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July 14-15, 2001 (Meeting between SEI, Science Panelists, and Agencies) Meeting Summary Meeting Minutes Meeting Agenda Attendees view as PDF file: minutes_jul.PDF, view: flipchart_notes_jul.PDF Meeting Minutes SEI Science Panel Working Group on Monitoring and Adaptive Management, July 14-15, 2001 Courtney: The purpose of what we're trying to do today. Agencies are in the process of writing the BA. We're at the point where the agencies and others are beginning to discuss the issues of effects, hoping to get agreement on a number of these things. We need to both tie up all the loose ends that we've talked about, and get to "And then what"? What does the final product look like, in particular the monitoring program. What I'm really saying is that the agencies are moving on to the decision-making part of the program, and as part of that process, we need to flesh out what a monitoring program would look like. We've asked the three of you [Bartell, Boesch, and Cody] back here to help in a kind of conversation format. Starting from the conceptual level to perhaps a more application level of how monitoring, adaptive management, and other kinds of investigations could be integrated into what will constitute the final product. To begin with, we want to emphasize that this is a conceptual level to help the project managers decide on what to recommend. It's to help those preparing the BA. No formal presentations. I will lead the discussion, and I'm assuming all of you will leap in whenever. Begin by discussing what constitutes adaptive management. Adaptive management, as we defined it in the survey, is an explicit acknowledgment of the concept of management under uncertainty and management under risk. It deals with the idea that new information, which can be thought of as gained from monitoring, feeds back into management. Sometimes, not always, you can work through in advance what some of those results might be and agree to what would be the management actions that would be triggered by new results. So sometimes you can agree to those triggers in advance, you can set up a monitoring program with potential outcomes, and agree in advance to change management appropriately. One of the things the project managers have discussed -- one of those "aha moments" -- when we collectively realized that there really is a good opportunity for adaptive management with this project where, given the concern about side-channel habitat, and the fact that the Corps is essentially removing a lot of dredge material from the system, if we were to monitor those side-channel habitats and look at sedimentation processes there. The Corps instead of taking that dredge material somewhere else and dumping it on land, could simply put it back in the water in such a way that it would feed back into those side-channel habitats. I remember it was upstairs here, and Laura said, "We can do that!" There was a recognition that adaptive management doesn't necessarily mean a huge and costly management. Actually it can simply be something that allows flexibility and appropriate management of the results. Adaptive management is one of those "Mom and Apple Pie" issues; everyone says they're for it, but the Devil's in the details. Under some definitions, adaptive management is just those triggers that are agreed upon in advance. There are specified outcomes, and that's it. Under other definitions, adaptive management includes a commitment to really investigate and figure out how the system works. It's more of an open-ended commitment. If something is wrong, we'll put it right. Naturally, this causes some alarm among decision-makers who see this never-ending price tag potential. So there's a tension there with, "Well, what if we get something we're not anticipating?" There's no easy answer to all those things. That's one of the things I want to talk to. I'm hoping the three panelists can help us with is the idea of what other people do in other circumstances. I will just lay out, though, that in the scientific literature there's a divergence of opinion about what really constitutes an appropriate adaptive management scenario, which runs the gamut from a real tightly framed monitoring situation all the way through to things that have a research flavor -- things like validation monitoring, or investigations, or research where you test your assumptions. Under those latter scenarios it is more open ended, but it gets back to those base assumptions and explicitly identifies the things we need to test. It's not just monitoring the results, you've got to go out and test the basis of your decision. If those are wrong, then you make corrections. I'm looking for folks to jump in here. Am I characterizing this correctly? What do people think? Boesch: You've painted sort of the polar extremes. Really the effective approaches lie somewhere in between in that if you have just a strict monitoring protocol that you set up a certain number of questions and observations you want to make and determine whether they meet your expectations or not. On one hand, that's it. If it doesn't meet your expectations, and you don't change your approach to it, it's not adaptive. So it has to be more than, "Here's exactly what we're going to do, and we're going to tick it off at the end of the day, and we're going to walk away from it. That's not adaptive. On the other hand, if it's just a broad collection of environmental observations and research on processes and things of this sort that isn't structured and organized to basically make the right experimental observations that don't answer the questions that are appropriate to the management decisions, then it's neither adaptive nor management. So really one has to think of a fairly tightly, well-designed monitoring program as the core. Because otherwise if you don't agree on the questions you're asking, performance standards and so on, then at the end of the day, in five years, you'll still be arguing about what you were when you started. That monitoring program has to be responsive; it can't wait to put a final report together in five years. It has to be prepared to feed out information, to help one process and continually re-evaluated one's assumptions and premises. And be prepared to adapt those. It also has to have at least some component where it allows you to sort of get off the page from time to time in terms of the exact monitoring program. Say, for example, you have an observation in the monitoring program that raises some questions, are there some other measurements that can be made, experimental approaches that can be taken, that can help us resolve what we're observing. Young: That was a linkage of the monitoring to some sort of a threshold concern effect that you identified earlier. Instead of being a management change, that feedback might go into a research type of question? Boesch: Right. Bartell: And I think it's important if we begin to address this more strategically and then move down into the hard part as we progress throughout the day. And that is determining whether you have the institutional flexibility or authority to enter into an adaptive management framework because essentially the first decision is whether or not to view your decision as not final. Not to view it as whether or not you approve or disapprove of the proposed project, but to view your decision as an initial decision and really as a kickoff of an experiment. Where let's just say for the sake of it that you approve the additional dredging. Then the question is whether that dredging has an impact on the listed species. So you've just launched essentially an uncontrolled experiment - but only in the sense that you have pre-project conditions as characterized to the extent that they've been characterized. Now you've got the additional dredging, and as Don correctly points out, you set up your monitoring program to provide timely, effective feedback to try to determine whether the project is having an impact on those species or not. With the recognition that if it seems that there is an impact, you come back to the table to say well maybe we have to re-think this dredging program, or we can't do it anymore, or whatever. At the same time, if you're not able to discern any impact that you can tie back to the project, the logical conclusion would be that if we are having an impact, it's not discernible. It would seem logical, at least to me, that you would continue that monitoring at some scale over the lifetime of the project. That only seems fair and perhaps with some follow-up just because of the ecological scales of the species that are involved. And the fact that the dredging would presumably continue on throughout the lifetime of the project. But to me, the key issues are whether or not you have the flexibility and the authority to enter into that kind of a decision framework. And if that's the case, then we can keep talking. Larson: Isn't also, tying it back to the project it seems like to me is the tough thing here. I mean you're talking about a system that's hugely complex, that we haven't described as far as natural variability goes. You can monitor it, maybe even for the 50 years you're talking about, but if you see a change in salmon, how do you link that positively to the project? Is it a ten percent link? A fifty percent link? There are so many changes that occur naturally in the salmon population, I'm not sure how you could link that back to a three-foot deepening. Boesch: You wouldn't do it as a black box. You wouldn't just measure the salmon populations. You would monitor how does the deepening affect the properties - water flow, depth - all the ones we've talked about, as well as the dynamics of the salmon populations. And if you can't draw a line of evidence to suggest how that activity could've affected the salmon, or if there are other observations that suggest there are other factors affecting salmon, I think it begins to answer that question. The degree to which the action is responsible for the observed output. Larson: So we have very little information on how we could tie that in. For instance, in Cathlamet Bay, we actually have measurements of salinity up into the thirties - 30 parts per thousand - in essentially a freshwater system under natural conditions, or baseline conditions now. So if we started monitoring salinity in Cathlamet Bay and all of a sudden it was normal and then we got a 30, would we know that it was natural variation, or contributed by the channel deepening… Boesch: The answer to that question is we know the other big driver is river flow. So that if you also have a history of the river flow and you find out that there is this relationship, you ask what is the compounding relationship of channel deepening to river flow? So if you found those kind of conditions under river flow conditions, which previously you would not have found, then you've got a concern. But if you have high salinity intrusion on the basis of experience or models you would normally expect would be an outcome of low river flow, then it's not…. You can't just do it in a very narrow sense. You've got to have a model in your mind of how this system works. And I think we've heard it. We've had - what, five meetings? As much as people lament what we don't know, we have to start building this on what we do know. And from that, you can then design what are the appropriate measurements to make to be able to detect the kinds of changes we think are important and meaningful. Larson: I understand. You've heard the bulk of the information we know on this. How would you design a monitoring program that looks at the entire picture of the thing and what would the triggers be? I guess Antonio [Baptista] with his model would be able to answer the trigger question… I mean what's the scope of a monitoring program that could answer the question, "Well, this change in bathymetry would produce that kind of thing so we would know that?" Bartell: During the past couple of meetings, we've outlined, or attempted to outline, the various issues we think are important in terms of affecting the population dynamics of those fishes. And you can think of those as each one as sort of a variance component in describing the variance in the population size of the fish. And the question then is, "If we change one of those components (i.e., the dredging program), can we statistically see over the long term any change in the population of the salmon. I agree. The Devil's in the details of how you're willing to live with and characterize those different components because you're obviously not going to be able to characterize them all equally. I'd be very much interested in whether or not the dredging program could be related to changes in the patterns of variance of those different components. In other words, if we do the dredging and we've got 30 years of salinity intrusion data, and we know that it's highly variable in space and time, etc., we can at least describe those spatial/temporal variabilities and variance before the treatment, impose the dredging, see change in that variance, and can we see it to the extent that we're willing to believe that it's actually a result of the program. And by looking at changes in those patterns of variance and the different components - whether it's some measure of food availability vis-à-vis increases or losses in wetlands that are contributing resources to the system, or the other components - the toxics - to bathymetry changes in terms of physical habitat, can we convince ourselves that we see changes in the patterns of variance that we might ascribe to the dredging program and begin to develop the picture that way? Larson: The example from dredging is that every year, the bar fills in by about seven feet. We come back in and dredge that area every year, it re-establishes, and then we deepen it. We've talked with Antonio about that, and I don't think in his CORIE data he's able to pick up that as a change at his stations. That's probably the only comparative example of how dredging would affect the historic data we might have on that