The ESA – HR program will be focusing the majority of this year’s funds towards identifying distressed habitats within the Panther Creek and East Fork Salmon River drainages, and developing a uniform plan of action that can be applied to both areas. Both of these areas have been affected by past management activities such as timber harvest, mining, grazing, livestock grazing, water diversions, and wildfire suppression. A substantial proportion of the habitat that is critical to rearing and spawning salmonids has been affected. The main channel on both Panther Creek and East Fork have low habitat diversity in areas critical to the survival of rearing juvenile steelhead trout and Chinook salmon following the emergence from the gravel during the spring. Other influences include high summer stream temperatures, lack of quality habitat and complexity, and reduced riparian vegetation abundance and extent. The conditions present in each of these drainages render them as population sinks for threatened anadromous fish and a priority for habitat restoration by the Tribes.

ESA HR personnel will continue to assist the Yankee Fork Rehabilitation Program (YFRP) with data acquisition in order to meet the requirements under the Bonneville Power Administration's (BPA) Action Effectiveness Monitoring program (AEM). These data will include information pertaining to fish abundance, fish habitat utilization, and invertebrate composition from 25 sites, and will supplement the concurrent collection of habitat information gathered through the Columbia Habitat and Monitoring (CHaMP) protocol by Watershed Solutions, Inc. (WSI) personnel. ESA HR will also be partnering with US Forest Service in the decommissioning of Valley Creek Road (NFS RD# 70304). This will aid in the reduction of silt and fine sediments entering Valley Creek which may be leading to increased mortality of emergent fry, and a reduction in quality spawning habitat. Lastly, the Tribes have developed a Memorandum of Agreement between the Tribes and the IDFG North Fork Restoration Project that will help streamline cost-sharing in support of this important endeavor to restore a self-sustaining salmon population to the North Fork Salmon River.