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Federal Register / Vol. 86, No. 29 / Tuesday, February 16, 2021 / Notices
the Skagit River in Washington. Fish would be captured by beach seine, handled weighed, measured, and checked for marks or tags, and released.
The purpose of the research is to assess juvenile salmonid habitat use and relative abundance in off-channel areas and thereby help improve efforts to increase access to off-channel areas and enhance rearing habitat quality in those areas. The SFEG would use the data to identify sites in need of restoration, target enhancement efforts, confirm post-project effectiveness, and guide future projects so that ongoing work can focus on appropriate areas and help create conditions that provide high quality rearing habitat. The project also aims to educate the public on the importance of floodplain habitat restoration for juvenile salmonids, and would contribute data to other regional research projects currently evaluating the role of off-channel habitats in salmonid growth and development. The researchers are not proposing to kill any fish they capture, but a small number of juvenile salmon and steelhead may be killed as an inadvertent result of these activities.

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NMFSs Southwest Fisheries Science Center is seeking to renew a permit that currently allows them to annually take listed salmonids while conducting research designed to: 1 Determine the inter-annual and seasonal variability in growth, feeding, and energy status among juvenile salmonids in the coastal ocean off northern and central California; 2 determine migration paths and spatial distribution among genetically distinct salmonid stocks during their early ocean residence; 3
characterize the biological and physical oceanographic features associated with juvenile salmon ocean habitat from the shore to the continental shelf break; 4
identify potential links between coastal geography, oceanographic features, and salmon distribution patterns; and 5
identify and test ecological indices for salmon survival. The renewed permit would allow the researchers to take juvenile and subadult CC Chinook, CVS
Chinook, LCR Chinook, SacR winter-run Chinook, SnkR spr/sum Chinook, CCC
coho, SONCC coho, CCV steelhead, CCC
steelhead, and NC steelhead.
This research would benefit listed fish by informing comprehensive lifecycle models that incorporate both freshwater and marine conditions and seek to account for the relationship between the two habitats. The data would also be used to identify and predict sources of salmon mortality at sea and thereby help managers develop indices of
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salmonid survival in the marine environment. Listed fish would be captured primarily via surface trawling, however beach seining would be used occasionally as would hook-and-line microtrolling. Subadult salmonids i.e., fish larger than 250 mm that survive capture would have fin tissue and scale samples taken, and then be released.
During the trawling operations, any subadult salmonids that do not survive capture, and all juvenile salmonids i.e., fish larger than 80 mm but less than 250
mm would be lethally sampled sacrificed in order to collect 1
otoliths for age and growth studies; 2
coded wire tags for origin and age of hatchery fish; 3 muscle tissue for stable isotopes and/or lipid assays; 4
stomachs and contents for diet studies;
and 5 other tissues including the heart, liver, intestines, pyloric caeca, and kidney for special studies upon request.
For the other types of capture, some of the fish may be tissue sampled, tagged, and released particularly adults, though some juveniles would still be lethally sampled for the reasons just described. In all cases, whenever a fish dies simply as a result of being captured, that fish would be used in place of an intentional mortality that is, instead of a fish that would otherwise be sacrificed.
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The Washington Department of Natural Resources DNR is seeking to renew a permit that allows them to annually take juvenile PS Chinook salmon and PS steelhead while conducting research in headwater streams on DNR-managed lands that drain into Puget Sound. Juvenile fish would be detected via backpack electrofishing encounters considered a capture event for this method and, if stunned, would be netted dip net and released in a low gradient stream segment or pool and allowed to recover.
The purpose of this research is to determine fish presence in small streams on state-managed lands to ensure that those streams are appropriately typed, adequately protected with riparian management zones RMZs, and adequately restored e.g., via removal of man-made structures that limit or restrict fish passage to upstream habitat. Data generated by this proposal would benefit listed fish by informing land management decision-making e.g., RMZ width, culvert replacement/
sizing, and it would also be submitted to DNR Forest Practices division to improve the existing stream type geographic information systems database. The researchers are not
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proposing to kill any fish captured, but a small number of juveniles may be killed as an inadvertent result of these activities.
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The Yakama Nation is seeking a 5year permit to annually take juvenile, natural MCR steelhead during the course of a research project designed to assess their current abundance in the Rock Creek watershed in south central Washington. Under the permit, the researchers would employ backpack electrofishing to capture a number of juvenile MCR steelhead. Some of those fish would be tagged with PIT-tags, and some would be tissue-sampled, but most would simply be handled and released.
The researchers would work primarily in five reference areas reaches and they would use mark/recapture techniques to study juvenile development and movement in Rock Creek. They would also conduct some boat electrofishing in the inundated pool downstream from the research area in Rock Creekprimarily to look at predator abundance. In addition, the researchers would take tissue samples from dead adults during spawning ground surveys. The purpose of the research is to assess the current distribution and relative abundance of MCR steelhead in selected portions of Rock Creek. That information would be integrated with information being collected on other ecological parameters and the researches would use that information as a whole to determine species status in the system and evaluate the effectiveness of several habitat restoration actions that have been going on there for a number of years. This research would benefit listed steelhead in that it would be used by fish managers such as the Rock Creek Subbasin Recovery Planning Group to prioritize to plan restoration, protection, and recovery actions for Rock Creek steelhead.
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NMFSs Northwest Fisheries Science Center NWFSC is seeking to renew for 5 years a permit that currently allows them to take juvenile LCR, SnkR fallrun, UCR spring-run, and UWR Chinook salmon; CR chum salmon; LCR coho salmon; SnkR sockeye salmon; and LCR, MCR, SnkR basin, UCR, and UWR
steelhead. The purpose of the study is to measure contaminant levels in resident sculpin in the lower Willamette River Oregon near a Superfund site with high levels of pollutants. The target species for sampling, prickly sculpin, is benthic-feeding and has a small home range, thus contaminant analysis of its tissues reflects environmental
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