Abundance of Fifteenmile Creek Steelhead

The Fifteenmile Creek steelhead population has been identified as a “must have viable” by the Interior Columbia technical recovery team (ICTRT) reaching viable status is essential for achieving DPS delisting.  Their status has been downgraded from 'viable' and is currently 'maintained' under 2015 NOAA ESA status review document, which is below this criteria.  The ICTRT, Recovery Plan, and the FCRPS BiOp have all identified this population as high priority for improving precision and accuracy of abundance, productivity, diversity and spatial structure information.  This work is critical to gaining a better understanding of the status of the population and DPS, monitoring and adapting recovery actions, and improving the knowledge of steelhead critical habitat.

Previous years' contracts have provided comprehensive monitoring and evaluation for abundance, productivity, and life history of steelhead in the Fifteenmile Creek population. However, recent funding reductions to this project have limited the goals to only estimating the abundance of adult and juvenile steelhead migrants in Fifteenmile Creek. Therefore, this project is now designed to provide information for the following key performance metrics: wild adult steelhead abundance, hatchery fraction, adult life history characteristics, juvenile life history characteristics, and smolt abundance.  The work proposed includes: 1) installation and operation a weir and a video chute to assess adult escapement; determine the proportion of returns that are hatchery origin strays; determine adult life history patterns; 2) operate a screw trap to: estimate juvenile (smolts and pre-smolts) abundance: mark smolts for migration characteristics assessment; 3) operate existing PIT tag interrogation sites to monitor trap efficiency.  Data analyses will provide abundance estimates and assess the key performance metrics.  A brief summary report will be produced that highlights key performance metrics.