FY07-09 proposal 200102700

Jump to Reviews and Recommendations

Section 1. Administrative

Contacts

Section 2. Locations

Province / subbasin: Columbia Gorge / Columbia Gorge

Section 3. Focal species

Section 4. Past accomplishments

Section 5. Relationships to other projects

Section 6. Biological objectives

Section 7. Work elements (coming back to this)

Section 8. Budgets

Itemized estimated budget

Total estimated FY 2007-2009 budgets

Cost sharing

Section 9. Project future

Future O&M costs: This funding will be requested to BPA for supplement to other state and private funding anticipated for population monitoring and habitat improvement, including predator control as needed. Head start effort will be reduced and maintained by state.

Termination date: Ongoing
Comments: Funding requests are anticipated for basic monitoring of 4 populations of western pond turtles in the Columbia River Gorge. Additional funding will be provided by other state and private organizations currently involved with conservation measures. Monitoring goals will follow those presented on page 93 of Columbia Gorge Subbasin Plan.

Final deliverables: Annual reports will be provided. Final reports of radio-telemetry studies and overwinter habitat use will be available. Database of all individual turtle histories will be presented in Access database.

Section 10. Narrative and other documents

Reviews and recommendations

ISRP PRELIMINARY REVIEW (Jun 2, 2006)

Recommendation: Response requested

NPCC comments: This proposal meets the ISRP review criteria and benefits wildlife; however, the ISRP would like to see a response to the following issues before making a final recommendation. 1) Project history is not well described. The authors need to more clearly identify how many turtles (by sex) were “head started” by facility, in each year, and when and where these individuals were released. The authors should also display the progress of habitat acquisition (acres) and enhancement (acres) detailed by year, site, activity, effort expended. 2) In Objective 1, the ISRP recommends that the authors use previous work (1996-2005) as a pilot project and analyze abundance using mark recapture and present their results (mean, confidence intervals) and clearly present these estimates in a long-term recovery analysis. In Objective 1, the ISRP believes the authors need to better define evaluation criteria that will use to select new site(s) for turtle release. 3) In Objective 2, the authors need to identify sample sizes of turtles they will mark and methods they will use to estimate survival. The choice of mark recapture as a technique to monitor turtle populations should be evaluated by analyzing data on hand as a "pilot project." The ISRP suggests authors propose alternative(s) to mark/recapture as a technique for estimating population size (e.g. index such as capture/effort?). 4) Objective 3 could be improved with a summary that describes the past husbandry techniques and specific changes that will be made in the future. 5) Objective 5 could be improved if the authors present acreages of habitat they will manage, how they will manage these acres, and present plans to evaluate habitat. 6) Also lacking are plans to evaluate efforts to reduce bullfrog populations.

ISRP FINAL REVIEW (Aug 31, 2006)

Recommendation: Fundable

NPCC comments: The sponsors did a good job of responding to the fix-it requests. Given the population estimates provided in the fix-it response, the ISRP team wondered about recruitment problems. To get at this issue, it would be valuable for the sponsors to record age/size classes in turtles they capture. For instance, recording the size classes of turtles at capture might be a way to identify year class differences and age classes in the population and lead to better understanding of recruitment. The ISRP noted and was pleased to see that there are plans to radio mark and track adult females in the population to better understand this segment of the population. In future work, the ISRP will look for authors to better understand the population dynamics of this species. The ISRP would also like to see a critical evaluation of the head-start work in future proposals. As the ISRP understand it, from 1991 to 2001, 116 head-started western pond turtles were released at the Bergen site(s). Population estimates for 2001 were that 121 turtles are in the Bergen area, and there were 55 acres of habitat work in the area as well. The ISRP wonders what is happening to turtles released at Bergen? Is this site typical? This example reminds us that the ISRP and the field biologists need to be able to critically evaluate their methods (e.g. head start) so they can change them (adaptive management) if necessary.