Saving Pacific Salmon and Steelhead
Our strategy to recover endangered and threatened Pacific salmon and steelhead.
Salmon and steelhead have been central to the culture and economy of Indigenous people since time immemorial, and still are to this day. They have swam in the waters of the West Coast for millions of years. In the mid to late 1800s, European settlers exploited salmon and steelhead in excess, and over-harvest continued into the 1970s. In Washington in 1978, there were 3,041 fishing vessels landing salmon. In 2022, there were just 79. When native West Coast salmon and steelhead runs abruptly declined, hatchery programs replaced the native runs. Meanwhile, industry, agriculture, mining, forestry, hydroelectric power, and urban development filled floodplains, dredged and channelized rivers, contaminated water, removed streamside forests, and created passage barriers to habitat that salmon and steelhead need to spawn and rear.
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Meet Pacific Salmon and Steelhead
The Pacific West Coast is home to the most diverse species of salmon and steelhead in the world. These fish travel from mountain streams to ocean currents and back again. Salmon and steelhead populations contribute to our culture, feed our families, and support jobs in the fishing fleet and beyond. They support recreation and give back to our ecosystem by providing nutrients to other animals, forests, rivers, and oceans.
NOAA Fisheries has listed 28 species of salmon and steelhead on the West Coast as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), from Los Angeles County in southern California to Puget Sound in Washington State.
Each species has a robust recovery plan developed through years of work and collaboration with communities and co-managers. These plans use the best available science, for example, on long-term monitoring of ocean conditions and environmental status and trends, to identify the actions needed to recover the species so they can again contribute fully to our communities, economies, and ecosystems.
Learn more about endangered and threatened Pacific Salmon and Steelhead
How Are They Doing?
Under the Endangered Species Act, NOAA Fisheries reviews the status of listed species to tell us whether recovery is on track or if we need to make adjustments to reach our goals. Our latest 5-year reviews of salmon and steelhead species returning to West Coast rivers highlight both significant accomplishments and the greatest immediate challenges for the species looking ahead. These reviews provide a course of action for everyone who cares about Pacific salmon and steelhead.
Action Rooted in Science
Robust science is critical to adaptively monitor and manage our rich and diverse Pacific salmon and steelhead populations, address uncertainties in a changing climate, and invest in the most effective solutions for each watershed along the West Coast.
Our scientists have forecasted salmon returns since 1996. We continue to uncover new information about their genetics and migration patterns from rivers to the ocean. We study how chemical contaminants, hatcheries, and climate change impact salmon. We also assess how habitat improvements, fish passage, and reintroductions affect salmon and steelhead distribution and abundance.
Learn more about our salmon and steelhead research
Salmon and Climate Solutions
Climate change, among various other threats, makes salmon and steelhead recovery a complex and challenging task. Major climate threats to salmon populations include sea level rise, freshwater quantity fluctuations, hotter temperatures, changes in snowpack and snowmelt, flooding, and ocean acidification. Our recovery strategy includes managing salmon and steelhead for resilience to climate change. Salmon are an outstanding species to orient climate solutions because the same actions that improve salmon and steelhead resilience can also increase our collective human resilience.
Learn more about how climate affects the salmon life cycle
Connecting People and Salmon from Summit to Sea
We can’t do it alone. The success of our strategy depends on building and maintaining strong and diverse partnerships, collaborations, and coalitions. We look to tribes, states, commercial fishermen and women, recreational anglers, and local communities.
In every stage of the salmon life cycle, people are taking bold and innovative actions to protect fish for future generations.
A Path Toward Recovery
Our comprehensive salmon and steelhead recovery strategy includes:
Guaranteeing Water Quality and Quantity
At the most fundamental level, salmon and steelhead need clean, cold water to reliably support spawning and rearing. Federal agencies are required to consult with NOAA Fisheries when they authorize, fund, or undertake actions that may impact endangered and threatened marine species or their habitats, and habitats necessary for healthy, productive fish stocks. Our main habitat consultations include hydropower relicensing where we issue mandatory conditions for fish passage and recommend protection, mitigation, and enhancement measures for fish and their habitat.
