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' 'beat management practices" are incorporated into land management 

 operations, fieh habitat continues to be impacted in steady incremental 

 steps. Private timber harvest, grazing, and farming have typically not 

 been conducted from a multi-purpose perspective and thus continue to impact 

 fish habitat at an alarming rate. The bottom line is that we may be able 

 to lessen the fishery impacts of land management practices on public lands 

 but we will not protect fish habitat unless we begin to view and manage 

 watersheds as ecosystems. 



The Service is involved in multiple jurisdiction watershed restoration 

 programs in the Klamath and Trinity river basins in California, and the 

 Chehalis and Elwha river basins in Washington. These and other cooperative 

 river basin restoration initiatives are helping to correct the effects of 

 past land management practices and to focus attention on the need to 

 responsibly manage land and water resources as the first line of defense. 

 What makes these programs effective? Recognition among all private and 

 public entities that all parties have a stake in what others are doing 

 throughout a given watershed, and agreement among all parties to seek 

 consensus solutions to protecting and restoring the watershed for the 

 benefit of all and because of the presence of Federal leadership that 

 transcends jurisdictional interests. 



After leaving the spawning and rearing habitat in the upper portions of 

 watersheds, fish must then navigate through or around dams, through man- 

 made reservoirs, past thriving populations of exotic predators, and past 

 nets and fish hooks. No single challenge to salinon and steelhead survival 

 can be viewed as the "straw that broke the camel's back." They all must be 

 viewed as a whole or we will begin to see the extinction of stocks 

 beginning with upriver populations such as the Snake River sockeye, 

 currently listed as endangered, and the Sacramento River winter run 

 Chinook, currently listed as threatened. 



