Client: Snake River Salmon Recovery Board

The Snake River Salmon Recovery Plan for Southeast Washington is designed to reverse the decline of local salmon, steelhead, and bull trout populations and to restore populations to healthy, sustainable levels to meet conservation and recreation goals. Habitat protection is a critical element of salmon recovery; and the Plan’s habitat strategy relies in part on existing land use regulations and conservation easements. The Snake River Salmon Recovery Board wished to learn more about the effectiveness of those tools toward salmon recovery goals. Cascadia conducted a review of the potential impacts of land use regulations and conservation easement programs on salmon recovery. We developed a framework to efficiently capture information on requirements, prohibitions, allowed activities, exemptions, and the geographical location of each regulation and easement, and identified how each could address limiting factors to salmon recovery. We reported clearly and concisely on the advantages and disadvantages of land use regulations and easements as they pertain to salmon recovery, and outlined ways in which the Board could integrate information about these tools to make decisions about funding easements and restoration projects in the future.