The sponsors do not adequately address ISRP comments and the ISRP still considers the proposed work to be limited in scope. In addressing the ISRP's comments, the sponsors often included extraneous material and referred the reviewer to other documents, reports and plans as a means of addressing the ISRP's questions. It is our understanding that the proposals as well as the responses are to be stand-alone documents that do not require ISRP reviewers to search through other reports to find the answers to the ISRP's questions.

Two crucial concerns were not sufficiently addressed. First, the ISRP was concerned that the method the sponsors were using to assess juvenile abundance was not accurate enough to assess juvenile status and trends. The sponsors did not address this concern in a clear and convincing way. Second, the ISRP was concerned about the lack of habitat assessment to aid in explaining changes in juvenile abundance. The sponsors acknowledged that habitat work would not be done and referred to the Intensively Monitored Watershed (IMW) project on-going in the Lower Columbia estuary. The sponsors, however, did not provide a clear explanation of how this project satisfied the need for habitat monitoring in their streams and how their project would be linked specifically to the IMW. In response to the ISRP's question about habitat monitoring, the sponsors also cited the EDT modeling work done for the Lower Columbia. It is unclear how this modeling related explicitly to the ISRP's specific question about habitat monitoring.