190 

 DRAFT 



EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 



In June 1992, the Oregon Forest Industries Council released a report titled "A Review 

 of Management and Environmental Factors Responsible for the Decline and Lack of 

 Recovery of Oregon's Wild Anadromous Salmonids". The purpose of the document 

 was to evaluate and determine the relative contribution of management and 

 environmental factors to the decline and lack of recovery of Oregon's salmonid stocks. 

 The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife conducted a review of this report to 

 determine if it provided constructive insight into defining and evaluating the problems 

 affecting Oregon's anadromous salmonid resources. 



The Department's review of the report involved two major tasks: (1) a review of the 

 scientific information presented in the report, and (2) an evaluation of the analytical 

 methods used to rank the relative importance of factors implicated in the decline of 

 Oregon's anadromous fisheries resources. The review of the scientific information 

 included verification of the accuracy of the data and conclusions extracted from a 

 portion of the cited scientific studies and information sources, and a review of the 

 completeness of the scientific literature presented in the report. The review of the 

 analytical methods used to rank the factors included an assessment of the technical 

 validity of the methodology, and an evaluation of the scientific basis for the analyses 

 according to the scientific information presented in the report. 



The Department's review indicated that the report contained major technical and 

 analytical weaknesses caused by a failure to stratify analyses by location, by species 

 and by life history stages within species. The relative importance of factors affecting 

 the productivity of salmonids in Oregon varies by region and watershed according to 

 the distribution and intensity of various human activities and environmental conditions. 

 The report's analyses of the relative importance of environmental and management 

 factors were based upon a statewide pooling of information that failed to reflect 

 regional variability. In addition, certain changes in habitat or management practices 

 will affect salmonid species differently, and will have varying effects on different life 

 history stages of a given species. The analyses presented in the report fail to account 

 for variability between species and life history stages, and limit the evaluation of the 

 relative importance of the factors to the effects on "salmonids" as one homogenous 

 group. 



A review of the scientific information presented in the report identified several 

 problems including: (1) a failure to base analyses or conclusions on information 

 presented in the report, (2) inaccuracies in the statistical information presented in the 

 report, (3) inaccurate interpretation or reporting of scientific studies, (4) failure to 

 analyze data using rigorous and scientifically valid methods, and (S) incomplete 

 summary of scientific information available for a topic. These problems directly affect 

 the validity of the information and conclusions contained within the report. 



The Department reviewed the methods used to rank the relative importance of the 

 environmental and management factors, and assessed the validity of the conclusions 

 derived from the analyses. The review indicated that these analyses were not based on 

 empirical data and were largely subjective. The authors presented a matrix as a method 

 to evaluate the relative importance of the factors, but the approach used in the matrix 

 was inadequate. The fundamental problems with the report's matrix analysis 

 methodology were: (1) the analysis was not stratified by location and species, (2) the 

 impact of the factors were arbitrarily ranked, (3) some population impacts were 

 multiple measures of the same effect on salmonid populations, (4) the measure of a 



