Industrial and agricultural pollution and toxic contamination, dams that block fish migration and access to spawning habitat—the decline of salmon, steelhead, sturgeon, and lamprey in the Columbia River is has many causes. To restore the river and the life that depends upon it, the Yakama Nation Fisheries is employing many and varied strategies, simultaneously. In some areas, habitat recovery is the key; in others, supplementation of salmon runs may need to be the driver.
By the end of the 20th century, indigenous natural coho salmon no longer occupied the mid- and upper-Columbia river basins. Columbia River coho salmon populations were decimated in the early 1900s.
Columbia River steelhead are iteroparous (able to spawn multiple times). However, as post-spawned steelhead (kelts) attempt to migrate downstream to return to the ocean, their survival is adversely affected by major dams.
Summer- and fall-run chinook were once abundant in the Yakima River Basin, but the runs were decimated as a result of historical land and water development and fisheries management practices.
Background: During the pre-treaty era, 44,000 to 150,000 coho returned to the Yakima Subbasin annually. By the mid-1980s they were extinct. Habitat loss and overharvest are factors that led to the extinction.
The Yakima Basin "Wood Fiesta" Helicopter Aquatic Restoration project is a multi-watershed collaborative effort aimed at enhancing aquatic habitat in remote watersheds that have been greatly altered by past management practices.
Four nursery lakes in the Yakima River Basin, which historically produced an estimated annual return of at least 200,000 sockeye, were removed from production in the early 1900s when irrigation storage dams were constructed without passage. The Y
Dramatic declines in the abundance of anadromous Pacific salmonids have occurred over the last century in the Columbia River basin. Population declines followed harvest, hydrosystem and watershed development, habitat loss and degradation, and red
We studied the nest-site characteristics of Western Bluebirds nesting in natural tree cavities in burned and unburned logged ponderosa pine forests along the east-slope of the Cascade Range of Washington, 2003–2008 and 2010. We compared 13 bluebir
This project expands research, monitoring, and evaluation (RM&E) activities conducted by the co-managers in the Yakima Basin (Yakama Nation and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife-WDFW) to better evaluate viable salmonid population (VSP
A major limiting factor affecting the healthy function of the watershed/habitat is the presence of an unscreened surface water diversion located on South Fork Simcoe Creek.