The Council’s 2000 Fish and Wildlife Program (FWP) established a broad framework for fish and wildlife mitigation and recovery within the Columbia River Basin. The framework included a vision for the Columbia River, which is intended to define the expected basin-wide outcome of the FWP, and a scientific foundation, which is a set of scientific principles that are intended to broadly summarize current scientific knowledge concerning ecosystem attributes, processes, and functions that are applicable to fish and wildlife mitigation and recovery within the basin. To achieve the vision, biological objectives were developed for the basin and will be developed for provinces and subbasins. The biological objectives describe the physical and biological changes needed to achieve the vision and they have two components:(1) biological performance, describing population responses to habitat conditions, and(2) environmental characteristics, describing the environmental changes that are needed to achieve the desired population responses.The 2000 FWP charged the ISAB with reviewing the scientific soundness and basin-wide applicability of the provisional environmental characteristics, as well as their utility for further defining biological objectives at the province and subbasin levels (2000 FWP, Appendix D). The ISAB was given the option to review other elements of the framework, as appropriate to accomplishing its stated charge of reviewing the environmental characteristics. The Basinwide Provisions section of the 2000 FWP discusses the framework and Appendix D presents the provisional basin environmental characteristics.