kind of thing. That much of a deepening isn't readily apparent in the water quality data that we're seeing. Courtney: [Inaudible.] Bartell: Qualified nods. When you say relating the conceptual model of how the system works, I don't want that to be interpreted as we've got to monitor everything. It depends on what you mean by the "system." By the system I mean the likelihood of local extinction of those stocks. It doesn't mean that you have to understand all the physcial/chemical/ ecological production dynamics of the estuary. Boesch: I agree with what Steve [Bartell] says, but the idea of adaptive management means you always have to keep your eye open - not wear blinders - so that if something comes up - a set of observations yielding new information - you should be prepared to change what you're doing and follow that. Courtney: [You [Boesch] presented an ideal; do you have any examples?] Bartell: Let me give you an example say from a food web point of view. If we're concerned about the potential impacts of dredging on distribution and abundance of benthic organisms that might be food for some of these critters, we might reasonably then want to monitor the spatial/temporal dynamics of those populations. But we might not necessarily have to go back to try to understand the variations in those dynamics and relate it back to primary productivity per se, or very specific food web structures and interactions, necessarily, to get where we're going. Courtney: [Suggests the continued involvement… How do other people deal with adaptive management in those sort of frameworks?] Young: Could I give one sort of broad-scale example? The ESA in the Biological Opinion has a "reinitiation clause," which in my mind could be a form of adaptive management. It says that if your project effects change from the way you describe them in your Biological Assessment, you shall reinitiate consultation, with the caveat that it will take no irreversible, irretrievable commitment of resources during that interim while you're reinitiating. What I'm understanding from this early dialogue is that adaptive management would take that step of "you've already got a management change in mind" that would be locked into the BA. You guys would be kind of considering all the management changes that could occur if an effect was monitored. And instead of waiting for this reinitiation clause under ESA to kick in, your monitoring would say, "we're going to go in a separate direction and monitor that for awhile." So it would avoid an ESA ball up. However, thinking about the kind of action we've got, what are the irreversible, irretrievable actions we're taking? You're dredging and then you're depositing the dredge spoils somewhere. Those are kind of your actions. If, in fact, your monitoring said, "we've got an effect," ESA would say, "take no irretrievable action," and if you take no more management actions for six months or a year, ships can still go back and forth. We have the opportunity to negotiate those changes, so I see ESA having some level of a feedback loop required. One last point. ESA also tells us that under the incidental take statement of the BO, you must monitor those aspects that cause incidental take. So from what I've heard, there's got to be a core monitoring program that links to an adaptive management program. ESA has a form of each. Bartell: So if I understand you correctly, you're saying we could do this if we want to. (Yes). Larson: We've been doing what you're talking about. If we have some situation that shows up that's different than under our original consultation, that would trigger reinitiation on our side. But we're actually involved in the smolt studies we're doing in an adaptive management program right now. We're going to sample during the actual deepening operation and then determine the location and abundance of smolts in the water column, and switch the dredging up river or down river, as necessary. We've agreed to that at the Corps to minimize impacts to smolts drifting down stream. Also during the original consultation with the O&M (Operations and Maintenance) program, we had a series of monitoring efforts put into effect. One was sampling the water column to see if we were going to get any juvenile salmon in the water column. Normally, the dredging will pick up the drag heads when the pumps are running. And so the concern was if that was the case that we were sucking up salmon during that period of time, then we would stop that and do something different. And so we had a long series of monitoring programs for several years to assess that where we would raise the drag heads with the pumps running at different depths and assess whether or not we got juvenile salmon. Same with turbidity and several other things. Adaptive management is not something new to the dredging program. Bartell: So if I'm interpreting correctly, you're saying that we've already been doing monitoring that either fits into an existing adaptive management framework or that could be developed as part of an adaptive management framework regarding this decision. Larson: Right. Hicks: The authorities we work under ________ we were deferring decision-making and accepting adaptive management. In order for a project to move forward, through Congress, to get appropriations the decision has to be made and it can include a monitoring program that then the Corps has the ability to make changes as it relates to the practices within the dredging. As far as the actual action, the decision has to be made, and the decision will then be taken… Cody: What you're really saying is there are flexibilities in some aspects of the project, but once the decision is to take the channel down three feet, then part of the channel down three feet and another part not doesn't work…. Hicks: Correct. Cody:… but there are great flexibilities involved perhaps in the timing of the dredging and the disposition of the dredge spoils, etc…. Tortorici: Well, let's caveat that. If we undertake the program and something happens and we find there's some significant impact ("significant" in quotation marks now), then that dredging action would stop until we resolve what that impact is and see if the whole thing needs to move forward. It's not quite as black and white as I think you would like it to be because of the imposition of the ESA on top of what's going on…. Boesch: So there has to be some threshold so the concern about the potential of unresolved impacts rises to some level…. Tortorici: Right. The very reason we're here in terms of some significant new information… reinitiating consultation. I mean if through construction of the project or after this monitoring program is implemented, significant new information arises then all things are taken off the table again until we figure out what the problem is. Maybe it's not a problem and things just move on, or maybe it is a problem and we deal with it… But I think the point that Laura is making is that we have to make a decision about go or no go. Bartell: But what I'm hearing, and maybe I'm misunderstanding, is that from your point of view, entering into this decision-making process in the form of an adaptive management program would be within your purview… Tortorici: Yeah. Right. Bartell: And what I'm hearing you [Hicks] say is that that action is interpreted as not making a decision. Hicks: No, let me clarify. You started off by asking if there's any institutional things that would not allow us to defer the decision-making. And that we're going to say we have adaptive management that can cause us to continually change. I just want to point out that we do have constraints that don't allow us to defer the decision-making. Bartell: So you're saying that entering into an adaptive management framework would be perceived as deferring the decision…. Hicks: No, no, no. You started by asking the question is there anything out there that would stop us? And I just want to point out that we have to make a decision about whether or not we're moving forward, and we can't in that decision-making say, "Okay, we're going to expend two hundred million dollars of federal taxpayer's dollars, but we're really not sure and as soon as we're done, we may say "No, that was a bad idea; put it all back." That's not part of it… There are different things that can be altered, adapted, checked, monitored. You know, we can change disposal practice if more material needs to be in the channel, we can accommodate that. But once the decision is made to move forward, it's not something that we can go all the way around and say de-authorize the project and let it all fill in to pre-historical times…. Bartell: So if I understand what your saying is if the decision is to go ahead with the dredging, that's a decision that carries on…. Hicks: It carries on except for the pieces that if something critical was to come out, if there was new contamination found, or if it was directly linked to the dredging, we would look at ways to minimize, avoid, compensate…. Bartell: But not stop dredging. Hicks: It would have to be very significant. Mishaga: Part of the problem, too, is the nature of the impacts we're talking about. If you're talking about the process of dredging, and you've got very defined impacts like, for example, if you're worried about hot-spots of contamination, it's very easy to set up in advance a contingency plan that can be part of monitoring, so that you have some kind of monitoring for dredging and you run into contaminant hot spots. You set up a contingency plan; you've already got it, you know what you're going to do. The problem that I think Laura's getting at is when you have indirect effects, or you're looking at system effects that are so diffuse, and again, looking at this idea of variability, what are you going to do and how are you going to do it, if you can't define that, there's no predictability around that…. Managers get real nervous about that. So you're still going ahead with the project, but you can't say the project's not going ahead because you don't know where this is going. So it has to do with the nature of the impact. Marsh: Can I go back to… I think the agenda item was concepts of adaptive management. I want to lay out my understanding of the concept. Adaptive management allows you to act in the absence of certainty. And there's very few instances where we have certainty. So the thinking then is that you need to identify the key uncertainties. In all these workshops we've been having, we've identified these uncertainties. Some of them are important, some aren't. We haven't really made that cut yet, but at some point we're going to have to. Then the next step is…. Most people think adaptive management is a monitoring program where you look at the results. That's not adaptive management. One of the points that has been brought up is that you have to have institutional flexibility. That's a key part of it. Another key part is that you design your action so that you either test your assumptions about your uncertainties, or you answer the uncertainties. But in designing your action, what Laura was talking about a few minutes ago, there's different ways we can do dredging - timing, disposal of materials, etc. - that's the design to try test assumptions that we think might help or answer uncertainties. You have to design the action to test those and answer the uncertainties. So that's your monitoring part, but it's a little more complex than just going out and monitoring. You're all describing pieces of adaptive management. If we can agree that that's the concept, then I think we can start to really address some of the issues that have been coming out and the discussion will be more meaningful. Courtney: I wonder if there's any way that we can think about that institutional flexibility issue. Are you anticipating getting together every year to look at monitoring results? Are you anticipating other folks doing that for you? What's the framework for not just feedback from monitoring results, but maybe the concept that the monitoring itself would have to change? How do you set up that flexibility to make it work? Boesch: Let me just offer some examples from the Chesapeake Bay program. Over the long run, the decadal scale, the program has been adaptive, but over the annual time scale it hasn't. One of the key reasons is that the technical analysis tends to be pigeon-holed; they're not interactive sufficiently. We have the modeling people in one committee, and the monitoring people in another. So when that program has had to do reassessments, what's happened is they've asked questions of how are we doing, etc., and they've relied very heavily on the modeling results because those results can give you answers in predictable time frames. They don't have any variance. One of the problems they confronted, however, as they got closer to the reassessment deadline, they began to tweak the models which naturally gave different results. So they got very scared about the modeling, and they ran to the monitoring program. But the monitoring program was poorly set up to provide the required information. This was mainly because they were having a hard time dealing with the temporal variability that they could've better understood if the interpretation of the monitoring results were better integrated with the models. So just that integration…. As Antonio said, it's the reason why the models have to be integrated with the observations in the CORIE program. So in one sense, at least for some of the physical dynamics, you actually have a good starting point where you've got some framework of integration of those two important aspects of the periodic reassessment that needs to be done. So first of all, make sure those are tightly integrated. Don't have people just doing a lot of statistics without understanding also the processes and insights the models can give us. And then also bring the people who are going to have to understand and use this into that process. At least the people in the agencies who are the technical interface between the decision-makers and the information that exists. Hicks: Well, isn't there