Throughout their range, the odds have not been looking good for wild steelhead and in many cases ODFW and other agencies are taking steps to prioritize the long-term health of wild steelhead, as seen with closures to the Columbia Basin tributaries in Oregon. So, why won’t ODFW apply the same level of caution when it comes to the issue of harvest in Oregon’s south coast?
Wild Steelhead Harvest: Biological or Social Issue?
In the final installment of our five-part series on Oregon’s Rogue-South Coast Plan, we recap some of our previous concerns and make the case why we believe wild steelhead harvest on Oregon’s coast must end.
Coquille Bass Blitz – Revisited
Wild Steelhead Initiative Manager, Dean Finnerty, and his son recently assisted ODFW with electro-fishing on the Coquille River, one of Oregon’s finest salmon and steelhead waters. ODFW’s electro-fishing efforts help remove non-native species that adversely affect native fish.
Uncharted Territory
The Northwest is experiencing the worst summer steelhead returns on record. Steelhead stocks from British Columbia to southern Oregon and as far inland as the Snake River basin are doing poorly. Sadly, we are likely to see greater variability in run sizes, with smaller peaks and deeper troughs.
Winning the Ecological Lottery
In this week’s installment of a five-part series into steelhead biology and fishery management, we dive into a discussion around life history diversity and how it relates to estimating habitat capacity.
What Is a Stock-Recruit Model? And Why You Should Care
In the third installment of our five-part series on the Rogue-South Coast Plan, we look into how scientists and managers most commonly estimate if harvest is appropriate for a certain population and at what level. This is generally done with modeling, which is nothing more than taking all of the data that is available for a certain population and combining it with a little bit of math and a few assumptions.
Snorkeling the Coquille River: Smallmouth Bass Surveys
ODFW’s effort to understand and reduce the threat of smallmouth bass is critical for sustaining native fish populations and fisheries in the Coquille Basin.
How the distribution of adults impacts density dependence and mortality in juveniles, and why it is important to escapement goals
Nick Chambers provides a more in depth discussion on the intricacies and quirks of density dependence, why adult spawning distribution is a key consideration, and how those attributes are important to evaluating density dependence and estimating escapement goals.
The Biology of Harvest
In the first of our five-part series, Nick Chambers discusses why density dependence is important to fishery management and how density dependence is used to understand production potential of habitat and to develop escapement goals.
For the First Time in My Life
For the first time in my life, I won’t be skating flies over glassy tailouts for summer steelhead this year on my beloved North Umpqua River. That’s because the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has closed this legendary fishery until December due to extreme low flows and dangerously high water temps.