The Elwha River is the site of the second largest dam removal in world history. In addition to this large-scale ecosystem restoration action numerous other smaller scale projects have taken place over the last 20 years including the construction of more than 80 engineered logjams, 1000's of acres of revegetation and multiple levee removals. Initial monitoring of this historic project was mostly funded by the National Park Service and lasted for ~10 years. Unfortunately, the Park service's obligation and ability to continue funding this monitoring effort has expired and the project needs to secure a new source of long-term funding. While initial monitoring efforts were spread across many collaborators and areas of research, this project aims to continue fish in/fish out monitoring to inform recovery and hatchery management. The approach has a proven track record, direct applicability to all the metrics described below and a budget that has been streamlined after 10 years of experience.
This project will focus on the basics of fisheries management: enumerating adult fish returns and juvenile fish outmigrants. The adult fish return portion of the project will continue the 13-year SONAR program. The SONAR is an acoustic camera that records movie-like imagery 24/7 from late January through late November to provide species specific escapement estimates of steelhead, Chinook, and coho. The program also performs bi-weekly tangle net surveys in the vicinity of the SONAR site to apportion raw SONAR targets to species and provide hatchery mark rate information on steelhead and coho. The juvenile outmigration portion of the project will continue the 20 year smolt trapping program. Smolt traps currently exist in Little River, Indian Creek, and in the mainstem and provides outmigrating juvenile estimates of five pacific salmon species as well as Pacific lamprey.
This monitoring forms the backbone of the multiagency Elwha Monitoring and Adaptive Management Plan (Peters et al. 2014) which is the guiding document for monitoring and managing Elwha steelhead and Chinook post dam removal.
Additionally, funding will allow continued monitoring of other important metrics related to fisheries management and ecosystem recovery including life history patterns of steelhead and Chinook using scales and genetics and the efficacy of using mark selective harvest techniques to manage the tribal subsistence fishery