Many have vanished--others are in jeopardy

By Carol Savonen

Wild salmon once filled the rivers of the Pacific Northwest. Scientists estimate that during the mid-1800s, up to 16 million adult salmon returned each year to spawn in the Columbia River drainage alone. In addition, salmon also reproduced in all Oregon coastal drainages south of the Columbia, such as the Nehalem, Alsea, Siuslaw, Umpqua and Rogue.

Today, Pacific Northwest salmon are in trouble. For instance, in the Columbia River drainage fewer than one-tenth of the early historic numbers of salmon return to spawn in rivers and streams. And most of those that come back are not wild. On many streams, hatchery fish can make up 70 percent or more of the population.

Nine of 10 wild salmon runs and 100 distinct salmon stocks have vanished in our region since European settlement. Three times that many are at risk of disappearing. Habitat is disappearing. For example, in the Columbia Basin more than half of the original drainage area salmon once occupied is no longer accessible because of passage barriers such as dams.

In the early 1990s, Sen. Mark Hatfield asked the National Research Council to organize a broad range of leading aquatic and social scientists to share their expertise on "the salmon problem" in the Pacific Northwest.

The questions asked were basic. Which salmon runs are in trouble? What is causing their decline? What are the options to stop the decline?

In 1996, the National Academy Press published the scientists' findings in a book called Upstream: Salmon and Society in the Pacific Northwest. Overall, the scientists identified the following trends, with a few exceptions:

• Salmon are threatened, endangered or extinct in two-thirds of their previous ranges in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California.
  
• Coastal populations are better off than populations that spawn in interior drainages such as the Columbia or the Klamath rivers.
  
• Populations of salmon are at greater risk in the southern ends of their ranges. For example, coho are in greater trouble in southern Oregon and northern California than they are in Washington.
  
• Salmon species that spend a greater proportion of their life in fresh water, such as spring and summer chinook, coho, sockeye, sea-run cutthroat and steelhead are generally in greater trouble than those that spend less time in fresh water, such as fall chinook, chum and pink salmon.
  
• Where runs are as large as they once were, hatchery fish make up the majority of fish in the runs.

"In the 1990s, native, anadromous Pacific salmonids [ocean-going Pacific salmon] are at a crossroads," wrote fish biologists Willa Nehlsen, Jack E. Williams and James A. Lichatowich in their 1991 paper "Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads," in the scientific journal Fisheries. "The habitats of these once wide-ranging fishes are severely curtailed, many stocks are extinct and many remaining stocks face a variety of threats."

They go on to say, "In most cases, enough of the native resource remains to allow a variety of remedial actions. If the salmon and their habitat continue to diminish, however, available options for present and future generations will diminish or disappear. The challenge for the 1990s is to take maximum advantage of technical, legal and management avenues available to us now."

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