Technical Contact/Project Lead: Catherine Corbett
Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership
400 NE 11th Ave.
Portland, OR 97232-2714
Phone: (503) 226-1565
Fax: (503) 226-1580
ccorbett@estuarypartnership.org

Administrative Contact: Connor Kerns
Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership
400 NE 11th Ave.
Portland, OR 97232-2714
Phone: (503) 226-1565
Fax: (503) 226-1580
ckerns@estuarypartnership.org

BPA Project Manager: Allan Whiting
Bonneville Power Administration
905 NE 11th Avenue
Portland, Oregon 97208
Phone: (503) 230-3786
ahwhiting@bpa.gov

Background
This Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) contracts with the Lower Columbia Estuary Partnership (LCEP) to support research, monitoring, and evaluation in supportive of the Columbia Estuary Ecosystem Restoration Program (CEERP)  This has manifest in the implementation of two monitoring programs: 1) the Ecosystem Monitoring Program is an integrated status and trends program that focuses on tracking temporal trends in conditions juvenile salmon and steelhead encounter as they outmigrate in the lower river and providing a suite of reference sites for use as end points in our restoration actions and 2) the Action Effectiveness Monitoring and Research Program that focuses on providing information on all BPA-funded restoration actions in the lower river. The latter program’s objectives are to assess whether restoration actions are meeting partners’ engineering design goals and whether future adaptive management actions are necessary; place restoration sites on the trajectory to recovery; assess the ecological uplift restoration actions are providing; and improves the efficacy of our restoration actions. The two programs are inherently intertwined with for restoration projects that are funded under LCEP and these other project contracts:

•    Columbia Land Trust (CLT) - 2011-007-00,
•    Columbia River Estuary Study Taskforce (CREST)- 2010-004-00,
•    Cowlitz Indian Tribe (CIT) - 2012-015-00, and
•    Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) -2010–070–00).

BPA in collaboration with NOAA Fisheries and Army Corps of Engineers and Estuary Regional Technical Group (ERTG) have initiated a new evaluation process to evaluate RME related initiatives to provide focus to scaling existing monitoring design, address existing uncertainties, provide input to CEERP program evolution and shared learning from restoration efforts to date across the region. Newly completed Synthesis memos will provide platform for future RME proposal development. LCEP will support development of data summaries to contextualize and scope hypothesis based monitoring design to be included in research proposals. Input from ERTG members and work products including findings from climate resiliency papers will add value and position CEERP to manage uncertainty inherent to restoration science and future climate conditions.

This contract seeks support for this new initiative in the form of 1) Covening CEERP Partners to discuss monitoring topics, 2) Data analysis and documentation for existing research 3) Research proposal development. Contract will also serve to support ongoing related work including Monitoring and Adaptive Management Planning (MAMP) and Site assessments with Unnmanned Aerial Vehicles supportive of tracking ecological trajectory of completed sites and restoration potential of existing opportunities.