Hello! Allow me to introduce myself: I am a 3rd year Ph.D. candidate from Mississippi, and I am excited to be part of the 2021 Cohort of the USFWS Directorate Fellows Program (DFP)! This summer, I get to dive deep into exploring the mission of USFWS: “working with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people.” Since starting my project a few weeks ago, I have been welcomed into the Klamath Falls USFWS office! My task is to write the plan for monitoring the success of reintroducing bull trout in the upper Klamath River basin. Bull trout are a federally threatened salmonid species endemic to the colder rivers and streams of Northwestern North America. Bull trout have multiple life history forms including resident and multiple migratory patterns, which makes monitoring the status and trends of bull trout populations a challenge.
Although my task is writing the monitoring plan for the reintroduction of bull trout in the basin, I have been fortunate to join in the very beginning of the reintroduction decision making process. There are many decisions that need to be made: where should fish be reintroduced? What life stage should we stock? How many? Which existing populations should be considered as potential donor sources? One tool that can help the Service to answer these questions is structured decision making (SDM). SDM is a process that directly fulfills the Service’s mission of working with others to promote conservation. Through SDM, everyone involved in making these decisions (i.e. the stakeholders) come together to discuss the objectives of the project. The stakeholders for this project consist of more than just the Service: Oregon Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the US Forest Service, the National Parks Service, several Oregon Tribes, and Trout Unlimited are all stakeholders in helping to recover bull trout in the Klamath Basin.
Once the stakeholders are gathered together around a (virtual) table, the real work begins. Everyone has a chance to explain what their goals are, what they think is important. There is plenty of lengthy discussion about the terms we use. What does population mean in a reintroduction context? How do we measure trends? By the end of the meeting, we have created a set of goals, which in SDM terms are called fundamental objectives: maximize the persistence of existing populations, maximize the abundance of bull trout in the Klamath basin, increase redundancy by reintroducing at least one new population. From here, there will be multiple meetings with scientists and researchers to pull together all of the information known about bull trout in the Klamath Basin that will help us to model how the system works.
Agency: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Program: US Fish & Wildlife Service - DFP
Location: Klamath Falls Field Office