a time delay between the actual data collection, the lab analysis, and then the input into the model to give you results even in a year's time? Boesch: There is. But I think you should build that in. Often the delays are because we let them happen. Some of the physical measurements that are being made in real time are available in real time. We ought to be using at least those. Some of the other kinds of information might require more laboratory analysis. But in a general sense, one of the problems monitoring programs have had is that they're generally poorly thought out - how the data will be managed and converted to usable information on the time scale in which decision-making takes place. Hicks: It seems like we are continuing to hit this major brick wall. We're really good at the physical information, and then some group of biologists has to take the information and relate it to a biological concept…. Courtney: Get back to the administrative part. How will it be built in? What is the framework for addressing uncertainty? Formal and informal processes for feedback. Boesch: It has to be formal. If you're really serious about having a monitoring program, and given the complexity of the system and all the time we've spent on this, you've got to build in a structure [Bartell concurs]. The other point I want to reiterate is to emphasize integration throughout. In part, the reason the chemistry and the biology are so difficult is because we don't do a good job of making sure the biologists are well-informed about the physical environment is changing. So that integration between the physical and the biological is essential and ongoing. Can't be done at the end of five years when you're scrambling around to write the annual report. Young: ESA basically says if you've got incidental take, you shall report. There's a framework. But what I'm hearing is that that's not enough. That's more the informal feedback. Tortorici: Well I would disagree. From a regulatory standpoint, that's a formal thing. If we're writing a Biological Opinion that says you have to have a report by such and such a time that explains - that's a formal requirement. The piece here that I think is in addition to that is the fact that what's being recommended is that we need to have an inter-disciplinary team that's established in a formal sense that it periodically takes a look at the information and develops a set of management recommendations, as appropriate. Part of the difficulty we've had in this project that we've all struggled with is trying to cross those discipline barriers to really get into the heads of the modelers and the engineers and the biologists and sort of work that back and forth. So I would agree that it needs to be some sort of standing committee that's inter-disciplinary and integrated and that has formal reporting requirements that all of the participants are going to be on the hook for. And it's got some sort of peer review aspect… Courtney: You're getting way out ahead… Tortorici: I know it… Hicks: So we're way past having annual decision-making… Tortorici: I know it. Well, it depends. It could be set up in a variety of different ways. Annual reports and then every five years everyone gets together in this very formal and asks, "What have we got?" from a five-year perspective. I know that our agency has flexibility in terms of how we would want to structure it. It's just getting the structure in place. Back to peer review, I do think we need to have some of that involved. Whether those people are part of a formal committee or brought in on a periodic basis to take a look at what we're doing, I don't have that in my head right now. But I think there are a lot of good thinkers in the academic community that would give us a lot of credibility to have a secondary check on that. From a legal standpoint, we've talked about developing not only a scientifically credible document, but a legally defensible document. I think having something like this in place in a structured way gives us a lot of legal defensibility. So that when we get sued - on the record - because I'm sure that we are going to be sued, we can go back to court and say we have thought this through and here's what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. And I think that gives, at least our agency, a lot of comfort to be able to get up in court and be able to defend ourselves. Marsh: Cathy, in the alternative to what you said, the minimum is if there's incidental take, the agencies would require annual reports - this is the minimum - and in the absence of anything else, you would review those and you would make decisions on your own on actions… Tortorici: Right. Marsh: So that would be the minimum. I'm not making any value judgments… Tortorici: I don't think in this case the minimum is where we want to go or is appropriate from a scientific standpoint. I've learned from this experience that we need to have more than one head at the table reviewing that information, whether it's a gnarly discussion or not, doesn't give me a problem. I just want to have other people looking at this information helping make a decision. Hicks: I think it's really important for the panel to understand that there's a lot of actions happening on a federal level right now in the lower river. And so when we think about developing a monitoring plan that will help tease out whether there was an impact of the three-foot deepening, keep in mind that at the same time, there's a term and condition calling for 10,000 acres of wetlands to be created in the lower river. And so as we're changing the lower river, we're still trying to figure out whether the three-foot deepening had some discernible change that we can measure. As other actions are reforming the estuary that becomes even more difficult unless we're prepared to say, "Stop any changes in the estuary so that we can better define the change due to this one action." Courtney: We can only go so far with this discussion. [From notes: Summarizes was has been said thus far]. Hicks: I guess what I'm suggesting is the interdisciplinary team that's going to be periodically reviewing this is reviewing all of it, and not just our piece of it. It should be the hydropower buy-out, the All-H paper, the changes from LCREP, the new starts, the permit applications for point/non-point source in the estuary. It should be the whole thing with different components of those things. It shouldn't be pushing all of that down to this one federal action. It should be up and high and big. Or a new one, or an advisory board that the President has set up. But it's much bigger and higher because of all the interrelated actions that are occurring. Boesch: The scope you're suggesting is the estuary, not the whole river? Hicks: Yes. Young: I don't necessarily disagree about the need for a larger framework, but I still see a sub-framework for this project that has monitoring and adaptive management aspects applicable to direct and indirect…. Hicks: The only way you're ever going to be able to make management decisions is to include all of those things. Bartell: Yeah. And certainly trying to relate the impacts of those wetlands restoration… I would see that as part of the monitoring program. Tortorici: We talked about this in our management work group in the following sense: Laura's alluded to a lot of work that's going on in the lower river and the estuary, some of which are stemming from the BO that our agency just put out on the whole hydropower system. And so part of the components of that BO called for an extensive research, monitoring, and evaluation (RM&E) scheme to be developed - not only for the upstream component, for mainstem and tributaries above Bonneville Dam, but within the estuary itself. What we've introduced to our managers is a concept that whatever we do here with regard to developing a monitoring and adaptive management program, it's going to need to be able to plug in in some way to that other activity. So it's going to be critical that the components we put into place here are not so isolated to this project by itself that when that larger RM&E piece comes in, they're going to look at this thing and say, "Can't fit it in to the building block." That's where the dance comes in, in terms of making this specific enough to get to what Kim's [Larson] saying about making it specific enough to be able to discern a change, and flexible enough so that it's got validity to that larger ecosystem effort. Boesch: That's the challenge; to sort of walk and chew gum at the same time. Tortorici: I'm just curious if you all [panel] have examples of a project that's a big project in and of itself, but is going to need to fit into an even larger sort of chunk, and how you can walk and chew gum at the same time. Boesch: It's a real challenge. One of the practical challenges here is who pays. It's nice to have something that's broad and collective, etc., but you've got to find a way to support and sustain that. Young: Colorado Fishes Recovery Program is an example of a broad-scale, multi-state RM&E effort. There are frameworks out there. Courtney: [Inaudible, but discussion of who pays. Standing committees.] Boesch: That helps in terms of some level of integration, in terms of people who sit on committees who are double- or triple-hatted. But what I was asking about "who pays" is if you really are talking about designing a monitoring program to address changing environmental conditions in the estuary as a result of all these activities, the real huge costs are all the measurements that have to be made. So do you have a source of funding from the various agencies and partners to address that issue, or are you resigned to the fact that the only way you can get funding is related to a specific subset of issues, in this case, the dredging. Courtney: That is the burning issue here. But there's also a lot of thought that this specific action needs to be monitored and there's a cost associated with that. Some monitoring program has to be put in place. Mishaga: I don't see that these different types of monitoring are treated the same way. In particular research. The academic community that comes to deal with these issues is naturally assuming that this is part of the reality of the situation. But from the people who have to justify this to the public, this is really difficult. I'm not sure that you can say… At least I'd like to hear people's experience about basic research, which is the validation monitoring we're talking about here, and the effects of the project and how these things operate. The reality of the fact is that once you get into these restoration programs or basic research programs, you're faced with a situation that the public naturally assumes that you're undertaking these kind of operations because they're directly related to the impacts of the project. This is a real problem for what we need to deal with as we go through this in the future. Frankly, I would like to hear how basic research monitoring really applies to adaptive management. In reality, it's most often and most effectively applied when you're talking about compliance and effectiveness monitoring where you can set up testable scientific relationships and monitor those and have plans in place to deal with them. You can relate that to the public. But when you start with these basic research problems there's an unpredictability problem. Basic research is totally unpredictable in terms of how it fits in with the kind of issues that we need to deal with to be able to sell this. People want to go in and be able to do something and then get away from it because they don't want open-ended research that doesn't directly relate to their project. So I'd like to make sure that when we set up formal committees as a potential approach that I'm clear that your intent is either across-the-board-type monitoring, compliance monitoring included, or it applies to one or the other. These to me are very different. I don't see those as the same. Boesch: I assume that what we're talking about here is strategic applied research, not basic research, which is curiosity driven. Although I'm not necessarily advocating that this effort here should support basic research, there is an important interplay between basic research and what we're talking about. All of the information that we heard in the earlier workshops was funded for curiosity-driven research that has provided some important understandings, which in turn, are helping us to manage the system more effectively. I agree that we are talking about monitoring for more specific purposes, but with the possibility that there may be some strategic applied research that's necessary to help understand the monitoring results. That we also ought to have this effort structured, for example, by committee membership, etc., but we continue to keep the door open for new understanding and ideas from not only this system, but from other systems, that we can use to interpret things that are bubbling up from basic research. Bartell: You're [Tortorici] saying that you're willing to walk down this road of adaptive management, and you're [Hicks] saying that we're willing to go down that road with the understanding that the feedback mechanism can only be under taken in the context of avoid and minimize, and mitigate… We're willing to do anything we can possibly do to fix things in relationship to the dredging if it can be demonstrated that we're having an impact. But we can't walk down the "dredge/no-dredge" scenario. To me, that's really a critical issue. Boesch: I think I heard NMFS say that they understand that, but we also need to talk about maybe a threshold; there needs to be a train brake. Young: There is. It's a very strong one called jeopardy. But a reasonable and prudent alternative for either jeopardy or adverse modification has to be an alternative, or a series of elements of an alternative, that is still within the authorities of the project or the proponents. So the true authorities associated with the project are very important. We have to be very clear what those authorities are. Bartell: So if I were to ask