Habitat Limiting Factors Reports

1. Habitat Limiting Factors Reports How they were used for the SOS report

2. LFA Background 1998-2003 Named by the Legislature Provided technical basis to choose the most beneficial projects. �What to do to benefit fish�. Used by local planning groups (WRIAs) who formed citizen committees. Committees combined their expertise with the LFAs to form strategies. �What we can do�. Last two years, WRIA strategies combined by region to form regional recovery plans. These also integrated hatchery and harvest information.

3. Habitat Categories Access Floodplain: wetlands, side-channel, hardening Riparian: age/species of tree, buffer width Sediment: quantity, quality, stability, road density Instream: LWD, pool quality, pool quantity Water Quality Flow Estuarine/Nearshore

4. LFA Process For each habitat category, all available data were assembled and summarized. Habitat results were compared to standards to give ratings of poor, fair, good, or data gap. Recommendations were developed to prioritize the greatest problems by watershed.

5. Ratings Standards Provide a habitat rating for each category or sub-category. When available, ratings were based upon accepted standards such as watershed analysis, NOAA Fisheries, and Wild Salmonid Policy. Ratings were expressed as good, fair, poor, or data gap. Some reports labeled ratings with a qualitative note such as type of data that supported the rating. End result is a report that has a summary table of ratings by habitat category by stream or stream reach. Example.

6. State of the Salmon Report Purpose of SOS report. The LFA data were used for the habitat condition colors in the 2004 SOS report. SOS habitat was defined as floodplain, riparian, sediment, and instream conditions. The other habitat components were supplied by other sources. The LFA data not only had to be rolled by from 4 major categories to 1 category, but also had to be rolled up from stream to WRIA scale for the SOS report. The methodology for this rollup was a product of the SOS technical committee.

7. Rollup from Stream to WRIA First, the rating was rolled up by WRIA for each of the categories. Methodology: frequency of stream ratings. The most frequent rating was the WRIA rating. If another rating was within 20%, it would be the secondary rating. Few available ratings resulted in a data gap for the WRIA in that category. Example on following page.

8. Rollup from Categories to Single Habitat Rating The poor, fair, good ratings are converted to numbers and averaged per category. As long as there are at least 3 categories with ratings, then the category ratings are averaged for a final numerical rating. The numerical rating was converted back to a good, fair, poor, or data gap and used for the colored maps in the SOS report.