The Nez Perce Tribe (NPT) Department of Fisheries Resources Management (DFRM) Research Division previously managed five separate Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) projects beginning from 1983 to 2010. These projects have now been consolidated into a single, unified project: NPT Snake Basin Natural and Hatchery Salmonid Monitoring. This consolidation aims to streamline administrative processes for both BPA and NPT, enhance implementation flexibility, and provide comprehensive monitoring across the Snake River Basin. The project seeks to improve data sharing, resource allocation, and overall efficiency by combining projects into a single contract.

Goals:
1.    Enhanced Monitoring and Evaluation: Assess the abundance, migration patterns, survival, life history strategies, and critical uncertainties for multiple anadromous and resident fish species across the Snake River Basin. Our combined approach will allow us to fill important data gaps, such as juvenile survival in the mainstem migration corridor, and provide robust evaluations within the existing contract budget.
2.    Streamlined Administration: Simplify administrative tasks by reducing the complexity associated with managing multiple contracts and statements of work. This will facilitate better expertise sharing, timely adaptive management recommendations, and comprehensive evaluations of hatchery and habitat restoration efforts.

The consolidated project and contract will implement a base status and trends monitoring plan utilizing similar data collection activities and methods across all anadromous fish populations within the NPT's usual and accustomed areas of the Snake River Basin. We will work to coordinate activities across other data collectors to avoid redundant efforts and efficiently obtain high-level indicators and metrics across fish populations in the Clearwater, Grande Ronde, Imnaha, and Salmon River subbasins. The data collected will contribute to abundance, survival, productivity, spatial distribution, and life history metrics for juvenile and adult anadromous fish.  
Additionally, the project will monitor and evaluate hatchery supplementation programs and provide support and adaptive management recommendations for conservation actions implemented in the Snake River Basin. Hatchery supplementation monitoring and evaluations will include in-hatchery rearing conditions and pre-release metrics, comparisons with natural-origin counterparts, and the adaptive management of adult returns. We will support conservation actions by evaluating existing and recommending new watershed habitat restoration, nutrient enhancement, and harvest management actions. And, as new conservation actions are implemented, we will develop study designs and initiate targeted monitoring to evaluate action effectiveness and guide future efforts through adaptive management.