At the request of the Council and BPA, the ISRP reviewed five revised proposals from the Mainstem Systemwide project selection process that were modified to address research, monitoring, and evaluation requirements under the National Marine Fisheries Service's (NMFS) 2000 Biological Opinion (BiOp) on the Operation of the Federal Columbia River Power System.
The revised proposals include one database related proposal (35048), three action effectiveness related proposals (35016, 35019, 35020), and one pollutant/water quality related proposal (35024). All the proposals are sponsored by NOAA Fisheries' Northwest Fisheries Science Center. The ISRP found proposal 35019, "Develop and Implement An Integrated Subbasin-scale Status and Watershed-scale Effectiveness Monitoring Program for Salmonid Populations and Habitat," to be fundable, but found the other four proposals "not fundable." They were not technically justified and did not make a convincing case that they will satisfy the requirements in the BiOp RPAs. Specific comments and recommendations for each proposal, in addition to general comments on the set of proposals and the process, are included.
This is the second in a series of 2003 ISRP reviews associated with NOAA Fisheries and the Federal Columbia River Power System Action Agencies' (Bonneville Power Administration, Corps of Engineers, and Bureau of Reclamation) Research, Monitoring, and Evaluation (RME) effort.
