In California, listed salmon ESUs have continued to decline even with ESA protection and unlisted salmon pops that support important fisheries and fishing communities are in dire straits in spite of efforts to sustain them. There are many reasons for this (e.g., warming climate driving more intense droughts, increasing human pressures on ecosystems) but a critical one is that management actions are typically analyzed in a piecemeal fashion, and little consideration is given to how the universe of management actions will (or will not) achieve restore healthy and harvestable populations (aka broad-sense recovery). Another is that we often don’t know how much an action will affect the status of salmon populations, and people are loath to make investments without an idea of the potential return. To support such analysis, we need decision support tools that can simultaneously address multiple management actions and stressors, including effects of changing climate and predict how salmon populations will respond. We aim to produce and apply decision support tools composed of coupled physical, biological, climate, and human dimension models that can answer questions such as:
● What combinations of management actions can achieve recovery under different future scenarios (climate, human population, etc)?
● Which of these are most cost effective and socially palatable?
Our overarching goals include providing the science and tools that stakeholders and decision- makers need to understand the costs and benefits of salmon management actions and carrying out case studies with these tools to identify pathways to recovery (for ESA listed pops and sustainable fisheries).