all parties to say as to whether or not under their authorities they can enter into this framework, the answer is "yes"? Young: Yes. But what I'm not clear about is if we had a jeopardy or adverse modification BO that said the only alternative is to allow the channel to fill back in - that's the only alternative we can come up with - but that's not within the authorities, we're in some level of conflict. Courtney: Attempts to answer that. There's always that last hammer in the reinitiation process. But before that occurs, we've got something else set up. Marsh: The courts could also say let the channel fill back in. It's highly unlikely, but let's admit that it's possible. Baptista: The courts would have to ask Nature to fill it back in. Larson: You're saying that Nature wouldn't allow it to fill back in? Baptista: Well, I would say that it's not an easy proposition. Filling it back to where it was is highly unlikely…. Young: But it will back in to current baseline conditions… Into 40-foot… Baptista: Well (not so sure). It really depends on what you mean by filling back in to the same conditions…. Bartell: The courts notwithstanding, I'm still hearing that we're willing to entertain this particular approach, but understand that it's not likely that we're going to stop maintaining the channel and allow it to fill back in. You're happy to fix any damages that might be caused by the project, but you're probably not going to stop the action (Hicks nodding). Boesch: Those sorts of things…. Long-term societal…. It's impossible to judge them. We never thought we'd be tearing down dams either. We can't sit here and anticipate them, so I think Laura's point is that under the planning framework, we're assuming that if we go ahead, we're going to do this project. And that the Corps has things it can do to lessen the impact. But that's their planning assumption. And what NMFS is saying is that that's fine, but if at some point in the process we see jeopardy, understand that their responsibility is to say we've got a jeopardy situation and stop the presses. I don't think the two positions are incompatible. It poses another challenge as we get down the line, but that's the reality these two agencies are operating under. Let's try to develop an adaptive framework to take care of the kinds of adjustments that Laura's talking about, but also serve to inform the kinds of judgments and evaluations that these folks have to do about the ultimate question of jeopardy. Bartell: Yes. I just want to make sure that we all understand the "rules of engagement." Tortorici: Definitely. That's important to get out. Cody: And then ultimately any collection of data should be directed toward elucidating that core that you retain over the whole project. That would be the primary purpose of designing the monitoring program. Boesch: It would be the necessary purpose. There could be other purposes, but that's the one you really have to do, otherwise we're really not solving the conundrum. Perry: Do you all envision, in a highly dynamic system and with the anticipated changes, that given that so far we've identified little impact from the project, do you think that we can design a monitoring program that's going to identify anything in that changing system that we can tie to this project? Boesch: I think that's a question you have to perpetually ask. Is this a fool's errand? I don't think so. I think you could design a program that if there were truly meaningful changes, that you could be reasonably expected to detect something that would pose a serious change that would result in resources… margin of error. Hicks: Wouldn't you see that pretty quickly if it was a significant change? Boesch: I don't know. Some changes might take a long time to manifest themselves. They could take decades… Hicks: Then those become harder because of the other dynamics in the estuary…. Boesch: A qualified yes. The effects of the channel deepening itself can probably determined in the first five years. The other changes are more challenging, where as you [Laura] say, they need to be integrated with yet other changes occurring in the system over time. Boesch: If I remember correctly, the shallow water habitats, other than the wetlands, are not necessarily being lost. Baptista: My sense is from the CORIE data that in the last decade there has not been that much change, but prior to that there was a fair amount of change. Boesch: [Inaudible]. Sediment may also be a resource. Rather than waiting thirty years… Take chances, try things; that's also part of adaptive management. Baptista: How are we defining monitoring? I seem to detect different meanings in different people. Maybe it's useful to begin with a common terminology. Courtney: I've got a definition on page 13 of the questionnaire. So I think that there's some sense among the panel that those things are appropriate, but it's worth stating that it's not the consensus view yet. Cody: Clearly there's a continuum between monitoring and research. There is no such thing as an "ESA meter" that we stick in the estuary and when it reaches some critical level, we say "Uh-huh," and the hammer drops down. That's a PR problem for you guys. We can't say "We're putting this money into designing this ESA meter and it's going to do exactly what we want and nothing else, and it pertains only to the project actions, and therefore it's completely justified. On the other hand, it's a problem for the agencies because it's hard to differentiate between the detectable results of project actions… and say "Now is the time when we have to exercise our final jurisdiction on this project." All we're doing here is asking what sorts of things would be useful to collect in the short term and in the longer term. In the longer term we're talking about research that enhances our understanding about salmon and food chains, about which our current understanding is far from complete. What can we do immediately that pertains specifically to the project action that's more than compliance monitoring? You say you're not going to disturb sediment, okay let's measure it. You're not going to change the scene in terms of toxics, okay let's measure that. So on the one hand, the short-term business is compliance monitoring, and in the longer term you've got research that really gets to the heart of the biggest uncertainties, unknowns, and it's really, I think, the more useful, but the most difficult to justify. Mishaga: I totally agree with you that there's a continuum between how you go about monitoring. Any monitoring program needs to be a rigorous test of hypothesis. The problem where we have the disconnect is not in the fact that it's not necessary to do it, but you need to get to a point where you can separate how you approach basic research monitoring from project effects because the public implies that when you undertake that in the context of a regulatory process, it automatically assumes that the sky is falling. Then we're stuck with this year after year after year. The public has the idea that dredging the estuary, which has been going on for years and years, is destroying the salmon runs. And I don't believe that's the case, and when you look at what we've seen to date I don't think it's the case. That we have uncertainty - yes. But some place there has to be a separation between the reality of the fact that you need to do a whole continuum of monitoring and adaptive management and what are the effects of this project. If you can't separate those two, then you're never going to be able to get the people who are responsible for this to address these issues because they're not interested in it. Cody: And I think the biggest problem will certainly be separating the project effects from all the other effects. [Relates recent experience at Shoshone Falls where all sorts of factors have contributed to decline of the falls.] Boesch: All the objectives you might want to consider when designing a monitoring program: 1) trends 2) goals 3) resources (e.g., harvests) 4) precaution 5) models (develop information that we can apply) 6) research (context for testing hypotheses) 7) public information (most programs could do a better job) 8) emergencies. Baptista: I think of monitoring as an assembly of actions that lead to in this case detection of change or verification of hypotheses. And monitoring really involves more than sticking probes in water. It involves a set of predictive models, a set of interpretations, that together make sense. It's just not the act of sticking probes in water that constitutes monitoring. By itself, that action is not going to get any of the answers that Laura is asking for because it's very limited. Courtney: During break, think about the notion of "precaution". Notion of a "tithe". Is size of monitoring program related to overall budget, size of project, or size of predicted impact? What scale is used to determined how big a monitoring program should be? Courtney: [ [Scaling monitoring program with risks (NMFS and FWS) versus scaling with predicted effects (Corps)]. Marsh: [Doesn't want to implement a whole new monitoring program. Thinks we should build on existing monitoring programs]. Larson: [Sees Corps fish monitoring as the environmental baseline.] Boesch: [Need an inventory and assessment of ongoing estuarine monitoring programs.] Marsh: [Also build on monitoring that's been going on for years about channel dredging.] Bartell: [Uncertainty and decision-making]. Boesch: Panel had much variance on the issue of toxics - agreement on the risk, but less agreement on the certainty. Bartell: If you define risk as the probability of something going wrong, in this case losing some of the listed stocks, the uncertainty would play into how confident you are about your estimate of that probability. Uncertainty sort of enters in a couple of ways into this problem, as I see it. One, being what I just said - that it's a component of risk estimation. And two, what we're really involved in; in this case, decision-making under uncertainty. In which case, if you endeavored to develop a decision model of this entire process, which would lay out the various physical, chemical, and biological components to describing salmonid habitat, and explicitly nail down how you would use that information to say either yea or nay to dredging, and then mapped the various uncertainties upon your evaluation of those different components and determine how much uncertainty you can live with and still feel credibility and comfort, to my way of thinking that's the only context that risk and uncertainty can have meaning is in your overall decision-making process. In terms of how willing you are to be wrong, to me, helps to scale how much of the uncertainty then you're willing to live with, with regard to each of those attributes. Then that feeds back directly into determining how many resources you need to dedicate to your monitoring system to characterize the variability. Courtney: I just heard you say monitoring should scale with level of concern. Bartell: Yeah, to me there's a couple of obvious scales. One concerns the scaling of the ecological entities themselves. Given that we're looking at fish population dynamics, there's an explicit scale to adopt before you can hope to see any difference. The other is the scale of the decision-making process itself in your institutions. And that's been brought up in terms of how long you're comfortable in funding monitoring programs, the magnitude of those programs, and what you expect to get in return with the investment. Another scale is the consequences of making the wrong decision. Bartell: I think the results of the survey are giving insight into that. You've identified, in this case, the decision variables that seem to be the most important are also the ones that we have the least amount of information that we're confident about, and presumably, you would use that to guide the allocation of your monitoring dollars, to put it bluntly. In a certain sense, you've done a "sensitivity analysis" of the decision problem, which I see as key in terms of designing an effective and efficient - in economic terms - monitoring program. Cody: I guess then what Steve [Bartell] is saying is that because the element of risk is unavoidable, because that remains in the equation, then some sort of monitoring scheme has to be developed to take account for this uncertainty. Boesch: 2x2 contingency (see attached). If you have high risk and low uncertainty, you don't do it. If you have low risk and low uncertainty, put it off the table, no need to monitor. If you have high risk and a high uncertainty, that's the first priority of things you need to address. And if you've got low risk and high uncertainty is a second-order priority. That's where many things associated with this project falls - toxics, biological, etc. We didn't really find much that was really high risk and low uncertainty. Baptista: Is it not true that in some cases, some of the boxes has indirect effects in others? Boesch: Yes. Tortorici: Because if you're talking about physical monitoring in the navigation channel, that's one thing. Physical monitoring in relation to habitats from a biological perspective, that's a different situation. We talked among the project managers about direct and indirect effects of the project, and how they would shake out if we did this sort of 2x2 square. We need to keep it in mind. Boesch: It's the simplest, most general framework. In reality, though, when you get down to making the hard decisions in the realm of low risk, high uncertainty, then it's more complex. [Inaudible.] Cody: The one thing I'd add to that, Don, is that I think the risk itself has two components. One is a vulnerability component and one is a project impact. I think those can be distinguished in some respects in terms of vulnerability to the fish stocks. They're not very vulnerable to modest changes in salinity, but they're highly vulnerable to other things. Ultimately, the fate of the fish stocks will be some summation of these vulnerabilities. So risk itself, as we're thinking of it here, is not a really simple one-component thing. Boesch: You're absolutely right. Bartell: Read the Kaplan and Garrett paper as a good introduction to that. Courtney: [How to select from among the universe of possible variables. 