Condors and Coho: Rethinking Federal Recovery Planning for Extinction Prevention

California conducts salmon recovery planning in a significantly different manner than in the Pacific Northwest.  In contrast, staff from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Southwest Region (not consensus based watershed groups) conduct outreach for information and data, assess conditions, identify threats, design recovery criteria and develop recovery actions to construct recovery plans for federally listed salmon and steelhead.  Partnerships with water agencies (unprecedented for California), private landowners, State agencies, environmental organizations and others are recently under development.  These partnerships have facilitated incoming information to the recovery planning process that will help provide the underpinnings of the recovery plans and set the stage for community support when plans are finalized.  Key partners such as The Nature Conservancy, the University of California, Berkeley, and Microsoft are providing state of the art tools to assess threats, evaluate habitat conditions and test hypotheses.

Many salmon and steelhead in California are threatened with extinction and CCC coho are one of the most endangered of all Pacific salmonids.  In fact, the Five-Year Status Review for CCC coho salmon (Williams et al. in press) sends a clear but dire message of impending extinction. 

Yes, Condors and Coho have much in common.  This presentation will provide a glimpse in the path of rethinking federal recovery planning for extinction prevention of California’s central coast coho salmon.  A path that is uniquely human:  to contemplate, debate, decide and act.  The common and most favorable ways of addressing limiting factors isn’t working and we face the challenge of looking to more less popular avenues to save coho.  But will we embrace the challenge of protecting the environment and the species therein while still ensuring the human condition?  These are one in the same challenge and the outcome will tell us more about ourselves as it will about our salmon (Montgomery 2003).