Bio station lands grant to
study Pacific Rim ecosystems

The University of Montana’s Flathead Lake Biological Station has been awarded a three-year $4.6 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to continue studying pristine salmon and trout watersheds along the Pacific Rim.

Station Director Jack Stanford said the grant will support the Salmonid Rivers Observatory Network (SaRON), a long-term project initiated in 2003 to study the biological diversity and productivity of 15 to 20 pristine salmon-river ecosystems.

Targeted rivers are in British Columbia, Alaska and Kamchatka in the Russian Far East.

UM’s primary SaRON partners are the Wild Salmon Center in Portland, Ore., and Moscow State University in Russia, along with a number of First Nations and federal and state agencies.

The goal of the project is to complete a massive, in-depth, comprehensive study of these rivers by examining the geology, chemistry, vegetation, aquatic organisms, stream flow and more. Stanford and his fellow ecologists want to gain a better understanding of the complex web of water and life — what he calls the “shifting habitat mosaic” — that makes up healthy river systems.

He said the shifting habitat mosaic concept, which examines spatial change of habitat for river organisms such as salmon in response to environmental variation, has become a guiding principle for river research and management worldwide.

The approach was pioneered at the Nyack Flood Plain on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River through research funded by the National Science Foundation and is the basis for much of the multidisciplinary research that now characterizes the biological station.

“We study systems ecology — working from the genotypes of the salmon and the biology of the organisms they support — all the way up to global views of landscape change,” Stanford said. “So it’s genes-to-ecosystem-level kind of work.”

SaRON goals include quantifying the biophysical processes that produce the shifting habitat mosaic and using this information to devise and promote new conservation and management strategies for salmon rivers, as well as ideas to restore rivers negatively impacted by people.

“Our research is designed to provide a new approach for salmon management worldwide,” Stanford said. “We need a paradigm shift in the management of wild salmon that focuses on sustaining the abundance and health of wild salmon habitat by allowing very charitable returns of spawning fish to not only produce the next generations of fish, but also add fertility to the system so those salmon youngsters grow into strong competitors for the rigors of the ocean they must return to.”

The failed old paradigm, he said, is called maximum-sustained yield in which salmon populations are harvested to just above their theoretical replacement numbers. This can prevent salmon from returning to their birth rivers — where they die after they spawn and naturally fertilize the river system — in enough numbers to maintain natural fertility.

“Some of the remote British Columbia rivers we work on are carved by glaciers out of granite bedrock, so they are characterized by very low background concentrations of nutrients — they essentially are rivers of rainwater,” Stanford said. “Sustenance of these otherwise pristine rivers is dependent on salmon coming back and dying, thereby stimulating productivity through complex pathways created by consumers of the carcasses.