12 criteria for selecting monitoring options]: related to salmonids ability to detect change; statistical power ability to detect project impact (direct and indirect) ability to provide feedback to management testing of hypotheses testing of assumptions relationship to jeopardy decisions cost effective contribution to new "knowledge" (physical or other measurements that help interpretation) relevance to risk (relationship to the conceptual model) scale of monitoring effort and statistical power to risk Bartell: Can I caveat that? Certainly considerations of statistical power and performance criteria are extremely important, but one thing I'd like to caution is as the agency making the decision, you get to choose what your level of power is that you're willing to make the decision And common sense tells you that you'd want as much statistical power as possible. However, for some variables, particularly if they don't appear to be important in the overall equation for salmonids, you might be willing to be less certain about your results and correspondingly, devote fewer resources and worry less about statistical power. Another way to say that is you're willing to make a decision on a less powerful statistic. Tortorici: In your experience, how many of these monitoring programs do you have examples of alpha being 0.05 vs. others where it might be 0.10 or even 0.20? Bartell: From my experience, I'd say you're almost in the forefront of cutting new ground here. Most people don't even consider it in their monitoring programs. Don't even know what it is. Young: Are you wanting an alpha or a beta in a complex system like this? Courtney: Beta. Boesch: The level of effort required to get beta to acceptable levels is out of proportion to the risk involved. Marsh: Example of Northwest Power Planning Council's effort to grapple with trying to detect the effect it's had on the overall populations of salmon and other fish and wildlife in the basin and they've never been able to do it. And we're addressing a part of that here. Courtney: List making? Baptista: Maybe you want to separate the effect of the project relative to the other changes in the system. Cody: Well it seems, Steve, that we have to now overlay that list on the table on page 14 in question 21, which sort of releases us from considering the top two-thirds of the list and concentrates our attention on the bottom one-third. Overlay this with the potential impacts, which were prioritized in the table on page 21. Young: Just looking through it and thinking about this, I'm not sure whether the table on page 14 falls into our 2x2 matrix. I don't disagree that there's some utility in it, but I already see one example - toxics - where there may have to be some additional conversations…. Boesch: Yes, and part of it … Relates to the point that Antonio made Tortorici: The first one that says "Relation to salmonids"…. That's more in a purely biological/ecological framework as opposed to relation to this #7, the jeopardy decision thing, which is more the regulatory aspect. So we all have clarification on this? Tortorici: And by "potential project impacts" you're talking about direct and indirect? And then for costs, we've sort of been dancing around this issue. It seems to me like there's a bunch of considerations and then there's a cost discussion. I'm not even sure that this is the proper group to have the cost discussion. Boesch: How about if we list it as "cost effectiveness"? [All agree]. That helps you make decisions among options. Tortorici: Here's the danger that I see in getting into the cost discussion too soon. There's a difference between designing a program that's appropriate for what you need, costing it out, and then coming back and saying we can only afford three of the four pieces of it. Versus saying here's the dollar figure that we have to deal with, let's design something that fits in with that dollar figure. And what I've seen happen is when you do it that way, you end up with something that's wholly inadequate. Tortorici: Clearly we can't go to the public and say we're going to have a two-billion dollar research program. That's just not appropriate. We just need to be cognizant, at least from our agency's perspective, about what we need. Then let's talk about the costs and see how far off we are. Boesch: I understand what you're saying, but in practice you do have those constraints. Tortorici: I just want us to have a monitoring program that's based on priorities in terms of what we need to get answers. Then cost it out, and if we need to scale it up or down, okay, but at least let's have it based on some solid scientific underpinnings. Perry: If I could add to that, in support of what Don said, I think cost effectiveness is a good way to characterize it because there's lot's of things you could spend money on, but in the end, is it really going to tell you anything? That needs to be in the equation. Tortorici: And we don't want to be in that camp, Dianne, of just asking for things... Perry: Going to what Steven was just talking about -- 30 years of data [from an unrelated project], how many millions of dollars went into that, and it's completely unusable. That to me is part of the cost-effectiveness issue. Young: I fall into the third camp, so that would be my first comment [risks as opposed to predictive effects]. Then, criteria to figure out the type of monitoring you would do, would be based on things associated with risk. So I see numbers 1, 7, and 10 [salmonids, jeopardy, relevance to risk].... I see then tools, depending on the areas where we see risk, whether it's a direct or indirect effect of the project, having sub-criteria. Cost effectiveness may go out a little bit if the risks were really high. So I guess I would think of this step-by-step; hierarchical, if you will. Young: I guess it depends on the type of effect and the type of risk we're talking about. Whether we would then take some of these other criteria and have a follow-up discussion, and a new 5x5 matrix, if you will. Now we've identified 3 or 4 major types of risk. These are the ones that are in the indirect effect area, the lateral habitat areas, the more biologically based. Do we need it for the adaptive management portion? So I guess the monitoring system comes up with tiers. Courtney: [Asks Tortorici for her thoughts on the same.] Tortorici: I think what you want me to do is say that number 4 is more important than number 8, or something like that. I think we've done a really good job in determining what the criteria are. I would say that at this point I'm not to prepared to say.... Now that we've re-defined the cost-effectiveness piece, that one is more or less important than the other. I think that these are all important elements that need to be built in. Maybe we want to tier them or restructure them in a way that Doug is suggesting, but there's nothing at this point that I would take off the table. I think these are all essential elements for a proper monitoring program and an adaptive management scheme. Courtney: [Asks Corps for its thoughts on the same.] Larson: The list seems adequate. I wouldn't have any problem if all those were met. Bartell: Let me stir up the pot. Again, I would design the monitoring program to feed as directly as possible into the decision-making process. So first if we're talking about risk-based decision-making, I want an explicit definition of what the risks are. There's 14 species we're concerned with, so in a very rudimentary sense, we've got 14 risks. What's the probability of local extinction? Some reduction in population size? Or a particular derivative of population size with time and space? You've got to tell me what it is. So those are the undesired events. The challenge is to estimate what is the likelihood of observing those undesired events with and without the dredging process. So unless your process is focusing on that, i.e., I guess the null hypothesis would be that the dynamics of those 14 species are going to be the same with and without dredging, I would take "testing of hypotheses" off the table, or at least put it at a lower level of importance, a second tier. Maybe the same thing with "testing of assumptions". Courtney: [Clarifies Bartell's statement.] Courtney: One aspect of the questionnaire, and where there's a divergence of opinion among the three panel member that are here, it would be useful to have a discussion about that. Larson: I didn't realize this until last night, but I should mention that one question on the questionnaire that says that the Corps BA and EIS said there was no effect, that's not true. We never said that anywhere. The BA said that the project "was not likely to adversely effect." I would've responded exactly the same way if I'd seen that question. It's different in the EIS. From the salmon standpoint, it said there was an effect but it wasn't significant. There's a difference... Courtney: Absolutely, and my apologies for not getting it right. We are recording that error. In the questionnaire, we asked how long should the monitoring program go? Boesch: I want to caveat my response. What I had in mind when I answered the question is that you can design a program and see the kinds of effects resulting from the channel deepening itself within a five-year period. But then at that point, you would judge whether it's necessary and what subsequent monitoring would do. So I saw it as kind of a planning block, a time in which you could say, okay we're going to have a 5-year monitoring program, and at that point we're going to evaluate where we are and make some judgments about what we do after that point. I didn't mean necessarily that it would conclude. Bartell: I based my 50-year response on a couple of reasons. It seemed to me that if you're going to enter into this in the framework of adaptive management, and I guess that was the assumption I was making -- a continuous process over the lifetime of the project. Even in the absence of an adaptive management process, the Corps would essentially look at avoid, minimize, and mitigate issues over the lifetime of the project. So if that investment would be made, it seemed to make sense that you would also continue the monitoring effort over that period to at least, if nothing else, feed into that particular procedure or policy. Cody: I said five years too. I said a five-year span may seem minimal, given the longevity of the fish and slow reaction times in the habitat especially. But I think most of the participants would be disappointed if, after five years, you could not identify some useful product from the monitoring. And if that useful product is forthcoming then there would likely be a decision to collect more of this useful stuff. But if you can't identify a useful product after five years, I think you should look somewhere else. Courtney: [Summary - some sort of evaluative planning process that goes for a certain time, and that get re-evaluated.] Bartell: Right. That was a key component that wasn't really covered by this question, and that is while I would still maintain that you would want to do some fairly long-term monitoring in relationship to the project, it may be that as you go along, collect and evaluate the information, there are things that you might drop out, or de-emphasize, or re-focus the monitoring to make it as efficient and productive as possible. If after measuring A for five years, we see nothing, then clearly there's no point in measuring it for another 45 years.... Young: Would you establish up front some sort of adaptive plan an anticipated length of time you think you'd want some initial response to be indicated, otherwise you might drop it? So you would have an end date and projection on each type? Bartell: That seems sensible, but don't press me to the details. I'm not going to tell you which parameters to measure for one year or five years. That comes back to the context of your overall decision process. Mishaga: It does totally depend on what you're going to monitor. Also it's my understanding that the BO is going to be re-visited every five years. It seems to me that would be a realistic point to evaluate what you've done the last five years and if it's not working, or you've found results, that's an appropriate time to re-evaluate the monitoring program. Larson: The actual BO for the channel deepening itself won't be done every five years. What happens is that as soon as it's built, it becomes part of the O&M program and then that's done every five years. The entire channel looked at from an O&M standpoint is done, not the channel event.... There's a difference. Boesch: But that's the operative decision at that point. The channel's already there... Larson: Right. That is the channel. Then it becomes the operation of the channel. Tortorici: My primary concern when the five-year figure bubbled up in the questionnaire is that given the types of things we're talking about monitoring -- the variability in the system, if there's any problems in establishing the monitoring program -- from purely a logistical and technical standpoint, I just wonder whether in five years we're going to have enough information to be able to judge the impact -- any impact. I hear what you're saying Martin, but there are matters of practicality that could drive this to more than five years, and then if we're not seeing any change, whatever that change is, just cut it off. Cody: Absolutely. The longevity of plants can be amazingly long. And so, there may be an adverse impact from the project that is just extremely difficult to pick up and certainly won't be measured in five years. Hicks: Associated to this particular action. Let's say next year you see a difference. What are you going to attribute that difference to? I would argue that ESA, and with the federal government's responsibility for monitoring adverse action, if it results that you think the natural life span of a plant is a waste of