At the Council’s January 28, 2011 request, the ISRP reviewed a response for the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon’s Columbia River Basin Fish Accord proposal, Willamette Falls Lamprey Escapement Estimate, BPA project #2008-308-00. The project intends to develop quantitative measures for indices of abundance and escapement estimates for adult Pacific lamprey at Willamette Falls. Proposed objectives will address the lack of population information in the Willamette River and address how lamprey behavior and vulnerability to predation may affect abundance estimates.
The proponents’ submittal is intended to address the issues raised in our previous review (ISRP 2009-23) in which the ISRP requested a response for Objective 1 (i.e., Investigate the performance of a half-duplex PIT tag interrogator at the Sullivan Plant at Willamette Falls to detect PIT tagged Pacific lamprey for a population estimate) and Objective 2 (i.e., Develop a protocol for long-term monitoring and index of abundance of adult Pacific lamprey at Willamette Falls).
The ISRP found that the proponents made reasonable progress in addressing the ISRP’s specific questions and recommended that the proposal meets scientific review criteria with two qualifications.
The first qualification is that upon completion the full-scale project design be reviewed. The project design should demonstrate clear evidence of the effectiveness of the technologies to meet project objectives: the long-term monitoring protocol(s) and an index of abundance for adult Pacific lamprey at Willamette Falls. This should include a statistical estimate of how many lampreys would have to be tagged to obtain valid abundance estimates.
The second qualification is that the ISRP review a progress report at the end of 2011 or early 2012 on two key uncertainties that have not been completely resolved: can PIT-tagged lamprey be successfully detected at passage locations and can lamprey be reliably counted by underwater cameras. The proponents expect to make significant progress toward addressing these uncertainties in 2011.
