Séminaire UMR 6308 AMURE

With Dan Holland, NOAA Northwest Fisheries science centre, Seattle. Dan Holland is a member of the International Scientific Committee of ISblue that is meeting in Plouzané on 5th and 6th October 2022.

• Abstract :

There are 13 ecologically significant salmon and steelhead populations in the Columbia River Basin (CRB) that are threatened or endangered. Billions of dollars have been spent over the last fifty years  on a variety of measures to promote recovery of these populations, and billions more will almost certainly be spent in the next few decades. Although there is no fixed budget or limit on what is spent to promote recovery, resources are not unlimited, and fully restoring the natural river system and habitat has been considered too costly and impractical. There is considerable uncertainty about the effectiveness of alternative actions for promoting recovery, both in absolute terms and in terms of cost-effectiveness. In this project we will compare a wide range of actions intended to promote recovery of salmon and steelhead in the CRB and evaluate relative return on investment of those actions in terms of increasing average returns of threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead populations. We will also evaluate the distribution of costs and benefits associated with applying different actions and how that influences equity and political feasibility of particular approaches.