taxpayers' money.... Cody: Well, there's certainly natural turnover in populations, but the question then becomes to what extent is this natural turnover hastened by the project or other anthropogenic actions and how do you separate project from those actions. That's the big one. Courtney: I think we're agreed on that. I don't want to spend much more time on the duration issue. Let's talk about the many potential things that could be monitored (pgs. 14 and 15 of questionnaire). Look at these different issues that could be monitored. What are the advantages, what are the criteria that we can meet, of all these different issues and ultimately what's the justification for a monitoring program. In broad terms, let me summarize what the panel said in the questionnaire. A relative de-emphasis of monitoring the physical factors, and a relatively strong emphasis on directly monitoring things associate with fish themselves. I was surprised by that because I think those things are intrinsically hard to monitor, it's hard to detect project impact, and we don't really know how to do that. Bartell: We're interested in monitoring fish because they're in the high uncertainty, high risk box. That's the main justification, regardless of the fact that it's hard to do. They're the dependent variables in the assessment, from my point of view. If you're simply measuring the things you know how to measure, and that are economical to measure, and they don't provide any information into the decision process, to me that's a waste of money, unless you can establish a very convincing relationship between salinity and the fish variables. Cody: Plus the physical models were fairly convincing; the potential impacts of the project on those factors were pretty well understood. Courtney: So looking at the boxes, the physical factors would be in low/low whereas the fish would be in high/high. So that's where you'd want to allocate resources, to the fish. Boesch: There are several things going on. There's less uncertainty about the physical factors. It's hard to be against measuring fish since this whole thing is about risk to fish. The issues that had the highest number of votes for low priority were temperature -- for obvious reasons; there's not a strong logical basis to project a major temperature effect -- suspended sediments and toxicants in dredge material and fish. I think that's probably symptomatic of a number of things. One is the real difficulties of measuring and also the unlikelihood that there's some sort of a major effect of resuspension of sediments by the dredging activity on the fish. It's also probably representative -- again, with the caveat that there is a diversity of opinion -- that at least half the respondents came away from the presentations seeing relatively little reason to worry about toxins in dredge sediments or fish. Courtney: I agree with what you're saying. I'm just trying to flesh out some of the criteria before the project managers have to go away and make the hard choices how you guys [the panel] made your choices. Boesch: Going back to the fish, it's a fine line between moderate and high priority. How do you do that? Yet, it's sort of an obvious reaction that if this is all about the effects on fish then somehow we ought to measure fish. It's a very different question, "What do we measure about fish, and do we measure it?" That's the dilemma. How do you transfer this response to okay, what do you do about it? Courtney: [If you could measure one thing, you'd measure the change in risk of extinction or the change in population decline - the delta lambda (change in rate of population change) as attributed to the project. Unfortunately, we can't measure this... We talked in the workshops about the change in lambda and how that's impossible to partition. I think what we're saying is there's a first tier approach.... In our table here, we have five votes as a high priority where there's the one at the bottom of page 14 which is that perennial issue of habitat changes in the periphery. What I took away from this was that you thought that was the thing which is associated with risk could essentially be linked directly back to this. Is that correct? Boesch: I wonder whether we mean the same thing when we talk about periphery or back channels. Cody: I took it to mean the shallow-water parts of the estuary. Those parts of the estuary in which salmon survivorship and growth were critical before they... Not the shorelines. Boesch: Also, the back channels. Some of those back channels are not shallow. Tortorici: It could mean shoreline habitat, too. It depends where in the system you're talking about. Hicks: When you [Boesch] said "high priority", how did you define it? Boesch: I think I had a similar notion to what Martin [Cody] had. Cody: I went on to qualify or explain it. I said I'd concentrate on the major biological variables of which habitat and habitat quality have the potential to grow and sustain juvenile salmonids. Boesch: What I had in mind was the wetland and emergent wetland islands and the associated shoalwater environments that Bottom et al. identify as being particularly important to juvenile salmonids. Courtney: [Wish list of things to monitor. Is there support from the panel and project managers to contemplate something which drives toward getting at the key links to the biological issue. There seems to be agreement that a priority is the peripheral areas.] Larson: Just to get clarification here, shallow-water habitats are only important to two or three of the ESUs. The other ones, which are yearling fish, are probably not using them at all. We keep talking about juvenile salmon as this giant category, but as far as peripheral areas go, it's only sub-yearling fall chinook, maybe some coho, and we don't know about sea run cutthroat. And chum. If you're considering monitoring, you have to keep that in context. Boesch: But those seem to be the ones that are assumed to be more sensitive to changes. The others are sort of transient; they're on their way through, right? Larson: Right. So the leap you would make then, is that it's not worth monitoring for the other species, the yearling transients. Courtney: Well, let's just say they're a lower priority. Young: The data that I've looked at in the estuary show just as many yearling transients being caught in the shoreline beach seines as in the purse seines. That would indicate to me that there is use of those shallow-water habitat areas by those fish. Larson: That's not what's accepted by most of the biologists that work down there for some of the species. There is a definite separation in ESU use of the estuary. Tortorici: What we've talked about internally for yearling-type fish, they're moving through the system pretty rapidly, but they could be there up to two weeks. The difficulty is that we just don't have enough information to know exactly what it is they're doing while they're there for that period and whether that's super-critical for them or not. Boesch: On the other hand, I understand that. But has there been a case made that that pelagic channel habitat that these other transient fish are using would be significantly altered by the channel deepening? It's like a crime -- you've got to have a motive and an opportunity. If a lot of the focus of what you folks have talked about are these younger, smaller salmon that are using this shallow-water habitat as being the ones... the fact that the estuary is changed, not only because of the dredging but because of a lot of other things, that are putting at risk because that's part of their life history, which is particularly dependent on estuarine survival. If on the other hand, you've got these other stocks that are more in the pelagic realm, which putatively is not as altered by the activity, then why should we be as concerned about them as we are about the others. Tortorici: The question then becomes do you not monitor for those at all or do you do it as some more periodic, or not-as-frequent approach? Courtney: Remember, you've still got to have statistical power. Hicks: Maybe this is a good point to diverge to question number 10 where it talks about ocean-type chinook being the appropriate surrogate. Among the project managers, we had one strongly agree and three agree with qualifications. Among the panel, we had one strongly agree, four agree with qualifications, one disagree, and one N/A. Boesch: So what you're saying is that's reflective of the point I just made. [Yes] Cody: So in this process of prioritizing, we're emphasizing these shallow-water estuarine habitats, which are extremely important for some of these ESUs, somewhat less important for others, and perhaps less still for others. Still that category would indeed capture some of the action in the high/high box, which is what we're trying to do. Courtney: There seems to be a sense that one of the aspects of this monitoring program is to get to these peripheral habitats. Now we haven't actually characterized how you'll go out and do that and what you mean by that. There's a lot of different components that contribute to that. It might be useful to think about some of things in terms of can we do it? Is this something we can measure? What's the cost? Larson: For the fish part of it, it seems like building on what we're doing with NMFS on the hydro system. The intent is to sample fish use, by ESU, of different shallow-water areas, to look at growth, feeding habits, rearing times, etc. A series of parameters that will define the importance of a particular habitat to the species. So it would seem if you want to do fish monitoring, you would build on something like that and not start over again. Some of those parameters are easier to monitor than others. We're still in the development stage. We're also trying to do with the FWS a sea run cutthroat study also under the same hydropower funding to look at distribution and habitat use also, and they're eventually radio tagging. So it would be helpful to get some recommendations beyond the things we're already doing. Boesch: We should build on depth and velocity as a measure of suitable habitat. Both of those things are monitorable. Baptista: In the next few months, you are going to have to go through the process of identifying the key factors that fall under the first-year approach that Steven identified. That's your starting point for designing a monitoring program. You have to monitor those things you think are important, otherwise it will be inconsistent. Boesch: In that regard, there's some debate about the accuracy for which we can project changes. Hicks: Before we leave this, can I put you on the spot, Don? When we talk about fish feeding and growth, and that's part of this other big study that the Corps is funding NMFS to do, in your questionnaire, you said that was a low priority. Boesch: I think what I had in mind is that there's a trap here to measure everything and everything. You can get really far afield of being able to ever relate it to the project. I'd be much more supportive of something that is focused on building on what we know in terms of habitat opportunity and understanding any changes therein, and then reinforcing that by understanding that model of habitat opportunity is really observed with respect to fish abundance. Larson: I'm curious about the hatchery vs. wild fish question. Boesch: I think I probably gave it a low priority because that's a bigger issue. It's a very important question, but I don't know how this project impacts on that. Bartell: I rated it high. I was concerned that it would be critical to have information as to how the project might alter the ways in which hatchery and wild fish might differentially use the system as a result of the perturbation. It seems to me that perhaps one of the contributions to the continued degradation of the listed stocks is the hatchery fish. If I were going to do the experiment, I'd turn off the hatcheries. Obviously you can't do that. Young: When you think about stream-type fish and the knowledge we have, are we dealing with all hatchery fish? If you were dealing only with wild fish, what opportunity would there be, and if we're talking about listable entities and the jeopardy analysis has to be based on just the wild species -- and I don't know which of these ESUs have listable hatchery components or if they're just the wild components. So when you start thinking about hatchery fish come out really large and move through the system, maybe that's not the same as the same ESU, the wild fish, the protected species, or protected entity that's using it for two to four weeks. I don't know. Boesch: If we're dead serious about reducing the jeopardy to these stocks, wouldn't we want to know what would be the effect first of all hatchery fish? And also eliminating harvest fully. Aren't you demanding a different standard in terms of this activity than other practices such as hatchery releases or harvest? Marsh: What NMFS has to do to allow those activities to happen is to issue a BO or a 4-d rule that says that allows an incidental take. Or they say that there won't be incidental take that causes jeopardy. And they've done that with the hydropower system, with management of federal lands, with harvest, with the hatchery system. They've done it twice now. Young: There's an effort to try to be equitable. There's different levels of scrutiny and responsibility being placed on entities. Courtney: I've got four things listed in terms of shallow-water peripheral habitat monitoring. We've got monitoring of emergent vegetation, we've got the idea of getting at fish use and growth (there's already existing research in this area), we've got the idea of getting at habitat opportunity and quality (tie in, of course with the CORIE program). Then we've got this thing with is it wild fish or hatchery fish in the periphery. Is there anything else? I think it meets all of the things we're trying to get to in terms of these criteria -- its relationship to salmonids, its relationship to the high risk/high uncertainty/jeopardy issues, it clearly ties back to our conceptual models we've been developing, it