FY 2002 Columbia Plateau proposal 25070

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

Reason for change in estimated budget

NA

Reason for change in scope

NA

Cost sharing

Reviews and recommendations

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

Comment:

Fundable if adequate responses are given to ISRP concerns.

Speculative, but interesting science. This project definitely needs to be integrated with proposal #199406900, and the relation to #25079 needs to be at least discussed. We are requesting a comprehensive assessment of the Hanford Reach by all the proposers of Hanford Reach projects. That assessment may better explain the relative priority of this particular project. This project also needs to better justify its design. Our first impression is that the sample size of sites is too small. Finally we would like to see a decision analysis from these researchers, showing how the information they propose to gather will offer a cost-effective improvement in actual management decisions, compared to use of the traditional methods for fall chinook spawning habitat assessment.

Their previous work indicates that a large percentage (80%) of the distribution of spawning clusters in the Hanford Reach can be explained by small-scale characteristics such as water velocity, depth and lateral slope of river bottom. The proposed work is speculative in that its ability to improve the estimation of carrying capacity of salmon spawning depends on the establishment of a relationship between subsurface lithology and ground/surface water interactions. Interesting science; but as far as making a practical management contribution, we probably should get some additional information. Their summary statistic of the predictive power of the traditional habitat characterization technique does not quite address the real quantity of interest. We should be more concerned with the false positive and false negative rates, and the scale of spatial heterogeneity in the errors. The proposal tells us that the false positive rate is high. What about the false negative rate? And what is the size of the patches of the respective errors? These quantities give a better picture of the possible contribution that this research might make to the performance of a management decision system. If the existing habitat characterization technique is effective at identifying whether river reaches of several km or tens of km length either do or don't have potential for fall chinook spawning habitat, that is good enough, because the relevant management decisions probably will be made on that scale. From this perspective, being able to explain on the scale of, say,100 m, why fall chinook spawn here and not there is of academic interest, but it won't make much difference for management decisions. The costs of this proposed new "efficient" method come out to about $20K per km, which might be judged reasonably cheap for a one-time survey, if it really does improve a management decision. But this cost might be over and above the cost of the traditional survey if it turns out that the new method by itself is not as good as the traditional method by itself, so you have to do both to get the benefits.

There needs to be justification of the limited number of sites (3 spawning, 3 non-spawning) because such a limited number of sites could lead to strictly local characterizations that have no relevance to other sites or broader scale application. The proposal needs to present more explanation of the expectation of the portability of the results of this study to other locations such as in the Snake River and below Bonneville Dam.

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Comments
Hanford Reach.

Already ESA Req? no

Biop? yes

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