Teams and technology trace Klamath River recovery by tracking new salmon returns

Aerial view of the empty reservoirs that once held water behind major dams on the Klamath River. With removal of the dams, the reservoirs drained. A new monitoring plan will count and track salmon as they return to their historic habitat © Bob Pagliuco / Office of Habitat Conservation

The removal of four dams on the Klamath River will reopen more habitat to Pacific salmon than all previous dam removals in the West combined. Now it will have a monitoring program to match—designed by top salmon scientists to track when and how many fish of different species return and where they go.

"The world's eyes are on the Klamath Basin right now," said Damon Goodman, Mount Shasta-Klamath Regional Director of CalTrout, who helped develop the monitoring program with other fish scientists, tribes, and state and federal agencies. "It's our responsibility to have credible, transparent, and solid data that tells us—how is this working for the fish?"

The monitoring program will employ the latest technology to answer three key questions:

• When and how many fish are returning? A SONAR station below the former Iron Gate Dam will use sound waves to detect and count the number of salmon and steelhead swimming upriver into new territory.
• What species are they? Crews will use nets that briefly entangle fish without injury to catch and identify the different species of fish heading upriver.
• Where are they going? Radio telemetry stations and mobile tracking teams across the basin will track signals from tagged salmon as they find their way back into their historical habitat.

The program will gather details about how and when fish return to the upstream habitat formerly blocked by four dams, gaining to more than 400 reopened miles of their former habitat. The results will help reveal which habitat is most important at different stages in their life cycle, which will help guide continuing restoration in and beyond the Klamath Basin. The findings will also support fisheries management by tracking how many fish are available to tribal, commercial, and recreational fisheries.

Excavators and other equipment disassemble Iron Gate Dam on the Klamath River. The removal of Iron Gate and other dams will reopen hundreds of miles of historic habitat to salmon. A new monitoring program will track their return - photo © Bob Pagliuco / Office of Habitat Conservation

Collaboration strengthens monitoring

This monitoring will also help federal agencies ensure they are meeting tribal trust obligations to support fisheries for Klamath Basin tribes that were long central to tribal life.

"Removing the Klamath dams represents an important investment in restoring one of the great salmon rivers of the West Coast," said Bob Pagliuco of NOAA's Office of Habitat Conservation. "We have benefited from the lessons of previous dam removals, and we want to be sure that we learn as much as we can about how the fish and the system respond to these changes. The data we collect will be valuable to others who pursue this kind of restoration in the future."

Pagliuco credited the tribes with building momentum for the dam removal project and persevering even when seemingly insurmountable obstacles arose. "Since the tribes never stopped pushing to make this happen, we're so glad they will lead the way in recording the incredible milestone of salmon returning to the river where they have depended on those fish since time immemorial," he said.

Agencies and tribes will each contribute data on fish returning to different parts of the Klamath Basin. For example, the Yurok and Karuk tribes will operate the SONAR station and tag fish near the former Iron Gate Dam site. The Klamath Tribes will operate three telemetry stations in the upper Klamath Basin upstream of the four dams being removed, tracking the way salmon and other species disperse into major tributaries of the Klamath River including the Sprague, Williamson, and Wood rivers, said Ryan Bart, a fisheries biologist with the Klamath Tribes.

"The fish have been missing from this part of the Basin for so long, we want to learn how they use it again," Bart said. "We know there is a lot of habitat for them here, we just have to get the fish here and have them teach us what they need."

Other agencies will count salmon redds, or nests, and the carcasses of adults that have spawned in different reaches of the Klamath River and its tributaries. That will help determine the ages of the returning fish. They will also use nets to sample the fish and determine how many fish of different species are returning. The monitoring program will cost nearly $4 million, with about half of the funding secured so far.

"Salmon are regaining their ability to move across the landscape as they did historically, which is critical to their recovery, management, and conservation" said Tommy Williams, a fisheries research biologist at the NOAA Fisheries Southwest Fisheries Science Center. "We now have an unprecedented opportunity to learn how salmon and steelhead experience ecological conditions and processes more similar to historical conditions."

Moreover, collecting data on the timing of fish migration, both upstream and downstream, and the number of fish of each species will provide data to guide continued restoration and to inform fisheries management including tribal, commercial, and recreational fisheries, he said. "Thinking beyond the Klamath Basin, this monitoring effort will add greatly to our knowledge about how to undertake salmon restoration on the broad scale of an entire large watershed."

Plotting monitoring strategy

Partners in the monitoring program include:

• CalTrout
• Karuk, Yurok, Klamath Tribes
• NOAA Fisheries
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
• U.S. Geological Survey
• Bureau of Reclamation
• Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife
• Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board
• California Department of Fish and Wildlife
• CalPoly Humboldt
• UC Santa Cruz
• Resource Environmental Solutions
• Ridges to Riffles
• Keith Denton and Associates
• Humboldt Area Foundation

The Humboldt Area Foundation, U.S. FWS, Reclamation, CDFW, and ODFW have committed funding to the monumental project. NOAA Fisheries has recommended $1.2 million through its Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund and Office of Habitat Conservation.

Representatives of the tribes and agencies participating in the monitoring program met in Ashland recently to learn about prior dam removals such as on the Elwha River in Washington, which may be the largest preceding removal project. They also toured the basin, assessing locations for the monitoring stations to be ready when salmon and steelhead will have access to upstream habitat not accessible for over 100 years, likely in early September.

"The removal of the dams is a tremendous joint effort of tribes, states, and federal agencies, and the monitoring plan approaches science the same way," said Jennifer Quan, Regional Administrator for NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region. "Everyone brings their own skill and focus to collecting data, and by combining forces, we will learn much more."

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife is supplying radio tags that biologists will implant in salmon swimming upstream past the former dams. Telemetry stations will pick up signals from the tags as they return to their historical habitat, said Mark Hereford, fisheries biologist with ODFW. Monitoring the repopulation of historical habitat will be a long-term process as fish will take several generations to establish new populations. The collaborative monitoring effort will help determine if and where repopulation is occurring.

"This will help us tell the story of recovery of the basin and the ecosystem as a whole," Hereford said. "That is an investment in Klamath restoration that will also pay off by helping us get the biggest bang for the buck as we learn how to tailor future restoration to be even more effective."

For more information:

• NOAA Fisheries Restoration in the Klamath Basin
• Restoring the Klamath River Basin: The Largest Dam Removal Project in the World