Bull Trout Recovery

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Monitoring and Evaluation Guidance

United States Fish and Wildlife Service

Bull trout (Salvelinus confluentus) in the coterminous United States were listed as threatened, under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1999 due to declines in distribution, abundance, and habitat quality over their entire range. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) subsequently (2002) released a draft recovery plan for bull trout. Proper monitoring and evaluation are considered critical to characterize the ongoing status of bull trout populations, and to allow for an assessment of recovery action effectiveness. There is however considerable uncertainty in how, where and when to best monitor bull trout population attributes and their habitats. In addition, there is much work to do in defining which analytical techniques will yield statistically reliable and rigorous estimates of key population and habitat performance measures.

To help address these monitoring and evaluation challenges the USFWS established a bull trout Recovery Monitoring and Evaluation Technical Group (RMEG). The RMEG is a multi-agency body chaired by USFWS technical staff and independently facilitated by ESSA Technologies. In association with recovery planning for bull trout the RMEG has four primary tasks:

  1. recovery program review;
  2. guidance on monitoring designs;
  3. guidance on specific monitoring techniques; and
  4. review of analytical methods.

ESSA has lead a continuing series of workshops over the past five years of the RMEG project to advance technical discussions of bull trout monitoring issues and to develop analytical tasks that would help to reduce monitoring uncertainties. A series of workshop reports produced by ESSA document the results of work to date, and describe the continuing development of RMEG questions, approaches, designs and analyses. In 2008 ESSA, in conjunction with the USFWS and RMEG participants, synthesized this work into a general guidance document for bull trout monitoring and evaluation that will be used by U.S. federal, state and tribal fish and wildlife agencies.