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STATE
OF WASHINGTON |
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INDEPENDENT SCIENCE PANEL |
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PO Box 43135 Olympia, Washington 98504-3135 (360) 902-2216 FAX (360) 902-2215 |
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Hiram W. Li,
PhD David R.
Montgomery, PhD Dudley W.
Reiser, PhD |
July 12, 2000
Dr. Robin Waples
Northwest Fisheries Science Center
National Marine Fisheries Service
2725 Montlake Boulevard East
Seattle, WA 98112
Dear Dr. Waples:
Thank you
for the opportunity to comment on your April 4, 2000 draft Recovery Planning
Guidance for Technical Recovery Teams.
In 1998, the
Washington Legislature created the Independent Science Panel (ISP) to provide
scientific review and oversight of the State's salmonid recovery efforts. In
our previous comments to the Salmon Recovery Funding Board (November 10, 1999
memo) and our May 2000 review of the 1999 "Statewide Strategy to Recover
Salmon", we suggested that for an approach to salmonid recovery to be
scientifically credible, it would need to be consistent with the following four
steps:
1.
The distribution,
abundance, and productivity of sub-populations or stocks needed to exceed the
viability threshold and to sustain harvest must be specified.
2.
What is
possible at each site, watershed, or region to halt disruption that is
deleterious for salmonids must be identified.
3.
Conceptual
and quantitative models need to be used to identify and avoid trivial pursuits,
compare the outcome of alternative scenarios, examine uncertainty and
statistical confidence.
4.
A rigorous
monitoring program is needed to ensure completion of implementation goals, to ensure effectiveness, to verify
accuracy of projected benefits, and to provide feedback for adaptive
management.
In our
opinion, the guidance your document provides to the Technical Recovery Teams
(TRTs) is consistent with these steps and should lead to increased use of
scientific information in decision-making. We believe the guidance document
provides a positive approach. We will continue to encourage the State,
Legislature, and others who are responsible for salmonid recovery planning in
Washington to help facilitate the implementation of approaches consistent with
the above four steps.
Recogizing that the guidance document provides
the TRTs and the public with an outline of how science may be incorporated in
federal recovery planning, we believe an area in which the document could be
improved, is in explaining the role of the recently formed Recovery Science
Review Panel. This would help public understanding of the roles of these
different teams and it is also of interest to us, and probably other regional
science panels, that have broad oversight roles.
Finally, we also recommend that you re-evaluate
the examples and hypothetical scenarios provided in Tables 1 and 2 (and
described in the text) of the draft guidance document, to make sure they are
readily understandable by the target audiences.
On behalf of the ISP, thank you again for the
opportunity to comment. We look forward to working with you to ensure that
science is used in recovering salmon.
Sincerely,
David Montgomery, Vice
Chair
Independent Science Panel