integrates the physical and biological. I'm not sure about the cost effectiveness or the statistical power. I think that's just a flag for you guys [project managers] and you've got to go away and think about that. I don't know how willing you are to go on the record, but how do you feel about just the shallow-water/peripheral aspects we've developed so far? Larson: You're asking that in exclusion to any other monitoring? Courtney: No. Let's just take it bit by bit. What do you think about this stuff? Larson: Writing the list is fine as long as you realize that some of the stuff may be either impossible to monitor or may never produce any results. Some of the stuff the variability is very high. You can certainly start off monitoring as much as you think you can afford. As long as you use adaptive management and taper it as you go along, then that's fine. Courtney: It seems to me that we've heard there's a high priority among some of the folks here that ... how would you feel about this becoming a component of the monitoring program? Hicks: Well I'd like to go back and define the risks before we would commit to something. We could do that now. What I heard Steve say -- explicit statement of risks, undesired effects, prioritize on the basis of those risks -- Mishaga: Also, risk has two components, as Martin said. There's a vulnerability associated with it and there's also the project effects of it. With hatchery fish, certainly there's a vulnerability issue. But from my perspective, I'm not sure I understand how this project has any effect on #4 [hatchery vs. wild fish in the periphery]. Courtney: I think that the issue was that if we've only got wild fish in the periphery then it's kind of like a validation issue; that would be something you'd want to know about the system. Young: ....stream-type fish. Right now we're saying that ocean-type fish are the priority.... Larson: What you're saying is that ocean-type fish habitat is the priority. Boesch: It's a fairly minor part. I agree with Doug that it should be part of number 2. If the only fish that use the shallows are hatchery fish, then it's hard to claim that this activity is affecting the shallow water environment to impact the endangered units. So that's a decision point. But the most likely thing is that there's a mixture of some sort. So I think it's just a fairly minor... Mishaga: If the reason that people want to look at shallow-water habitats is that there's uncertainty and understanding, the physical processes that are going on and how a physical change can affect the biological processes that result from those physical processes, and that's the uncertainty, it's irrelevant in terms of habitat potential what kind of fish are there, where they come from. If we want to understand that process of what are the potential habitats, what's their quality, and how are they connected -- how does that relate to tidal changes and all the other fluctuations that go on. To me, that's where the uncertainty of the whole process is. To me that's something I would categorize differently from this list over here. Courtney: Let me go back to Laura's point. How does this proposal get to issues of high risk? Is that what you're saying? Hicks: What Steve [Bartell] was saying earlier was that if he was going to design a monitoring program he would start with the ultimate issue being risk of extinction. And then one has to look at which one of those three ties to risk are we most trying to zero in on. I don't think we've addressed which one of those three yet. I interpreted those three to be distinctly different. Courtney: I saw that as one process. Bartell: To me, the delta lambdas could be the end points -- could be the 14 risk assessment end points. The second component is estimating ... if you define an acceptable delta, maybe that's zero, or whatever, then given what you know about the system are you able to make measurements, what's the probability of realizing that delta as a result of the project. Then that defines the information that becomes most critical in terms of evaluating that. I'd begin then to set priorities among these different possible things to measure in designing my monitoring program. Young: I'm seeing Laura nodding vigorously, and I've got to admit, I'm starting to get a little lost in this. Courtney: Are you asking to go through the big list of factors and say which of these fit with the criteria that Steve's developed? Hicks: I guess I'd like some confirmation from the group -- I mean I like the way that Steve lays that out -- that that seems like a reasonable approach. Young: And what I don't understand right now is that I see two different boards and I want to see that box one links to box two. Show me the process again and then let's talk about it. Because I'm really lost. What is the process? Courtney: Ideally, we would measure lambda, and we would be able to look at changes in lambda as your explicit statement of risk or undesired events. Young: Is that with project, or without? [With] Courtney: The problem is that we can't even measure lambda, let alone delta lambda. Bartell: If you're defining lambda as some indicator of growth rate, maybe it's just comparing the population sizes, and monitoring it pre- and post-dredging. Are there more fish, fewer fish after the dredging? How much of a change needs occur before we bring in the hammer? Courtney: Let me see if I can bring some closure on this. I don't think we're going to get to a place where we can say delta-lambda. I suspect we're not going to get to a place where we can see even a change in population size. I suspect the answer to #2 then -- what are the probabilities of these -- we will get only the most qualitative of approaches, which is to say some of the scientists think that there's probability or reasonable existing probability that these things are going to be detrimental. That may be as good as we're going to get -- a qualitative, best professional judgment-type of thing. Bartell: Based upon some measurements. You're still going to attempt to quantify even though it may not be ultimately to your satisfaction. Courtney: What you're saying is give us some estimate of the probability of these. The fish folks have to be tasked with saying that we feel that the evidence, such as we have, is that the probability of there being a change in lambda as a consequence of these actions, we see those probabilities being higher as a consequence of these particular changes. What I think we've all agreed is that peripheral habitat fits into the high-risk contingency. That's the best professional judgment. Perry: Well, I'd like to ask a question about that. Do you think it's a high risk, or it's the only risk, or the only thing you can identify where there's a linkage, or a potential linkage. Do people really think that's a high risk? Courtney: Highest of the things we've talked about. It is the thing of biggest concern. Perry: Biggest concern -- that's different for me than high risk. Boesch: High in a relative sense, rather than an absolute sense. Hicks: I would like to get more at what is that risk. Boesch: You're asking is it one out two, one out of twenty risk? I don't know whether we can say that. Larson: She's asking for some sort of prioritization of how those different factors may actually lead to that area being high risk. This is ultimately what the BRT is going to have to get to anyway. Hicks: When you look at the survey, most of the respondents believe that there will be a very low direct impact due to the proposed action. A very low physical impact to the channel, to the main navigation piece. So now we're looking at the peripheral, and it becomes an order of magnitude more uncertain, in my mind, on how physical change in the 600-foot-wide channel is going to affect something in a four-mile cross section. We keep moving farther and farther away to the part that's harder and harder to measure. The risk becomes higher and the uncertainties are even higher. I don't get how you discern that, even if you had unlimited resources and unlimited time. If you told me the problem was with food sources, I'd say let's grow more organisms and forget the study. Let's plant more plants in the estuary and forget the research component. Cody: It seems there's more risk attached to that approach. I mean, if you start growing Corophium, for example, there could be an unanticipated side effect of the Corophium out-competing other food sources that are important later in the season. Hicks: Then I would have something concrete to monitor. I would be monitoring my new food source and seeing whether it has an adverse or positive impact. Cody: I think what we're suggesting, from what we know right now, monitoring the food source is a good idea in these shallow-water, peripheral areas. Hicks: Okay.... Courtney: Time out! The best professional judgment from the panel is the peripheral areas. Some of these things are going to get done in other formats, some of these things could get done in a fairly specified period, some of it could be tied in fairly closely with monitoring of physical factors. There's a lot of impetus to make this a key component of the monitoring program, and in fact, of all the higher risk, higher uncertainty areas, these are the things that attention is focusing on. What does it take to get a commitment that these are the areas where we might begin focus of a monitoring program? What else do you need to see? If we can't get to a decision on this, we're not going to go anywhere else with any other aspect of the monitoring. This is the thing that is coming up as the highest priority. Tortorici: My initial reaction is that we're in the ballpark of where we need to be. That doesn't mean that it wouldn't need to be thought through some more. In terms of critical elements to start thinking about -- yeah. And I agree about this business of the hatchery fish being sort of moved into the other fish thing. I think the issue with hatchery fish that Dan Bottom was talking about is because hatchery fish are hatchery fish, they use the system differently. And so that which we're concerned about for shallow-water, peripheral habitats probably is more relevant to wild stocks than to hatchery. Courtney: Let's not get off point; let's stay with the big picture. Tortorici: Okay. The big picture, I think we're in the ballpark of where we need to be. If you're going to ask me which ones to prioritize, I have no intention of doing that because I think that all of those are doable and all of those are integrated with one another and so, if we're going to talk about monitoring, all of those pieces need to be there to get a more comprehensive picture of impacts. Larson: Are we to interpret that you prioritize this as the critical habitat to monitor? Tortorici: Yeah. Larson: Not channel, not anything else. Tortorici: Well I say that, and then I think about... Let's think broadly about it. If we came out and said that because of our analyses, explanations, talks with the panel, that we think that this is the thing that really needs to be monitored. And because of that, we're not monitoring anything in the main channel. What do you think the public's reaction to that would be? Bartell: Bad idea. Tortorici: So, yeah, we've spent a lot of time talking about this, and yeah, it's important. Larson: I understand that the public is a whole different concept. But from your standpoint, is this where you think we should put the effort and the dollars -- in monitoring shallow-water habitat? Tortorici: As the primary activity, yes. However, I think that there are ongoing activities that we could plug into in the broader system. Larson: But the effort should go here. I guess I'm just trying to clarify that. Tortorici: Yeah... Mishaga: Nothing on this list deals with the toxics issue. Tortorici: No, not yet. Courtney: Time out! I don't think we want to drive to a position where NMFS is having to say, "This is the only thing we're going to monitor." I think Cathy's saying there are other components to consider. The point we're all trying to get to is is this the regulatory agencies' highest priority issue? Larson: That's it. Courtney: And the answer is? Tortorici: Yeah. Young: Can I caveat for my agency? Larson: Yeah. I would think that you would want to because this is not the principal habitat for sea-run cutthroat. Young: I was going to expand on this just to make sure that the context of these peripheral, shallow-water habitats is from the upstream to the downstream end of the project. So we're talking riverine and estuarine habitat. Larson: Those two habitats are totally different. Shallow-water habitat could be only half a foot on the side of a river. Upstream, at river mile 70 or 90, where it's deeper, it is totally different than Cathlamet Bay. Young: I agree. And that's why I'm just pointing out that my idea of agreeing with some of this prioritization is not just estuarine. Tortorici: And we talked about that at a previous workshop when Karl [Eriksen] was talking about impacts to the river. We were talking about how deeply the Corps had investigated the side-channel habitats above the estuary and whether further information needed to be collected. Larson: Well, what Karl said was that there was no significant change in water-surface elevation until river mile 90. Tortorici: And we had asked Karl during that discussion the level of detail of that analysis, such as what sort of habitats did the Corps monitor to make the conclusion that the impact was significant, and Karl didn't have.... Hicks: Cathy, didn't you just say that the shallow-water habitat in the estuary is your primary focus? Tortorici: Yes, but that doesn't mean that it's going to be the only focus of this monitoring program. Hicks: I would like to take us back to the list of 12 monitoring priorities and walk through those points. What is the hypothesis we're testing when we say we would like to monitor the things on the right side of the page? Are we testing whether the channel deepening have a change to the emergent vegetation in the shallow-water habitat, fish use, etc. And go down like that? Is