The U.S. District Court in Oregon Wednesday (Feb. 25) partially approved a preliminary injunction—requested last year by conservation groups, tribes, and the state of Oregon—that would make small changes in how federal dams are operated for salmon and steelhead protections on the Columbia and Snake rivers.
Beginning this spring, more water will be spilled at eight federal dams on the two rivers during spring, summer and fall/winter to aid the safe passage of juvenile salmon and steelhead, sending more of the fish over the dam rather than through turbines.
State fisheries managers have set the initial opening for recreational spring Chinook salmon angling on the mainstem Columbia River from Buoy 10 near Astoria, OR to the Oregon and Washington state line near Pasco, WA. It’s a year in which fewer fish are expected than had returned to the river last year, but the 2026 forecast is still higher than the 10-year average return of spring Chinook.
A federal project that will expand and improve navigation in areas of the Columbia River Near Longview and Kalama took a step toward completion when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concluded in its environmental review of the project that it would cause no significant impacts to fish and wildlife. mitting timelines, and reduce or eliminate extraneous regulations and paperwork that it says is slowing its delivery of civil works projects and programs.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Portland District, is vowing to become more efficient when approving and building infrastructure projects, such as the recently proposed power line under the Columbia River and the two new turning basins at the ports of Kalama and Longview, WA.
Dubbing the effort ‘Building Infrastructure, Not Paperwork’, the Corps says the initiative will provide a focus on the agency’s cover vivil works missions. At the same time, according to the Corps, it will minimize non-core programs, direct funding to priority water resources projects that will provide the greatest benefits to the nation, shorten permitting timelines, and reduce or eliminate extraneous regulations and paperwork that it says is slowing its delivery of civil works projects and programs.
The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission voted 6-1 to deny a petition that requested crab fishery rules be modified to further reduce the risk of whale entanglement. It urged the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife to continue its planned rulemaking process and engagement with NOAA fisheries to obtain Endangered Species Act coverage.
In August 2025, two biologists from NOAA Fisheries’ Alaska Region Protected Resources Division traveled to St. George Island to conduct routine maintenance on NOAA facilities. Upon their arrival, they began receiving reports from residents about a high number of northern fur seals found dead in unexpected locations on the island. Over the next week, the biolgists followed up on the reports and confirmed the deaths of 13 seals. The seals showed no obvious trauma or other apparent cause of death.
The Bonneville Power Administration’s first quarter financial forecast shows mixed results for the agency’s expected end-of-year performance. While the outlook is positive for most measures, agency net revenues currently fall short of the target for fiscal year 2026, and BPA’s debt-to-asset ratio is on track with caution.
The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s refusal to develop a national gray wolf recovery plan under the Endangered Species Act. The service in late 2025 published a finding that listing the gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act is “no longer appropriate” and that the agency would not be preparing an updated recovery plan.
A debilitating hoof disease affecting elk herds across the Pacific Northwest appears to be driven not by a single pathogen but by multiple bacterial species working together, according to a study led by researchers in Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has reached a significant goal in conservation science by gaining the ability to study more closely the behavioral patterns of the Sierra Nevada red fox in the southern Sierra Nevada. The department’s capacity to closely track the fox’s movements is a critical step toward understanding and protecting one of California’s rarest and most elusive carnivores.
A new analysis shows that the Pacific Northwest’s mature and old-growth forests are most at risk of severe wildfire in areas that historically burned frequently at lower severity The study by scientists at Oregon State University and USDA Forest Service Research & Development is important because those forests are culturally, economically and ecologically significant, supporting biodiversity while storing vast amounts of carbon, and they are under increasing threat of stand-replacing wildfire.
Forecasts for the 2026 runs of spring and summer Chinook salmon and winter steelhead into the Columbia River are coming in lower than last year’s actual returns for each of the stocks, according to a joint state and tribe stock status report. The report released by Oregon, Washington and tribal fish and wildlife staffs is a compilation of 2025 returns of Chinook, winter and summer steelhead, sockeye salmon and shad to the Columbia River Basin, as well as 2025 recreational, commercial and tribal harvest totals.
A federal judge signaled that he could accept at least some operational changes at lower Columbia and Snake river dams proposed by the state of Oregon and conservation groups in October. However, it will depend on what plaintiffs and defendants agree on in a long-running court case that could decide the fate of threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead.
Columbia river salmon recovery programs fared better in the 2026 federal budget than tribes, advocates, bureaucrats, and biologists feared.
President Donald Trump had made major cuts to the program in 2025.
But those cuts brought together a wide-ranging group of powerful interests around the Columbia River Basin to ask Congress to fund programs such hatcheries, habitat restoration, and sea lion killing.
