The new NWIFC Magazine is online and features a story about how the Nisqually Tribe rescued a rare and culturally important plant. From the Magazine:

Two hundred camas bulbs that were almost buried under a new road are now part of the Nisqually Tribe’s community garden.

“We  got  these  plants  out  just in time,” said Caitlin Krenn, the community    garden    coordinator.  A  work  party  of  volunteers quickly  mobilized  last  spring  to salvage  the  plants  before  they were paved over with a new by-pass in Yelm.

The    two-year-old    community garden is located in the upland  portion  of  the  Nisqually sxwda?deb Cultural   Center,   a former ranch the tribe purchased almost 10 years ago as part of a salmon  habitat  restoration  project.
…

“Our major villages were usually located between fishing sites and  camas  prairies,”  said  Geor-gianna Kautz, the tribe’s natural resources manager.

Anderson Glacier is the headwaters of the Quinault River. Larry Workman, QIN

The new NWIFC News features a story about the concerns of the Quinault Indian Nation about shrinking glaciers that feed two major coastal rivers. From the magazine:

The glaciers that feed the Queets and Quinault rivers are just fractions of their size today from a few decades ago. As they recede, they threaten salmon stocks important to the Quinault Indian Nation (QIN).

“These glaciers once provided large amounts of cold water year round that maintained higher summer flows,” said Tyler Jurasin, QIN operations section manager. Lower flows mean less habitat for spring/summer chinook runs in the Queets and Quinault rivers on the Olympic Peninsula, which already face many other threats to their survival.

“In addition to lower summertime flows, we are dealing with a lot of sediment released by the retreat of the Humes and Anderson glaciers,” Jurasin said.

You can download the entire magazine or any in the archives here. You can also read it at slideshare and scribd.

In this 1979 photo, a Quinault Indian Nation tribal member walks the beach in heavy foam near Duck Creek, several miles north of Taholah. Larry Workman, QIN

The new NWIFC Magazine features the efforts of coastal tribes to track harmful algea blooms in the Pacific Ocean and their impact on wildlife and fish stocks.

From the magazine:

In only the second incident of its kind reported in scientific journals on the West Coast, thousands of seabirds died on the Washington coast as the result of the effects of a harmful algae bloom.

…

Tribal members and technical staff from the Hoh, Makah and Quileute tribes, and Quinault Indian Nation (QIN) were among those who helped record the magnitude of the problem. They counted and identified bird carcasses and gathered water samples for testing. Results were used by ocean researchers to assess
the event.

For some tribal members, the bird die-off wasn’t anything new; they’d seen similar events in the 1950s and 1960s.

You can download the pdf version of the magazine here and read it here at scribd.

The archives of the NWIFC Magazine are here.

From the management roundup:

While overall salmon populations continue to decline mostly because of lost and damaged habitat, 2009 was a bright year for many stocks. Indian and non-Indian fishermen enjoyed harvests in some areas for the first time in years. While the tribal and state co-managers work hard every day to minimize impacts to wild salmon stocks from harvest and hatchery practices, salmon recovery will ultimately be successful only with a strong commitment to protecting and restoring salmon habitat.

You can download the pdf version of the magazine here.

The archives of the NWIFC Magazine are here.

Lorraine Loomis, the Swinomish Tribe’s fisheries manager, has participated in every North of Falcon process since the 1980s and acts at the treaty tribes’ lead negotiator. From the article:

Cooperative co-management continues to point the way to wild salmon recovery in western Washington. “If we didn’t truly believe we can rebuild these stocks, we wouldn’t be working as hard as we do,” said Lorraine Loomis, Swinomish tribal fisheries manager.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the North of Falcon (NOF) cooperative salmon season setting process for treaty and non-treaty fisheries in western Washington. Loomis
has coordinated tribal participation in NOF since the beginning.

“There wasn’t a lot of trust at first,” she said. “The tribes and state would develop their fisheries management data separately.” Loomis credits Bill Wilkerson, then director of the
Washington Department of Fisheries, with helping to ignite change.

Tribal and state biologists began working together to develop a unified set of fisheries management data that all parties could accept. “Developing agreed-upon data was a real turning point,” she said.

From the article:

Like humans, fish can carry pathogens that don’t kill them. Different strains of the same pathogen, however, can be lethal. That’s the problem confronting the Quinault Indian Nation (QIN) with their steelhead enhancement efforts in the Quinault River watershed.

Quinault River steelhead have been infected with a strain of Infectious Hematopoetic Necrosis (IHN), a virus that has killed hundreds of thousands of steelhead in the Columbia River watershed since it was first detected in hatchery trout in Idaho in the 1970s and spread to the lower Columbia River by the 1990s. It attacks the blood-forming tissues such as the kidney and spleen, causing death by anemia.

Over ten years of archives of the NWIFC Magazine are available here.