that the hypothesis that we're agreeing we're testing? And then go to point number 2 and have a discussion on the ability to detect change, if that is indeed the hypothesis that we're trying to test. Let's use this as our first example of checking off that criteria list that we spent hours on this morning. Is that the hypothesis we're agreeing to? Larson: No, no. Only for the estuary and only in shallow-water habitats. That's what NMFS has identified. Not shallow-water habitats in the river. Perry: [Inaudible, but questions how some changes can be linked to the project] Mishaga: One of the ways we can look at this is if you look at the physical processes that are going on as a result of this project, they're pretty well understood. And when you look at the changes that physically result in the system, they generally appear to be fairly minor. So if you look at the whole river system, where is the most sensitive point in that river system where, if small physical changes could have an effect on the system itself, to me that would be in the shallow-water areas. Because first of all, the fish that are there are the ones that are most vulnerable, they're the smallest. Any potential change will be reflected there. If you can monitor that effectively and demonstrate that there isn't any change, or if there is a change, at that point that would be the place where you would determine where you need to go from there. You'd want to think about changing what you're doing as opposed to another kind of monitoring program. If I had to make a decision on this, that's the one point I'd want to know whether changes are occurring there. Because if you don't have changes there, the chances of change elsewhere in the system.... You need to measure the most sensitive places. Then if you do have changes, it depends totally on what is changing. Are we, for example, looking at changes in bathymetry that we weren't expecting? Changes in the food web? Changes in the habitat structure? All those things will require you to do things differently. So it's critical that we understand what the changes are and how the process operates before you can really set this thing into motion. It's not the kind of monitoring where if you have a change you stop the channel deepening because if you get a change, you probably won't be able to relate it to the project. You have to look at it differently. Hicks: But what we said was the ultimate issue was the risk of extinction. So is the mild change, or whatever you're going to measure.... Somebody's going to have to make the call then does that change result in a risk of extinction? Mishaga: But on the other hand, if the most sensitive part of the system is monitored, and you're responsible for making a jeopardy call, and you don't know what the change is, how can you possible make that decision? Boesch: I think what Rick is pointing out is that if you get to the point where you've got a documented change that you can't otherwise explain, there are a number of options about what you do about that. You can do further analysis if it's a change potentially significant enough to jeopardize the stocks. You can refine future studies in the monitoring program to help understand the cause of the change. If it's interpreted to be a serious enough change that could jeopardize the stocks, then the agencies have a responsibility. Fundamentally, if there's a change in salmon populations in the estuary, and if you've done everything you can to try to explain it, don't you want to know that? Perry: I guess where I struggle with it is we've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on salmon recovery in the system. John [Marsh] was saying over lunch there's a huge return and nobody knows why. I just really question.... I mean the likelihood is that you probably will find some changes in salmon populations. Given that many people have beaten that path way ahead of us, I don't see how we're going to effectively argue to Congress -- that's what I'm thinking about right now, going to get dollars -- for this kind of a monitoring program when we can't even articulate a concern about extinction, or even a linkage to this project. Courtney: I totally disagree that there's no linkage. We laid it out. The best professional judgment is that these are the most likely areas.... Perry: Yes, it's a vulnerable area, change may occur. But you can't really identify that it's connected to this project. Did I hear that wrong? Hicks: No. I agree with you. Perry: So we're saying that we're going to monitor it regardless -- and excuse me, I'm not a biologist -- one of the comments I heard about biologists somewhere today is that they just collect data and then they figure out what they're going to do with it.... Mishaga: The fact is that we don't know enough about that to say there's going to be an effect or not. And the very fact that you would set up a very structured monitoring program... Believe me, I'm not interested in recommending anything about the random collection of data. But a very structured, well-designed program that's going to be looking at the linkages in the overall conceptual model that we've talked about. How you really take this physical system and relate it to the biological system. Making that connection is the only way the resource agencies would be comfortable with being able to allow this process to proceed. They don't have that information, and we're all speculating about it. Boesch: As a society, we've set up some procedures, one of which is the Endangered Species Act, which expresses the public will that we ought to do everything we can not to have these organisms going extinct. There is a public basis of concern about that.... The legal construct as well as the public concern is demanding us to develop information, to assure that extinction will not be the case. And we're confronted with a situation where we know we have limits in terms of how we can do that. At this point, we have to do the best we can to try to define that process. We've got to find a solution to this. The risks are low, but the standard in terms of acceptability of risk is extremely high. So at this point, we have a very practical, technical problem. How do we do this in a way that's convincing to the public as well as being the best way to the science. Marsh: This monitoring program you've put together for these factors looks to me to be relatively cost effective. But what I'm hearing is that we won't be able to tease out from the monitoring whether the channel deepening had any effect on these. And I agree with that. There are so many variables and factors in the system that it's just going to be -- I won't even say difficult -- I think it will be impossible. But you'll note that there's a change. Five years of information on the estuary is not going to inform you much on what's happened. You'll have five years of information on an estuary that is so highly variable and dynamic that you need two hundred years of information probably to be meaningful. Boesch: One decision outcome would be at that point, you've decided you need more than five years and you might want to measure some different things. But it at least gives you a punctuated period by which to focus. Courtney: Let's go back. I'm trying to respond to your [Laura] question about what the risks are. A weak response is this is our best professional judgment. I'm hearing from all of you that in five years, we'll also be relying on our best professional judgment. Boesch: Some things will be able to be explained quantitatively; others may have to be judged... Courtney: Here's a proposal for you. We've talked about the need to have some sort of advisory decision group. It might be smart to think about the format you're going to use these results in in five years' time, the sorts of decisions you might be making. Process-wise, it would be smart to be thinking about what that group would look like, how you're going to use these results. That would be important to put into your BA. Marsh: Yeah, you could do it that way. Courtney: At least the panel is nodding in agreement with me. Boesch: Some sort of a decision tree to show how these results will affect the decisions in an adaptive way. Now when you get to the point 5 years down the road, you might have some different thoughts, and you might want to change the decision tree, but at least you've got a map that guides you along the way. Bartell: And you've documented your process. Young: ESA says you shall do monitoring to ensure you've minimized your effects, an incidental take statement. It doesn't say how you do that. What my counsel to the applicant agencies is, is to make sure that whatever monitoring and adaptive management plan you come up with is linked to some rational risk and uncertainty analysis, tiers of that, has feedback loops. I'm liking what I'm hearing from a regulatory standpoint. I don't know how Cathy feels. It makes sense from the logic -- leave a track in your BA that says "We value this in a certain type of risk, or a certain type of uncertainty. It leads us to this type of thing." And we do it for every single time we chunk some sort of effect analysis out. We decide what's the risk, the uncertainty, and we decide upon a monitoring and adaptive management portion. We keep putting things into boxes, if you will. There's the logic trail. Then the regulators can either accept your monitoring plan as the term and condition, or we modify it in some way. I'd much rather build the logic and build the plan up front and get it in the BA. That way we reduce the uncertainty in our paperwork. Cody: Yes, I believe that was addressed to some extent in the questionnaire, too. We also did not subscribe to the idea of just going out and collecting information. We talked about duration, collecting data such that in five years time there should be a recognizable use of that data, and if not, then perhaps the situation should be re-evaluated. We're not collecting information that impinges upon delta-lambda. What should we collect instead? What would be a more reasonable approach? So this is something that is not an open-ended drain for your dollars, which we all want to avoid. But it has to be useful, it has to be contributory, it has to have assessment points along the way. Larson: The first thing you have to do is decide where to monitor. Where do we see the impacts and the highest risk areas. The panelists say it's the shallow-water habitat, and I assumed they meant the estuary. Then we expanded a little into the river. I'd like to get some boundaries on the locations for the area. Are we talking about monitoring 106 to 0 [river miles]? Or are we talking.... Tortorici: I'm not prepared to get into that discussion right now... Larson: You just told me that you were only interested in the shallow-water area.... Tortorici: No I didn't say that I was only interested.... See this is a concern that I have about being pressed in this way. And forgive me if I sound a little tense about this. Just because I say that from an agency standpoint we feel that that's a highest priority. That is not the only thing that we need to have looked at. Nor is it from a short term and a long term the only thing we need to have looked at. I feel like, potentially what's happening here is we're going to leave this room, and then you guys [Corps] are going to come back and say well it's only shallow-water habitats and it's only in the estuary. That's just not the deal here. This is just really a concern. Courtney: I'm sure the panel would support you on that. The operative word there is "highest" priority. Tortorici: The point I'd like to add to this is that at least what I'm thinking about in the context of the short-term and long-term aspects of this program. From a short term and long term that's why I think this is the highest priority because we need to start and we need to continue the monitoring after the project is constructed on out for some period of time to make a determination about whether there's really an impact. Is that 5 years? Is that 10 years? Where it's located I can't give you an answer, Kim, because it's almost 4 o'clock in the afternoon and my brain is starting to fade a little bit. But other things that need to be monitored before and during the project, we need to have some monitoring during that activity period. That's a short-term piece that needs to be worked on. And so, one of the other decisions I hope we're going to get to is during construction, and for some short-term period after construction, in-channel monitoring needs to occur on some level. Courtney: When you say in channel, you mean associated with the dredging? Tortorici: Yes. Hicks: What's the hypothesis? What question are we trying to address there? Tortorici: We have some base assumptions about impact vs. non-impact from the actual dredging itself. It deals with entrainment, for example, with potential suspended sediments. You know we just need to make sure that what we're going to be doing with regard to that actual dredging activity that we're correct in those assumptions. I think we owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to the public, for a short-term period to do that kind of monitoring. Courtney: There's some nods around the table. I don't think there's much opposition here. Marsh: I've got to clarify something. I don't think I was very clear before. I have to write this up, and when I do that, I'll have to say that it's like trying to determine some man is the father of a child. There's DNA testing, blood testing. This is blood testing. After we've done this, we can say, we think there's going to be an effect on "X" (shallow-water habitat). And if there was, then we have to do something to try to determine whether that was affected by the project. That's how we'll have to explain it and is that okay? Courtney: I hope that we will have some correlative evidence that would suggest that this all fits with a project effect. But I'd also add that even if it isn't a project effect, you've still got the management options of improving that habitat. This is a plus for the project