At the Council’s November 2008 request, the ISRP began a review of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon’s Accord proposal, Determine Status and Limiting Factors of Pacific Lamprey in Fifteenmile Creek and Hood River subbasins, Oregon, # 2007-007-00. This project is intended to monitor the status of lamprey, at a variety of life stages, in the Fifteenmile Creek and Hood River basins. Project funds will also be used to identify factors limiting production and work cooperatively with interested parties to restore lamprey populations.
On December 15, 2008 the ISRP provided its initial review and recommended "Response Requested - Meets Scientific Criteria (Qualified)" and requested additional information:
"The ISRP qualifies the recommendation identifying that additional effort and responses be given to: 1) adding a water quality monitoring component to detect the presence of potentially harmful chemicals, 2) detailing the juvenile lamprey sampling program, 3) examining the objectives for, and statistical basis of, applying 100 PIT tags to adult lamprey in Fifteenmile Creek, 4) describing results from (Project # 200201600 "Evaluate the Status of Pacific Lamprey in the Deschutes Basin" - initiated in 2002) to ensure that study protocols from the latter project are complementary as possible, avoiding any duplication in methods development."
On October 20, 2009, the Council provided the Warm Springs Tribes’ response to the qualifications.
The ISRP's final recommendation is Meets Scientific Review Criteria (Qualified).
Qualification 1: In its initial review, the ISRP recommended that the proponents add a water quality/contaminant element to their study proposal. They responded that this was beyond the scope of their study. While this may be true, the ISRP believes that because of their long developmental stage in the silt and gravels of their native streams Pacific lamprey are quite vulnerable to the presence of contaminants. Thus, the ISRP strongly recommends that a contaminant monitoring study element be added in the future to this project or development of a separate companion study be proposed and added. Further details on a suggested program are given below.
Qualification 2: Regarding issues raised regarding sample size in our initial review, the proponents indicated that they could not estimate the appropriate PIT tags to apply because they had no knowledge of the population size of lamprey in Fifteen Mile Creek. Rather than picking a "random number" such as 100, the proponents could have used abundance data from the nearby Deschutes River lamprey surveys and scaled to Fifteen Mile Creek to come up with a hypothetical statistical basis for selecting number of PIT tags to use. This qualification can be dealt with in further development of the study protocols.
These qualifications can be addressed without additional ISRP review.