Outside of regulatory programs, we engage partners and volunteers to improve water quality and quantity. In the Lemhi Valley in Idaho, landowners have joined species recovery efforts and conserved water by improving irrigation practices and agreeing not to divert. Now, adequate water flows go to fish during key parts of the salmon and steelhead life cycle in the valley. At the confluence of the Yakima and Columbia Rivers, the Yakama Nation, with funding support from NOAA Fisheries and other partners, will remove the Bateman Island Causeway which prevents river flows, creating a thermal barrier to migrating adult salmon. In California’s Butano Creek, habitat projects keep streams flowing for fish by building water storage for farmers. For the first time in almost 20 years, coho salmon are returning to the creek demonstrating how restoration work can benefit both fish and farms.
Deposits of pollutants end up on roadways and are transported to our waterways via runoff. Contaminated runoff poses significant threats to freshwater, estuarine, and marine species, including Pacific salmon and steelhead. NOAA’s work found that 42 percent of juvenile steelhead died following 24 hours of exposure to untreated urban stormwater runoff. Across the West Coast, partners are helping achieve water quality and quantity standards for fish. Some western states have already begun designing highways with inexpensive filtration measures shown to protect salmon.
Protecting and Connecting Healthy Habitat
Habitat loss and degradation are the biggest contributors to the decline of salmon and steelhead. Across the west, dramatically human-altered and degraded riverscapes and floodplains have significantly reduced ecological richness and limited salmon and steelhead productivity. Today, despite investments in habitat restoration, the rate of habitat loss continues to outpace restoration. The pace and scale of habitat restoration must increase to make a meaningful difference in conservation and recovery.
A functional riverscape has room to evolve and move. It is resilient to climate cycles, shifts, and extreme climatic events, and even benefits from periodic natural disturbances. Managing land and water that supports, or has high potential to support, functioning habitat for salmon and steelhead is critical. We work to help migratory fish and communities who rely on them by opening or improving access to river and stream habitats. By strategically funding recovery projects and mitigation, like Conservation Banks and In-Lieu Fee Programs, we can protect existing habitats and re-establish connectivity to floodplains affecting juvenile rearing and migration. Through efforts like SHaRP (Salmon Habitat Restoration Priorities), we can expand our efforts by advancing local knowledge and engaging with community members to create highly specific restoration strategies.
Connecting Fish Populations Across a Diverse Landscape
Ensuring salmon and steelhead species are spread out in abundance across the landscape increases their resilience in the face of climate change and the pressures of human population growth. In California’s Central Valley, dams block steelhead from over 80 percent of their historical habitat, including nearly all historical spawning habitat. Levees block access to 95 percent of the Central Valley’s floodplains. Our NOAA Fisheries biologists and engineers work to implement passage routes that meet the biological needs of fish and create guidelines for restoration practitioners to use. In places like the Similkameen River in Washington, the removal of the Enloe Dam would open access to 1,500 stream miles of cold water habitat for Chinook and steelhead. Dam removals, improvements to fish passage barriers, like culverts, tidegates, and fish screens, and innovative collection methods, show continued and lasting benefits.
Returning Salmon to their Original, High-Quality Habitat
We must return salmon above dams and other barriers to their original high-elevation habitat with clean cold water that supports their recovery and provides resilience to climate change. Numerous examples show reintroduction is a successful method for recovery. For example, we are working with key federal, state, and tribal partners, like the Winnemum Wintu Tribe, to return native Chinook salmon to chilly rivers above Shasta Dam. Salmon reintroduced to their historic habitat as juveniles are, for the first time, returning to their home rivers to spawn. In the Columbia Basin, reintroduction efforts of summer Chinook are underway in the blocked area above Chief Joseph and Grand Coulee dams. This return ensures that both lower and upper river tribes have access to fish critical to ceremonial and subsistence harvest needs.
