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Prioritizing Watersheds to Recover Pacific Salmon and Trout in the Coastal Province of Oregon, USA.

Kelly Burnett Gordon Reeves, Dan Miller, Ken Vance-Borland, Kelly Christiansen and Sharon Clarke

USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, CORVALLIS, USA

Theme: TH2

Policy makers and land managers must often select freshwater areas to protect or restore given limited information on locations that may yield high ecological benefit at low cost. In response, the Coastal Landscape Analysis and Modeling Study (CLAMS) developed an approach to assist in allocating scarce funds and prioritizing watershed management objectives to recover Pacific salmon and trout in the Coastal Province of Oregon, USA. The approach will be used to assess each watershed (mean area 2000 ha) in the Province, based on management-related attributes (e.g. road density and land cover) and intrinsic potential to provide high quality habitat for at-risk populations of coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) and steelhead trout (O. mykiss). Intrinsic potential is obtained for each species using widely available 10m Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) to characterize favourable conditions of stream gradient, flow, and valley constraint. Watersheds with high intrinsic potential for a species may be good candidates for habitat protection when past resource management has been limited, and for habitat restoration when management has been more widespread. In contrast, watersheds with lower intrinsic potential may be better suited for resource-intensive or resource-extractive activities. Spatial context (e.g. distance from the ocean, or connectivity to less-disturbed watersheds) is also assessed and may be particularly important to consider when determining management priorities for relatively pristine watersheds with low intrinsic potential. Tailoring future management to the intrinsic potential of an area should enhance the biological success of broad-scale freshwater conservation strategies and improve societal acceptance by reducing economic impacts.