- Spawner Escapement Policy: Spawner abundance goals will be established for individual, separate
breeding populations (stocks) in all areas that have existing or restorable habitat capacity to support
naturally reproducing, self-sustaining stocks, with the intent to encourage local adaptation (high
productivity) and maximize long-term surplus production that sustains harvest, recreational
opportunities and other ecological benefits.
Future fishery management, albeit complex and difficult, must be based on the needs of stocks. These
are the basic building blocks that, in aggregate, constitute the state's salmonid resource. To do
otherwise would perpetuate the opportunity for planned, deliberate overfishing.
- Conserving Genetic Diversity Policy: Genetic diversity within and among stocks will be maintained or
increased to encourage local adaptation and sustain long-term productivity. Conditions will be created
that allow natural patterns of genetic diversity and local adaptation to occur and evolve.
- Ecological Interactions Policy: Wild salmonid stocks will be maintained at levels that naturally sustain
ecosystem processes and diverse indigenous species and their habitats.
Healthy populations of other indigenous species will be maintained within levels that sustain or
promote abundant wild salmonid populations and their habitats.
- Harvest Management Policy: The fisheries will be managed to meet the spawning escapement policy
as well as genetic conservation and ecological interaction criteria.
- Cultured Production/Hatcheries Policy: Use programs of stable, cost-effective artificial production to
provide significant fishery benefits while maintaining the long-term productivity of naturally spawning
salmon and their ecosystems.
Protect, rehabilitate, and re-establish naturally spawning populations using integrated principles of
genetic conservation, ecology, hatchery production, and fish management.
- Habitat Protection and Management Policy: Maintain or increase the quality and quantity of habitat
necessary to sustain and restore salmonid populations.
- Basin Hydrology and In-stream Flow Policy: Maintain or restore the physical processes affecting
natural basin hydrology. In addition, manage water use and allocation in a manner that would optimize
in-stream flows for salmonid spawning, incubation, rearing, adult residency, and migration, that would
address the need for channel-forming and maintenance flows, and that would address the impacts of
water withdrawals on estuarine and marine habitats.
- Water Quality and Sediment Quality, Delivery and Transport Policy: Provide for water and sediments
of a quality that will support productive, harvestable, wild salmonid populations, unimpaired by toxic
or deleterious effects of environmental pollutants.
Manage watersheds, stream channels, wetlands, and marine areas for natural rates of sediment erosion,
deposition, and routing, to within the limits of salmonid life requirements.
- Stream Channel Complexity Policy: Maintain or restore natural stream channel characteristics for
channel sinuosity, gravel quality and quantity, in-stream cover, large woody debris (LWD), pool depth
and frequency, bank stability, and side-channel, off-channel, and flood plain connectivity, and function.
- Riparian Areas and Wetlands Policy: Functional riparian habitat and associated wetlands are protected
and restored on all water bodies that support, or directly or indirectly impact, salmonids and their
habitat.
- Lakes and Reservoirs Policy: Maintain or restore lake and reservoir habitats that are conducive to wild
salmonid passage, rearing, adult residency and spawning.
- Marine Areas Policy: Provide nearshore marine, estuarine, and tidally influenced marine ecosystems
that contain productive, balanced, integrated communities of organisms having species composition,
abundance, diversity, structure, and organization comparable to that of natural ecosystems of the
region.
Ensure that functions and values of the following habitat types are maintained or increased: eelgrass
habitats, herring spawning habitats, intertidal forage fish spawning habitats, intertidal wetlands, and
safe and timely migratory pathways for salmonids in marine waters.
Allow natural rates of erosion and transport of sediments, nutrients, and large woody debris that affect
habitat quality in tidally influenced estuarine and marine shorelines.
- Fish Access and Passage Policy: Provide and maintain safe and timely pathways to all useable wild
salmonid habitat in fresh and marine waters, for salmonids at all life stages.
Ensure salmonids are protected from injury or mortality from diversion into artificial channels or
conduits (irrigation ditches, turbines, etc.).
Ensure natural, partial or complete fish passage barriers are maintained where necessary, to maintain
biodiversity among and within salmonid populations and other fish and wildlife.
- Habitat Restoration Policy: Restore usable wild salmonid habitat to levels of natural variability for
watershed processes and habitats.
