FY 2002 Blue Mountain proposal 27003

Section 1. Administrative

Project location

Reasonable and Prudent Alternatives (RPAs)

Section 2. Past accomplishments

Section 3. Relationships to other projects

Section 4. Budget for Planning and Design phase

Task-based budget

Outyear objectives-based budget

Outyear budgets for Planning and Design phase

Section 5. Budget for Construction and Implementation phase

Task-based budget

Outyear objectives-based budget

Outyear budgets for Construction and Implementation phase

Section 6. Budget for Operations and Maintenance phase

Task-based budget

Outyear objectives-based budget

Outyear budgets for Operations and Maintenance phase

Section 7. Budget for Monitoring and Evaluation phase

Task-based budget

Outyear objectives-based budget

Outyear budgets for Monitoring and Evaluation phase

Section 8. Estimated budget summary

Itemized budget

Total estimated budget

Cost sharing

Reviews and recommendations

This information was not provided on the original proposals, but was generated during the review process.

Comment:

The proposals make a convincing case for the value of presenting complex habitat information in map form. The proponents have previously demonstrated the ability to produce high-quality maps at the Columbia Basin level. The proposed mapping would develop Landsat maps of wildlife-habitat types throughout the Columbia River Basin. If successful, these maps would represent a major step forward in the detail of information available to managers as baselines for ecological assessments. The improvement in mapping scale (down to 4 Hectare MMU from the Current 100 Hectare) would be particularly useful. However, the success of finer resolution maps would be determined by the availability of data at this scale. It is unlikely that regional data are of sufficient quality to support Objective 2.

Objective 2 should not be funded. The "wildlife and ecological evaluation" would be an assessment based only on habitat-type maps and on previous correlations of the habitat types shown in these maps with presence of species of wildlife. However, habitat maps contain errors and habitat types are necessarily arbitrary and cannot fully capture habitat for individual species. Thus, the evaluation adds no additional information to what is provided by the habitat maps, and it would undoubtedly be in error on many counts in predicting wildlife. It would not provide a very useful assessment of "wildlife species or habitats that are limiting" within a subbasin; in fact, it is not clear exactly what is meant by species or habitats being limiting. Objective 2 would have managers diagnose errors in the predictions that would be generated by the evaluation. Critiquing the predictions would be a useful exercise for the proponents but is not likely to be useful to the managers, who might be better informed by gathering primary information on species distributions and ecosystem function.

The maps would be made available in digital format to wildlife managers for the development of "coarse filter" conservation strategies. The utility of the maps to wildlife resource selection studies or as a layer in a GIS is unclear. For example, if the location (latitude-longitude) of a radio-tagged animal is provided, can the user easily build a table of associated habitat types based on the digital map?

Proposal 27003 falls below the quality of previous proposals. It is poorly written, combining poor grammar, spelling and punctuation with a confused structure and unexplained technical terms. Methods are presented in the background section. Objectives are different in sections 4 and 5. The "relations to other projects" section refers almost exclusively to other NHI mapping projects rather than establishing how the mapping would relate to and complement other projects. Also, absent from the proposals is a clarification of their relationship to work funded under the NWPPC's Ecosystem Diagnosis and Treatment project. The proponents have, however, adequately addressed the ISRP's previous comments on validation and field-testing from those reviews.

A key issue for these mapping proposals remains support from the managers, CBFWA, and the scientific community as a whole. Subbasin summaries indicate a need for mapping products and in particular, a need for mapping wildlife-habitats, but the summaries in themselves do not directly call for specific maps. The proposals did not contain letters of support from managers in the respective subbasins. Finally, publications describing the methodology for wildlife and ecological evaluation of the habitat maps should be submitted to peer review in the wildlife scientific journals such as the Journal of Wildlife Management.

The ISRP suggests that validation and field-testing be made compatible with one of the national terrestrial survey efforts. Perhaps an intensification of the National Resources Inventory survey sites and data collection protocols would serve the region well. See the Proposals #200002300 and #200020116 and the ISRP reviews in the Columbia Plateau.

Comment:

Comment:

Comment:

Comments

Already ESA Req?

Biop?

Comment:

BPA RPA RPM:
--

NMFS RPA/USFWS RPM:
NA

Comment: