Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on stream restoration projects to benefit salmonids and other aquatic species across the Pacific Northwest, though only a small percentage of these projects are monitored to evaluate effectiveness and far fewer are tracked for more than 1 or 2 years. The Washington State Salmon Recovery Board and the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board have spent more than US$500 million on salmonid habitat restoration projects since 1999. We used a multiple before-after-control-impact design to programmatically evaluate the reach-scale physical and biological effectiveness of a subset of restoration actions. A total of 65 projects in six project categories (fish passage, instream habitat, riparian planting, livestock exclusion, floodplain enhancement, and habitat protection) were monitored over an 8-year period. We conducted habitat, fish, and macroinvertebrate surveys to calculate the following indicators: longitudinal pool cross section and depth, riparian shade and cover, large woody debris volumes, fish density, macroinvertebrate indices, and upland vegetation condition class. Results indicate that four categories (instream habitat, livestock exclusions, floodplain enhancements, and riparian plantings) have shown significant improvements in physical habitat after 5 years. Abundance of juvenile Coho Salmon Oncorhynchus kisutch increased significantly at fish passage projects and floodplain enhancement projects, but significant results were not detected for other fish species. Moreover, the biological response indicators of juvenile salmonid abundance and macroinvertebrate indices showed declines at instream habitat and habitat protection projects, respectively. Our results indicate that a subset of projects can be effectively evaluated programmatically, but power and sample size estimates indicate that two or more years of preproject data are necessary to adequately determine the effectiveness of many project types, particularly for fish. Programmatic evaluations of project effectiveness should include adequate preproject sampling and multiseason monitoring for fish species to address issues of variability that are likely to be encountered in large-scale monitoring programs.

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The 1975 and 1974 year classes of adult, wild summer and winter stcclheads (Salmo gairdneri) were genetically compared at five polymorphic enzyme loci: alpha-glyccrophosphate dchydrogenase-1; lactatc dchydrogenase-4; malatc dchydrogenasc-$,4; superoxide dimutasc-1; and phosphohexosc isomerase-$. Overall genetic differences between summer and winter steelhead groups were not significantly greater than genetic differences observed for 1973 and 1974 year classes compared within each group. These findings, in conjunction with field observations of known summer-winter steelhead spawning pairs, suggests that summer and winter steelheads in the Kalama River are not at present reproductively isolated.

In the Pacific northwest, brown trout (Salmo trutta) are found in selected streams and lakes east of the Cascade Mountain Range but have not been reported heretofore from coastal streams or tributaries of the lower Columbia River. Two brown trout were captured—one in 1979 at Kalama Falls salmon hatchery and the other in 1984 in Herrington Creek, a tributary of the South Fork Toutle River in Washington. Both fish probably came from previous plantings elsewhere. Viable anadromous populations via upriver or lake plantings have not yet been established in the lower Columbia River tributaries but could become so in the future.

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