FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 4, 2000
Contact: Brian Gorman
(206) 526-6613

The West Coast's first salmon recovery team has been appointed and charged with setting biological standards for measuring recovery efforts for Puget Sound chinook, chum and sockeye, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced today.

The eight-person group is formally known as a technical recovery team. It is part of an ambitious undertaking by the federal fisheries agency to write recovery plans for all 26 populations of salmon and steelhead on the West Coast listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Today's appointments will be followed by as many as nine more recovery teams, organized into discrete geographic groups in Washington, Oregon and California. The next group to be designated will look into listed fish in the Willamette and Lower Columbia watersheds.

Each technical recovery team will be responsible for setting biologically-based recovery goals within its geographic area. Teams will serve as science advisors during the entire recovery-planning phase, a process expected to last several years.

"The men and women of this first team bring a commanding mix of technical skills in fields like salmon biology, conservation biology, ecology and habitat," said Usha Varanasi, head of the fishery service's Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. The center, and its southwest counterpart in La Jolla, Calif., will oversee the various technical teams as they conduct their recovery work.

"Their work promises to be some of the most demanding ever done in applying the principles of conservation biology to a real-world natural-resource problem," Varanasi added.

Team members are:
    · Ken Currens, a fishery geneticist with the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission
    · Jim Doyle, a forest fish biologist with the U.S. Forest Service
    · Robert Fuerstenberg, senior ecologist with the King County Department of Natural Resources
    · William Graeber, a natural resource scientist with the Washington Department of Natural Resources
    · Kit Rawson, senior fishery management biologist with the Tulalip tribe
    · Mary Ruckleshaus, a fisheries research biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service
    · Norma Jean Sands, a fisheries research biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service
    · James Scott, chief fish scientist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

There is more information about recovery efforts on the Northwest Fisheries Science Center's Web page at www.nwfsc.noaa.gov.

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