Aquatic Resources
Aquatic resources continue to undergo review of methodologies and historic data and incorporation of new methods into monitoring the sport fishery, native fish communities, food base, and water quality monitoring. Protocol review panels were held for the water quality program (Ruane et al., 2001), the Lees Ferry trout fishery (Culver et al., 2000) and for the aquatic program (Bradford et al., 2001), which includes the mainstem fishery downstream of Lees Ferry, and the aquatic food base program a system-wide perspective. Recommendations made for the native and non-native fishery programs have included increasing random sampling efforts, strengthening efforts associated with integration across disciplines and developing modeling efforts.
The water quality program is in the process of incorporating recommendations into a revised program, and the downstream fishery and food base program is also incorporating panel suggestions into the development of monitoring programs for these resources. As a result of recommendations, an effective mark-recapture program in the LCR and different stock assessment models for assessing the status and trends of the humpback chub have been developed. However, review findings on the aquatic food base program were insufficient because current understanding about linkages between lower trophic levels and food availability of fish were deemed inadequate to interpret foodbase in relation to management goals. They identified that further research was needed before a long-term monitoring program existed, because assumed linkages between foodbase and fishes had not been empirically established.