The panel advises that the practice of "supplementation" be used sparingly in the Columbia River Basin until carefully designed and monitored experiments can find answers for the many associated scientific uncertainties.

The report, "A Review of Salmon and Steelhead Supplementation," fills more than 250 pages and draws on existing literature about supplementation projects in the basin. The ISAB reviewed the genetic risks, and models of the demographic benefits, of supplementation, performance indicators to evaluate supplementation, decision-making tools for supplementation risk-benefit assessment, and surveyed the status of Columbia River Basin supplementation projects.

NOAA Fisheries and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council last year requested that the ISAB "consider the benefits and risks of supplementation to natural populations of salmon and steelhead, and whether natural and artificial production could be integrated to increase the capacity and productivity of the combined population for the foreseeable future." The report was also forwarded to the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which along with the other two entities helps select the ISAB membership.

ISAB Chairman Eric Loudenslager and member Daniel Goodman will present findings from the report to the Council during its meeting next week in Boise. Ad hoc ISAB member Richard Williams, who chairs the Council's Independent Scientific Review Panel, will also participate.

NOAA Fisheries is charged with protecting and guiding the recovery of 12 Columbia Basin salmon and steelhead stocks that are listed under the Endangered Species Act. As a result, it has a strong interest in assuring that hatchery processes do not negatively affect listed naturally spawning stocks.

The Council's fish and wildlife program funds numerous hatchery projects, including supplementation programs. The Council program is funded by the Bonneville Power Administration. CRITFC's member tribes

The report's "adopted" definition of supplementation (from the Regional Assessment of Supplementation Project) is "the conservation of the target population, i.e., to maintain or increase natural production, while maintaining the long-term fitness of the target population and keeping the ecological and genetic impacts on non-target populations within specified biological limits."

The primary aim is increased naturally spawning populations by releasing hatchery-origin fish that return as adults to spawn in the wild among natural-origin fish.

The ISAB report says that the many uncertainties regarding supplementation have spawned considerable controversy. Some believe the management strategy will produce an increased abundance of natural-origin salmon and that refined hatchery practices can reduce the risks to wild stocks. Others doubt that the abundance increases can be obtained and say there is a high probability that supplementation will cause significant harm, reducing the overall productivity of the naturally spawning population.

"The conclusions that can be drawn from the collective body of existing empirical information relevant to supplementation is that there is credible potential for a benefit to very small wild populations and credible potential for harm at any population size," according to the report. "Current information, however, does not allow accurate prediction of the magnitudes of the harm and benefit or of the net balance."

Among the beneficial mechanisms that could be produced from hatchery-wild interactions are: increased nutrient supply to the freshwater system from an increased number of salmon carcasses; increased aggregate productivity owing to the much higher egg to smolt survival rate in the hatchery phase, and increased genetic effective population size caused by the larger total number of adults, according to the report.

Harmful effects could be: depression of genetic diversity because of over-representation of small numbers of parents in the hatchery phase; increase exposure to disease; increased exposure to predation; exceeding the carrying capacity of the habitat, and depression of wild spawning productivity because of domestication selection in the hatchery phase.

A memo accompanying the document summarizes the scientists' conclusions:

• "While supplementation is ongoing, it can often be expected to increase the number of salmon and steelhead spawning naturally in the target population, and this may provide additional harvest opportunities compared to the situation with no artificial production.
• "The increased population size and productivity attributable to supplementation will likely not persist once supplementation ceases.
• "Supplementation can reduce the natural spawning fitness component in the integrated population and this reduction in natural spawning fitness will persist in the natural spawning population for some number of generations after the termination of supplementation.
• "Data to calculate the correct performance indicators are not being collected regularly in supplementation projects. Because of the widespread lack of reference populations, neither benefits to abundance, nor risks to natural spawning fitness, can be effectively quantified at present.
• "Except for critical cases where a natural spawning population is literally on the verge of extinction with no credible options for rescue by habitat improvements or harvest management, a technically valid risk-benefit assessment of supplementation to decide upon whether supplementation should be undertaken in a particular stream will be dominated by uncertainty because the data need for the assessments are largely unavailable."

