Read the Synthesis Report

Intensively Monitored Watershed (IMW) programs have been active across the Pacific Northwest for over twenty years. These study systems represent one of the few opportunities to understand fish-habitat relationships at watershed scales and across multiple life cycles. This information is essential to salmon and steelhead conservation and recovery programs, which annually invest millions of dollars in habitat projects and population and habitat monitoring. As IMW studies move into post-treatment monitoring phases, preliminary take home messages can help natural resource managers, policy makers, and practitioners more effectively implement recovery and habitat programs, as well as convey the benefits of long-term monitoring at a time when investments in salmon recovery are being reassessed at local, state and federal levels.

A small team of staff from the Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Partnership, Snake River Salmon Recovery Board, Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board, and the Washington Governor’s Salmon Recovery Office worked with IMW program leads from study systems across the Pacific Northwest to identify lessons learned to date, and to recommend applications from the IMW programs to conservation and restoration work. Survey questions on targeted fish population responses, restoration action types and anticipated watershed responses, and management and policy outcomes were distributed in summer 2021 to individual IMW program leads. Survey responses were synthesized in October 2021. In winter 2021, three workshops with IMW stakeholders were held to discuss synthesized survey responses and develop management application recommendations. Workshop outcomes were published and shared broadly in 2022; see link to report above.