At the January 5, 2005 request of the Council, the ISRP reviewed the Nez Perce Tribes' Step 2 submittal for the Johnson Creek Artificial Propagation Enhancement Project (JCAPE) intended to address step review elements and conditions placed on the project over the past six years as part of project selection processes. The JCAPE project submittal proposes to annually produce and release 100,000 smolts from adult summer Chinook salmon returning to Johnson Creek. McCall Fish Hatchery will be used to rear the juvenile fish, and no additional facilities are being proposed.
The Council's most recent recommendation on the JCAPE project was made on April 2, 2002 as part of the FY 2002 Programmatic Issues for the Mountain Snake and Blue Mountain provinces. The recommendation was to conditionally fund the project at levels consistent with past Council decisions in FY 1998 and FY 2001. The Council provided four specific conditions. Conditions one and two pertained to the relationship of JCAPE to the Idaho Supplementation Study. These conditions were addressed as part of the ISRP review and the Council's subsequent recommendation regarding the Idaho Supplementation Study in 2003; consequently, the Council did not request the ISRP to rehash the issue of Johnson Creek's transition from a control stream in the original Idaho Supplementation Study to a treatment stream. The third and fourth conditions addressed previous issues and the future expectations that the Council had with the project.
The third condition included scientific issues and is the focus of this review. Those conditions included:
- relationship of this project to the Council's policies on artificial/natural production,
- final design of the project consistent with any master plan and preliminary design,
- has the project or its purpose changed in such a way to raise new scientific concerns,
- has the underlying science or the way it is understood changed so as to raise new scientific issues, and
- how technically appropriate are the monitoring and evaluation elements of the project.
The project sponsors address these issues in Attachment C (JCAPE Monitoring and Evaluation Plan), Attachment F, the Project Review Conditions, and Attachment G, the Master Plan Responses. These documents were the focus of the ISRP review. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Ecology Group conducted the previous step review, and the ISRP referred to that review for context. In addition, the review team contacted the project sponsors regarding results of the project to date and also contacted Chris Jordan, NOAA Fisheries, for information on the regional pilot status and trend monitoring studies and the development of standard monitoring procedures and other data collection methods.
Also see ISRP review of Nez Perce Tribe's response to this report (document ISRP 2005-12)