• "Use supplementation sparingly, and only implement in a subset of the locations where unharvested natural populations are not replacing themselves, where habitat capacity is believed to be able to accommodate additional production, and where landscape conditions and institutional considerations are suited to maintaining the integrity of the experimental design.
• "Where supplementation is used, it should follow a protocol that uses natural-origin adults from the target population as parents in hatchery spawning.
• "Establish and monitor performance standards for each project for natural-origin and hatchery-origin adult abundance and per capita production rates.
• "Conduct all supplementation projects with explicit experimental designs to reduce uncertainty and contain supplementation risks. Establish reference populations, adequate monitoring, and objective means to assess when supplementation should be terminated (due to either success or failure).
• "Coordinate the multiple supplementation projects across the Columbia River Basin so that in aggregate they constitute a basinwide adaptive management experiment. The (NPCC) Fish and Wildlife Program should include mechanisms to ensure that individual projects are collecting the data necessary to test their effectiveness and ensure regional coordination of the multiple experiments."

As of Thursday morning NOAA Fisheries officials had not had a chance to review the document.

"As always, we're open to new information. We'll be reviewing that document carefully," said Rob Jones, NOAA Fisheries chief of harvest and hatcheries for the Northwest region's Salmon Recovery Division.

"Supplementation right now is experimental," Jones said, as managers attempt to solve some of the uncertainties that the ISAB report notes. He said that of 192 artificial propagation programs in the Columbia River Basin, 74 are focused on some sort of supplementation.

"There's information evolving all the time. This is a subject that's getting a lot of attention," Jones said. The agency is in the process of reviewing the Endangered Species Act status of 27 Pacific salmon and steelhead evolutionarily significant units (ESUs). An ESU is a population, or group of related populations, of salmon or steelhead.

At the same time it is developing a new hatchery policy to guide its deliberations in establishing ESUs and making the "risk analyses" that decide if a fish stock is threatened with extinction and thus worthy of ESA protection. The coast-wide review is part of NOAA Fisheries' response to a U.S. District Court ruling which held that the agency made an improper distinction under the ESA in how it treated artificially propagated fish in its ESA status determinations. Judge Michael Hogan said the agency had gone contrary to the ESA by including hatchery stocks in designating ESUs, then leaving many of those hatchery stocks unlisted.

The ISAB information comes in plenty of time to inform those processes," said NOAA Fisheries' Garth Griffin. The agency produced a preliminary draft hatchery policy that was distributed for comment to state and tribal co-managers early this year. NOAA is now working on a draft that will be offered for public comment.

The Independent ISAB was established by the Council and the NOAA Fisheries to provide independent scientific advice and recommendations on issues related to regional fish and wildlife recovery programs under the Northwest Power Act and the Endangered Species Act.

The ISAB's membership includes

• Robert Bilby, Ph.D., an expert in riparian ecology at Weyerhaeuser Corporation.
• Peter A. Bisson, Ph.D., a specialist on habitat issues at the Olympia (Washington) Forestry Sciences Laboratory of the U.S. Forest Service.
• Charles C. Coutant, Ph.D., senior resource ecologist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
• Daniel Goodman, Ph.D., an expert in ecological risk assessment at Montana State University in Bozeman.
• Robert B. Gramling, Ph.D., an expert in environmental sociology and natural resource management at University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
• Susan Hanna, Ph.D., an expert in marine economics and fisheries management at Oregon State University.
• Eric J. Loudenslager, Ph.D., an expert in genetics and fish culture, and a hatchery manager at Humboldt State University, California.
• Lyman McDonald, Ph.D., consulting statistician at Western Ecosystems Tech. Inc., Cheyenne, Wyoming, formerly a professor at the University of Wyoming.
• David P. Philipp, Ph.D., an expert in conservation genetics and reproductive ecology at the Illinois Natural History Survey, University of Illinois.
• Brian Riddell, Ph.D., an expert in international fisheries management at the Pacific Fisheries Resource Council, Canada.
• Richard N. Williams, chairman of the NPCC's Independent Scientific Review Panel, participated in the production of the supplementation report as an ad hoc member of the ISAB. Dr. Williams specializes in population and evolutionary genetics, ecology as graduate affiliate faculty at the Aquaculture Research Institute, University of Idaho.

Related Sites:
ISAB report: www.nwcouncil.org/library/isab/isab2003-3.htm