you were as well so thank you all once again. Stay in touch and I think we'll we'll stay on a little bit longer here. We'll leave the meeting open if you want to review the Q&A's, but we will end the recording now and of course folks who want to sign off can sign off but with that, a really great thank you to everybody involved, and I'm a good night to those who need to say good night.