October 15, 2025 — Environmental groups and the state of Oregon asked a judge Tuesday to OK a suite of changes to dam operations in the Columbia Basin to reduce harm to endangered salmon and steelhead.
The requests are the first major development in a decadeslong legal battle in the basin since the Trump administration blew up a 2023 agreement that had provided a path to dam removal on the lower Snake River.
August 21, 2025 — The Nez Perce Tribe and its collaborators will try to eke out a few more years’ survival for Tucannon River Chinook.
“But,” Jay Hesse says, “we also had to ask: What about all the other populations? So in 2021, we started modeling quasi-extinction for all the Snake River spring/summer Chinook and steelhead populations listed under the Endangered Species Act. The results are giving us a better picture of real conditions, and a stronger case for the urgency of action.”
Mr. Hesse is the director of Biological Services for the Nez Perce Department of Fisheries Resources Management.
Some years ago, federal scientists at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries developed the “quasi-extinction threshold,” which the NOAA uses in planning.
For Snake River Chinook salmon and steelhead, the threshold is fewer than 50 adult fish in a population returning from the ocean for four consecutive years. Below that floor, the population’s continued existence can no longer be scientifically assumed or predicted. It is an emergency signal, flashing red and near black.
The Nez Perce Tribe is applying this science to management of populations below or near the extinction threshold, as well as to public education and long-term science.
Nez Perce Fisheries provided me two maps from its upcoming extinction threshold report for Snake River spring/summer Chinook, and steelhead, updated through 2024 fish returns. These maps show some of the findings, but much else in it will deserve attention.
July 28, 2025 —A September 2023 presidential memorandum of understanding (MOU) from the Biden administration called for the elimination of four Snake River dams that the MOU said contributed to the near extinction of 13 salmon and steelhead fish populations that return each year to the Columbia Basin from the Pacific Ocean to spawn.
Supporters of the Biden MOU say the fish are important to local tribal health and sovereignty and to basin ecosystems, and the declines are affecting southern resident orcas off the coasts of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. The orcas eat the salmon.
The 2023 agreement was between the federal government and four Lower Columbia River tribes — Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon, and the Nez Perce Tribe, as well as the states of Oregon and Washington. The tribes want the dams removed.
Opponents argue that the dams support river navigation for maritime barge operations, passenger vessels, irrigation, and emissions-free hydropower for nearby communities and should be maintained.
April 4, 2025 — A single severely dry winter temporarily, but dramatically, altered the ranges of three fishes — Chinook salmon, coho salmon, and steelhead trout — in California’s northern waterways.
In a new study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, biologists found that the unusually dry winter of 2013-2014 caused some salmon and steelhead to temporarily disappear from individual tributaries and even entire watersheds along the northern California coast.
“California is at the southern end of the range for several species of salmon and trout, and because of a whole host of impacts, from colonization and engineered control of western rivers to climate change, these populations have been decimated,” said study lead author Stephanie Carlson, the A.S. Leopold Chair in Wildlife Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. “Our findings provide a glimpse into how an individual extreme event can trigger the widespread and sudden collapse of multiple populations and species and potentially result in longer term range shifts.”
During California’s historic multi-year drought of 2012-2016, the 2013-2014 winter was remarkable for having both very little rain and an extremely late start to the rainy season. By the time the first large rainstorms arrived in late January and early February 2014, many streams and rivers in Northern California were very low, and in some, the mouths had dried up completely, preventing salmon and steelhead from completing their annual voyages upriver to spawn.
The study examined how the drought affected Chinook salmon, coho salmon and steelhead trout, all part of the genus known as “salmonids,” in 13 coastal watersheds ranging from Marin to Humboldt counties. While all three fish species were impacted, Chinook salmon were able to cope by shifting their breeding activities downstream. However, fish monitoring data from the summer of 2014 revealed that steelhead trout had been eliminated from a number of individual tributaries, and coho salmon disappeared entirely from three coastal watersheds.
December 17, 2024 — Federal protections for four West Coast salmon and steelhead species will remain in place for at least another five years, even as some populations have made progress toward recovery, according to NOAA.
The decision, based on formal status reviews, means restoration of salmon runs will continue for California coastal chinook salmon, central California coast steelhead, California Central Valley steelhead and Southern Oregon/Northern California coast coho salmon.
The combined fishery, which extends from the San Francisco Bay to the southern Oregon coast, includes key river runs from California’s Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada. Those habitat areas continue to “suffer from habitat loss as development and other threats compromise spawning and rearing habitat [that are] particularly important in preparing young salmon for a life at sea,” NOAA Fisheries said last week.
July 26, 2024 — The U.S. government will invest $240 million in salmon and steelhead hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest to boost declining fish populations and support the treaty-protected fishing rights of Native American tribes, officials announced Thursday.
The departments of Commerce and the Interior said there will be an initial $54 million for hatchery maintenance and modernization made available to 27 tribes in the region, which includes Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska.
The hatcheries “produce the salmon that tribes need to live,” said Jennifer Quan, the regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region. “We are talking about food for the tribes and supporting their culture and their spirituality.”
Some of the facilities are on the brink of failure, Quan said, with a backlog of deferred maintenance that has a cost estimated at more than $1 billion.
September 25, 2023 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is recommending sending $106 million to 16 salmon and steelhead recovery efforts in five Western states.
NOAA and the Department of Commerce recommended grants to state agencies with salmon protection missions, tribes and tribal partnerships in Idaho, Alaska, Oregon, Washington and California.
The funding “provides an important opportunity to bolster salmon and steelhead recovery and invest in the communities that rely on them,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement.
January 18, 2023 — A decades-long effort to remove four dams on the lower Klamath River in California and Oregon would be the largest dam removal in the world. The dam removals would reopen access to more than 400 miles of habitat for threatened coho salmon, Chinook salmon, steelhead trout, and other threatened native fish.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on Nov. 17 gave final approval for the surrender of utility licensing for the dams, clearing the way for their removal as part of the restoration effort.
NOAA is one of many partners collaborating to build a network of restored habitat that can support these species once the dams are removed. NOAA, the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, and Trout Unlimited have released a detailed plan for restoring habitat in a key portion of the watershed.
November 16, 2022 — The National Fisheries Institute, the National Aquaculture Association, and the Northwest Aquaculture Alliance are calling for an independent review of a decision by the U.S. state of Washington to cancel two net-pen leases for steelhead farms operated by Cooke Aquaculture.
Washington’s Department of Natural Resources made the lease-cancelation announcement on 14 November, 2022, citing a determination the leases “continued operations posed risks of environmental harm to state-owned aquatic lands resulting from lack of adherence to lease provisions and increased costs to DNR associated with contract compliance, monitoring, and enforcement.”
January 14, 2022 — The Washington Supreme Court has sided with Cooke Aquaculture in a unanimous 9-0 ruling that upholds the company’s fish farming permits in the state.
The lawsuit has its origins in a five-year permit that the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) granted to Cooke in January 2020, allowing the company to farm steelhead trout in Puget Sound and the Salish Sea. Soon after the permit was granted, a consortium of conservation and environmental groups including the Wild Fish Conservancy (WFC) filed a lawsuit challenging the permit, claiming the department was allowing the farms without fulling considering what the impacts would be on water quality in the surrounding areas.
Read the full story at SeafoodSource