Fish recovery programs get awards for efforts

The Upper Colorado River and the San Juan River endangered fish recovery programs recently received Cooperative Conservation Awards from the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The two programs were selected from a field of 700 nominees.

Biologists and outreach personnel with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources are among those involved in the programs.

The Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery has become a template for other such projects across the country that involve people and groups with different, and sometimes conflicting, interests.

The program's goal is to recover endangered fish in the Green and Upper Colorado river drainages. The two big challenges are: How to apply science and recover the fish without seriously affecting the interests of people in the drainages.

Since the Green and Colorado rivers run through several states, and water use impacts a long list of interests — including communities, government agencies and private and commercial interests — recovery efforts needed to involve a broad base of constituents.

"Because participation on the committees is voluntary, each state, Native American tribe, agency, group or individual had to decide how much they wanted to be involved," said Kevin Christopherson, regional supervisor for the DWR. "Utah, through the UDWR, made the decision to get in deep. We hired biologists and jumped right in."

Sampling fish in Utah was one of the first projects the DWR and its partners got involved in. Sampling helps determine population numbers, the locations where the fish are, their seasonal movements and other base-level information.

Projects then began to focus on specific species and the habitats they needed. The information gathered has helped determine which river flow patterns will help the fish the most and when water needs to be released from Flaming Gorge dam to supply those flows.

More recent studies are looking at the flood plains near the rivers.

"For example, the levee removal project looked at breaching old man-made levees around key flood plain locations to try and provide larval razorback sucker with important rearing pondlike habitat," said Trina Hedrick, native aquatics project leader in the Northeastern Region.

"The construction of Flaming Gorge dam altered flows to a point that flood plains were often disconnected from the river, even during high flows. Breaching the levees allowed river flows to expand back into traditional flood plain habitat. That made this habitat available again to razorback suckers.

"Since the breaching of the levees, we've been doing research into what flows are necessary to maximize spawning efforts.