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Managing for Resilience:
Part 1 (background, results) – Eric Beamer (EB)
Part 2 (modeling) – Corriegh Green (CG)
Discussion moderator: Paul Hoobyar (PH)
Names of those presenting questions are denoted as initials if known. Many speakers were not identified or were not known by me. These are denoted by (unk) in following notes. Notes were taken during discussion and some cases, questions and response were approximately paraphrased. Discussions were also digital audio-taped, but some individuals were inaudible on tape. Questions and responses from audible speakers were transcribed (closely) verbatim, but for inaudible speakers, notes taken during meeting were used.
Case study questions/responses: Eric Beamer’s Part 1 presentation
Q. (Unk) What are estimates of adults for each juvenile life history type?
(EB) response missed on recording
Q. (Unk) How is the severity of high-flow events in the watershed related to history of logging in basin?
(EB) Both logging and road construction have impaired all reaches, but current ownership and land use in upper reaches should eventually restore function.
(Unk) noted: At the scale of Puget Sound, there is a heavy reliance on non-natal (near-shore) habitats by all species.
Q. (Unk) Is there a problem of juvenile fish becoming trapped in pocket estuaries at low tide?
(EB) Fish are forced to leave in most places, level of predation is not known, may be high by avian predators
Case study questions/responses: Correigh Green’s Part 2 presentation
Many questions were technical, regarding modeling parameters and outputs; responses same. Most missed on audio recording.
Q. (Unk) Why are various entities in basin opposed to mgmt plan?
(CG) Many are not necessarily aware of consequences, some have not bought into mgmt goals and priorities.
Q. (Unk) Are there any possibilities for mgmt for life histories that may have been lost? What if some life histories have been lost, how would that affect mgmt?
(CG) We could approach it as managing for habitat diversity that accommodates other life histories. For example, tidal delta habitats are mostly gone, so restoration efforts should form or include this habitat.
Q. (Unk) Does the recovery plan explicitly identify the possibility of increased fluctuations, and then (could you) talk about the mgmt implications of that, or is it just implicit in the plan that that is not yet what’s it’s supposed to be?
(CG). It’s not as explicit as it could be; we basically took what we knew at the time about variation and said, knowing what we know about variation, how will that affect the population as we know it and let’s plan for several possibilities. For example, we have this regime concept for marine survival, so the recovery plan should cover good regimes and bad regimes, and we should be doing well with the salmon even when ocean survival is low.
Q. (Unk) It might be helpful tie in the discussion of mgmt options to conservation too because some of the resistance (to the plan) may be how you absorb “fluctuation” in the concept of the natural systems that we’ve always used, but they may not be able to see alternatives for mgmt that could be explicitly designed to accommodate that fluctuation and they might feel different about those levels of variability if they could see some different way to approach it.
(CG). I think that’s a very good point and speaks to our general psychological knowledge that people don’t really understand variability very well. It speaks to statisticians who think more in terms of means than about variance, and also for your average person who doesn’t have a concept of time scales, variation over space, those sorts of things, which would inform their perceptions of what is going on.
Q. (Si S.) (Did not catch all of question, but asked who drafted management plan)
(CG). It was drafted by three Skagit tribes, WDFW, then given to Puget Sound Recovery.
Q. (Unk). Do you have realistic opportunities to increase abundance and complexity of habitat in the Skagit?
(CG). There are limited opportunities, but we’re trying to take advantage of them. The plan includes restoration actions in the order of 2,800 acres, and within the next three years about 1,000 acres of that will be restored over next 10 years.
Q. (Unk) Is it possible for you to use the model to examine whether that would be of benefit or not?
(CG).. We’re funded to monitoring the recovery of the populations for those delta actions (missed the rest on audio recording)
Q. (Unk) Does the model address restoration of habitats at different time scales?
(CG). I think we have to accept that some habitats might be lost, eg tidal delta (due to global warming, sedimentation)
Q. (Unk) Do diverse populations show more variability than less diverse populations, even though this is not intuitive? How would you conceptualize that?
