Washington State Forum on Monitoring Salmon Recovery and Watershed Health

Forum on Monitoring Salmon Recovery and Watershed Health
This page last updated March 26, 2009

The forum is a 25-member body created by the Legislature to coordinate policy and technical issues related to monitoring salmon recovery and watershed health. Its main objectives are to:

Scientist in creek with stadia rod.

Provide for more efficient and effective use of monitoring resources among agencies.

To recommend and standardize a set of measures to report progress towards salmon recovery and watershed health improvement.

To better guide (and improve accountability for) investments in salmon recovery and watershed health improvement.
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The Need for Monitoring
It is often said that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. To effectively manage salmon recovery and watershed health improvement programs, decision-makers need to measure the key environmental conditions most important to salmon and watershed health, and track how those conditions are changing over time.
Photo of juvenile salmonid in scientist's hand.

Monitoring is considered so important and fundamental to success that the federal government requires it of all salmon recovery plans submitted under the Endangered Species Act. In Washington, federally-required recovery plans cover nearly the entire state. More details

Why Coordination?
During the past few decades, federal, state, and local government agencies, tribes, regional organizations, private companies, non-governmental organizations, and citizen volunteer groups have developed dozens of different monitoring programs, the majority of which were designed to meet specific objectives or satisfy legal mandates or funding requirements important at the time.

Without any overall coordination among these programs, the result has been data that is difficult to share, doesn’t measure conditions in the same way, and can’t be rolled up to guide state and regional decision-makers.

While monitoring may sometimes seem straight-forward, the actual measurements are complex and difficult to standardize. For example, a key measure of salmon recovery involves counting how many salmon return from the ocean to their native rivers. There are many different methods and computer systems used to count fish, there are six species and many different "runs" of salmon, there are complications from changing weather conditions, and there are normal variations in salmon numbers, all making the process of standardizing counts, reliably estimating abundance, and detecting long-term trends difficult.

The first step in solving this problem was the development in 2001-2002 of "The Washington Comprehensive Monitoring Strategy and Action Plan for Watershed Health and Salmon Recovery." This strategy provides the foundation for coordinating, prioritizing, and standardizing the myriad of monitoring programs and needs across the state.