The FHC's Nicks, Weber and Bouwes had their recent paper in CJAFS, "Estimation of salmonid habitat growth potential through measurements of invertebrate food abundance and temperature" highlighted in the Columbia Basin Fish and Wildlife News Bulletin. Chris Jordan of NOAA and the CHaMP program was a co-author.


Check out the full article here.

The ET-AL's Nate Hough-Snee and his former UW colleague Rodney Pond have published their work assessing how soil amendment shapes forest restoration in North Cascades National Park, Washington State, USA. This note illustrates how soil amendment creates winners (survivors) and losers (dead trees) when using amendment to improve soil nutrition at heavily degraded sites. While growth increased in three species (Douglas fir, black cottonwood, and red alder) that received soil amendment,  a greater proportion of the trees that died were amended. Increased mortality in amended trees was attributed to water stress from transpiration required for the vigorous photosynthesis and canopy growth of amended trees and increased competition from neighboring trees. The paper ran in the September issue of Ecological Restoration and is also available from Nate's Figshare.

• Hough-Snee, N. and R.L. Pond. 2014. Amending impaired soils increases seedling growth but reduces seedling survival at a retired gravel mine.Ecological Restoration 32(3): 231-235. DOI: 10.3368/er.32.3.231.  Request PDF

FHC/ET-AL team members Alan Kasprak and I (Nate Hough-Snee) recently published our work on the direct and indirect drivers of wood in the Columbia and Missouri River Basins. The article "Direct and indirect drivers of instream wood in the interior Pacific Northwest, USA: decoupling climate, vegetation, disturbance, and geomorphic setting" was published in Riparian Ecology and Conservation, a new open access journal on all things riparian, from ecology to geomorphology and hydrology. Co-authors on the project include Dr. Brett Roper (USFS - Fish and Aquatic Ecology Unit/USU) and Dr. Christy Meredith (PIBO EM). ​

Nick Bouwes and Joe Wheaton were co-authors with Michael Pollock and others on a paper that was just published in Bioscience that lays the conceptual framework for using beaver to restore incised streams. The conceptual framework is based on the group's experience in Bridge Creek, Oregon using beaver dams to restore an incised and degraded stream to the benefit of the steelhead. 

• Pollock, M., Beechie T , Wheaton JM, Jordan C,  Bouwes N, Weber N, and Volk C. 2014. Using Beaver Dams  to Restore Incised Stream Ecosystems. Bioscience. DOI: 10.1093/biosci/biu036.

See also coverage in USU Today.

Nick Bouwes and Eric Wall recently published a review article with Jordan Rosenfield on 'Successes, failures, and opportunities in the practical application of drift-foraging models' in Environmental Biology of Fishes. 

2013. Rosenfield JS, Bouwes N, Wall CE, Naman SM. Successes, failures, and opportunities in the practical application of drift-foraging models. Environmental Biology of Fishes. DOI: 10.1007/s10641-013-0195-6. 

Abstract:
Accurately measuring productive capacity in streams is challenging, and field methods have generally focused on the limiting role of physical habitat attributes (e.g. channel gradient, depth, velocity, substrate). Because drift-foraging models uniquely integrate the effects of both physical habitat (velocity and depth) and prey abundance (invertebrate drift) on energy intake for drift-feeding fishes, they provide a coherent and transferable framework for modelling individual growth that includes the effects of both physical habitat and biological production. Despite this, drift-foraging models have been slow to realize their potential in an applied context. Practical applications have been hampered by difficulties in predicting growth (rather than habitat choice), and scaling predictions of individual growth to reach scale habitat capacity, which requires modelling the partitioning of resources among individuals and depletion of drift through predation. There has also been a general failure of stream ecologists to adequately characterize spatial and temporal variation in invertebrate drift within and among streams, so that sources of variation in this key component of drift-foraging models remain poorly understood. Validation of predictions of habitat capacity have been patchy or lacking, until recent studies demonstrating strong relationships between drift flux, modeled Net Energy Intake, and fish biomass. Further advances in the practical application of drift-foraging models will require i) a better understanding of the factors that cause variation in drift, better approaches for modelling drift, and more standardized methods for characterizing it; ii) identification of simple diagnostic metrics that correlate strongly with more precise but time-consuming bioenergetic assessments of habitat quality; and iii) a better understanding of how variation in drift-foraging strategies are associated with other suites of co-evolved traits that ecologically differentiate taxa of drift-feeding salmonids.