Restoring Habitat-Forming Processes
In collaboration with land owners and water users, we need to rehabilitate natural processes to restore and maintain habitat functions. Often nature can do this job more quickly and inexpensively than we can—sometimes assisted by beavers, for instance. We are engaging partners to increase the pace and scale of riverscape restoration to make a meaningful difference in climate adaptation, wildfire resilience, water security, and salmon and steelhead conservation and recovery.
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Preserving Genetic Diversity
Conservation hatcheries kickstart the return of endangered fish to healthy habitats. For example, during California’s severe drought, biologists took the emergency action of supplementing the critically low numbers of juvenile fish by releasing hatchery winter-run Chinook salmon. In Idaho, thousands of sockeye once swam up the Columbia, Snake, and Salmon rivers, migrating more than 900 miles from the Pacific Ocean to Redfish Lake every year. Between 1991–1998, only 16 sockeye salmon returned to Redfish Lake. The captive broodstock program helped save the signature species by protecting its remaining genetic diversity in conservation hatcheries. In 2000, 252 adults made it back. We can provide a helping hand toward the goal of a self-sustaining stock. As a lifeline for endangered species on the brink of extinction, our biologists closely track hatchery fish, as an overdependence could undermine the population’s genetic heritage and fitness.
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Supporting Tribal Harvest and Tribal Treaties
To meet tribal treaty-reserved fishing rights and co-manage fisheries to include harvest for tribal cultural ceremonies, subsistence, and commerce, we need to conserve healthy habitats for naturally produced salmon and continue production hatcheries that are also carefully managed to protect and promote natural fish diversity and the health of naturally occurring populations. By continuing to provide technical assistance and funding for tribal capacity-building efforts, we can support bringing and maintaining technical expertise within many federally recognized tribes.
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Supporting Sustainable Salmon Harvest
We aim to provide sustainable fishing of abundant wild and hatchery stocks while conserving Pacific salmon and steelhead populations. Through several forums, like the Pacific Fishery Management Council, we work with fishermen to manage commercial fisheries in ways that minimize impacts to listed species, including salmon. In collaboration, we review and approve regulatory recommendations to provide for shared conservation and sustainable commercial, recreational, and tribal harvest in our oceans and inland waters.
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Reducing Predation
We work with co-managers to reduce over-predation impacts from seals, sea lions, birds, and invasive species like Northern Pike, Sacramento pikeminnow, and smallmouth bass that prey on or compete with threatened and endangered salmon. Improved monitoring and modeling help us anticipate interactions and assess whether steps to manage predators may be warranted. In the Pacific Northwest, specialized removal of the growing population of California sea lions aims to reduce predation on Columbia River salmon.
We are working to help salmon and steelhead thrive, alongside people, in today’s urban and rural landscapes and seascapes. We cannot do it alone.
Funding to Save Pacific Salmon and Steelhead
We cannot recover these fish alone. In addition to congressionally-appropriated base funding for NOAA Fisheries, the important sources below provide critical federal funding for the recovery of salmon and steelhead.
- The Pacific Coast Salmon Recovery Fund provides grants to states and tribes to protect, conserve, and restore these populations.
- NOAA Fisheries received $27 million in funding under the Biden-Harris Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act to help recover threatened and endangered Pacific salmon and steelhead in the face of climate change.
- The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides a historic opportunity for NOAA to continue making an impact for fisheries, protected resources, and communities through our Community-based Restoration Program.
Take Action
Whether you live a few minutes or a few hours from the coast, you can help recover salmon and steelhead on the West Coast. To start, volunteer with one of our partners, and make sustainable choices at home, work, and school.
Education and Outreach
Whether you’re looking to educate your students or a neighbor about Pacific salmon and steelhead, we have lesson plans, posters, and brochures in English and Spanish to support your efforts. If you’d like to work with us to develop salmon education or outreach programming, please reach out to wcr.education@noaa.gov.
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Newsletter
Subscribe to our monthly West Coast Region Newsletter to get the latest news on salmon and steelhead research, habitat restoration, and regulatory updates.