The Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ Crucial Habitat Assessment Tool (WAFWA CHAT) was developed to bring greater certainty and predictability to planning efforts by establishing a common starting point for discussing the intersection of development and habitats. Spanning 16 states, CHAT is an online system of maps highlighting important fish and wildlife habitat areas, based …
ODFW Kit Fox research in southeast Oregon captures rare footage of pups playing Rare footage of Kit Fox pups playing in the Eastern Oregon desert recently was captured on video. Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologists have been studying the foxes since 2012. Kit Fox are a Strategy Species in the Oregon Conservation Strategy. …
Researcher captures video of wolverine in Wallowa County In April 2011, five days after discovering wolverine tracks in the Wallowa Mountains of Northeast Oregon, researcher Audrey Magoun downloaded photos of two wolverines from a remote camera. It was the first confirmation of wolverines in Wallowa County. Before that, they were the stuff of legend, rumor …
Many nearshore species that inhabit subtidal rocky reefs are important both ecologically and economically. Black, blue, China, deacon, copper and quillback rockfishes, cabezon, kelp greenling, lingcod, sea urchins and abalone are examples. Investigating and sampling the fish and wildlife species that inhabit rocky reefs is thus of great interest to scientists and fishery managers. But …
Phytoplankton, the microscopic algae that live in marine waters and drift with ocean currents, are a key component of the marine ecosystem. These primary producers at the base of the food web create the food directly consumed by many marine animals. The productivity of the marine waters off of the Oregon coast, like that of …
Gases from earth’s atmosphere are absorbed in ocean waters. The amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere has increased substantially since the industrial age that began roughly 150 years ago. Dubbed the “evil twin” of global climate change, ocean acidification results from carbon dioxide added to earth’s atmosphere being absorbed by ocean waters. Roughly …
Oregon’s nearshore environment is public domain, and opportunities for public participation in conservation and management of nearshore resources are present throughout the entire Nearshore ecoregion. For the other eight ecoregions, Conservation Opportunity Areas (COAs) were developed to guide voluntary, non-regulatory actions to benefit habitats where broad fish and wildlife conservation goals could be best met. …
The concept of a keystone species, one that affects its biological community assemblage, in both direct and indirect ways which are out of proportion to its biomass, is based on research done on the ochre sea star, Pisaster ochraceus, in the rocky intertidal zone (Paine 1969). Dr. Robert Paine’s concept that a keystone species shapes …
The Rogue River is unique, with an ecosystem much more similar to California watersheds than any coastal watersheds in Oregon. Rogue salmon and steelhead are included in management units with California salmon and steelhead, rather than with Oregon coastal populations. Spring Chinook The Rogue River’s spring Chinook salmon, particularly the early-returning, early-spawning portion of the …
Little is known about the basic biology and ecology of lampreys. To address this deficiency, National Marine Fisheries Service biologists analyzed data from two fish assemblage studies that span three decades (1980–1981 and 2001–2012) to provide the first analysis of anadromous western river (Lampetra ayresii) and Pacific (Entosphenus tridentatus) lampreys in the Columbia River estuary: …