(CG).. (mostly inaudible on recording; response in summary) The model predicts that, but we do not have good empirical evidence to show that.
Paul Hoobyar: General follow-up discussion
(Court S.) (Presented a means of defining “scales” of human and ecological systems at which discussion on resilience might proceed)
Human Ecological (salmon)
Individual Individual
Family/household Spawners
Band/assoc./neighborhood Population
Tribe/community/corporation ESU
State/province Ecosystem
National/regional councils Ecoregion
Region/countries “Salmon Nation”
Global Genus
(Unk) We have focused so far in our discussions at populations or single species and how those species interact within single basins. But when talking about “resilience”, are we thinking about the whole systems, from headwaters to oceans and back for multiple species? Should we considering whole watersheds, including oceans?
(Mark Chilcote) In my mind, “resilience” is what happens to a population after it gets “slapped down,” and rebound rate is influence by a lot of factors. In my mind it is a simple concept of “what do you observe when a population or an ecosystem is stressed? Are the processes still there to restore it?
PH. (Used the metaphor of…) describing resilience as “portfolio diversity”.
(Unk) In that stock market analogy, if several of those portfolio options go down, is it perhaps worse than one item (if the portfolio consists of one or few items) going down? Why is diversity always viewed as a positive thing?
(Unk) We can also view it as why are we managing for multiple species, and at the risk of sounding like a whining scientist, but it is really difficult and a challenge to get specific, detailed information on multiple species ecosystems like we’ve seen for the Skagit River, so to some degree I’m more comfortable trying to understand single species rather than trying to understand multiple species.
(PH) This points to a “comfort level”, or building a foundation, and taking a simpler approach by starting with single species. There is sort of a practical side to all of this.
(DB) Two things; as far as the marine component, I think we’re doing the same sort of thing there. Even dealing at the population level, we don’t have a lot of information. So, our surrogate for that is returning adults and what we can determine from otoliths and scale analysis; how long they were in the ocean and when they went to the ocean, under the assumption that that early ocean survival captures a lot of what is going on. At least in terms of the returning adults we can look at the different contributions of these different live histories and how those vary through time and that’s the kind of information we’re trying to generate. The other thing is that, coming back to Court’s comment regarding to scale, we’ll get another view looking at regional scale this afternoon. You’re right, we’ve been looking at the population level, but when you’re looking at life history, those vary individually and show a scale of variability down at that level. How you can manage that is one issue; even the scale is very large if you incorporate the whole life cycle of the salmon. You could argue that if the goal is simply maintaining salmon in Oregon, you’re going to come up with a different kind of diversity spread across the landscape than you would if you were worried about it in a particular river basin.
(PH) So what I hear is that there is general agreement and a higher level of “comfort” if we focus on a single species approach.
(Si S.) Are salmon a good indicator of resilience? Other species might be better indicators of complexity (eg redside shiner). So perhaps “complexity” of a community is a more appropriate indicator of resilience.
(Unk) Human nature is more accustomed to the means than the variance and don’t good ways to think about variability. Another way to think about it is that humans are bad at perceiving change rather than stasis. Resilience is a measure of change. Someone said resilience is a feature of ecosystems that are disturbed and how well they come back, and compared it to an investment portfolio as a better strategy. That is a risk mitigation strategy addressing keeping things stable. But change happens, its part of the natural world, but how quickly will it come back and will it come back to what it was before? That’s what a resilient system is. It is a hard one to manage and hard one to understand, but (we need to) embrace the change and see how the system is built to respond to change and return to its condition before. That’s what resilience is about and managing for diversity or managing for stability, I think, is antithetical to a resilience approach.
(Unk) We should perhaps consider chum salmon as a single species to view resilience; there are summer, early fall, late fall and winter stocks that experience different hydrographs and these stocks have evolved to use those hydrographs are particular times of the year. We could use existing documents to review variability and response of different species, say, at the whole Puget Sound scale.
(Court) We also need to consider various scales of disturbance (eg global climate change, accepted land use and regulations), or smaller scales, such as whether we have buffer zones along streams.
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