Critically low water in northwest Colorado forced the closure of one of the region’s most popular stretches of water to anglers.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife is closing the half-mile stretch of the Yampa River below Stagecoach Dam and the boundary of Stagecoach State Park.
"We are trying to be as proactive as possible to protect the outstanding catch and release trout fishery we have downstream of Stagecoach Reservoir," said Bill Atkinson, area aquatic biologist.
"This stretch of the river receives a tremendous amount of fishing pressure, especially in the spring when other resources might not be as accessible.
This emergency closure is an effort to protect the resource by giving the fish a bit of a reprieve when they are stressed like they are right now."
Citations will be issued to anyone fishing the stretch of water once it’s been closed.
Low water flows force fish to concentrate in residual pool habitat and become stressed as they compete for food.
Fish also become easier targets for anglers, an added stressor that can result in increased hooking mortality, the agency said.
It could take several years for fish populations to recover if the stretch is harmed by low flows, the agency said.
Should flows increase for a continuous period over the summer, authorities will reconsider the emergency fishing closure, said Lori Martin, senior aquatic biologist.

Endangered Species Act.
From the Department of Water Resources: “Federal agencies responsible for the protection of species listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) today provided biological opinions on the proposed construction and operation of California WaterFix.
Under the ESA, other federal agencies must consult with the Service and NOAA when their activities have the potential to impact federally endangered or threatened species.
The Service biological opinion is available here, and the biological opinion from NOAA Fisheries is here.
“The wisest thing to do in the face of uncertainty is to monitor constantly, test hypotheses regularly, adjust operations accordingly, and reassess,” said California Department of Water Resources (DWR) Acting Director Bill Croyle.
“In the Delta, we always will be adjusting to improve resiliency and protect the environment.
The biological opinions are important components of the analysis of the environmental effects of WaterFix.
These biological opinions will also be considered by permitting agencies, including the State Water Resources Control Board in its hearing now underway on a petition by DWR and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to allow for the change in points of diversion to add three new intakes on the Sacramento River as part of WaterFix.
WaterFix would not change the volume of water to which the SWP and CVP are entitled to divert, but would add additional diversion points in a more environmentally protective place that also is easier to safeguard against natural disaster such as earthquake and sea-level rise due to climate change.” Stay tuned to Maven’s Notebook for coverage later today from the media call; Reactions to be posted tomorrow … ——————————————– Sign up for daily email service and you’ll always be one of the first to know!
Sign up for daily emails and get all the Notebook’s aggregated and original water news content delivered to your email box by 9AM.

Dennis Nixon: Cuts in grants, programs would hurt oceans.
A portion of the fishing fleet harbored at Galilee, in 2014.
He cites the importance of expanding offshore energy resources — traditional as well as renewable — and increasing seafood exports to reduce America’s $13 billion seafood trade deficit.
NOAA, as its name implies, is responsible for the research, management, and support for the ocean exploration and economic development that the president calls for, and many of the areas specifically targeted for cuts would reduce U.S. capacity in offshore energy and seafood production.
Speaking from personal experience as the director of Rhode Island Sea Grant — which, as part of the NOAA budget, would be “terminated” along with the $73 million National Sea Grant College Program that encompasses 33 state programs — I can say that one such example is the development of the nation’s first offshore wind farm in the waters off Block Island.
“The whole fishing scene is very intriguing to me in that I’m obsessed with the problem that we have a $13 billion trade deficit in fish and fish products.
… With all the water surrounding us and all the lakes and rivers, it seems weird that we should have a deficit, so that’s one of the areas we’re going to be focusing very much on,” Ross said, according to a report in E&E News.
Still, real growth in seafood production will come from the development of aquaculture.
The administration’s budget proposes to eliminate the $9 million nationwide Sea Grant aquaculture initiative.
Dennis Nixon is the director of Rhode Island Sea Grant and a professor of marine affairs at the University of Rhode Island.

Mugabe’s Ocean Conference Explained.
The Minister of Environment, Water and Climate, Oppah Muchinguri Kashiri says despite being a landlocked country, Zimbabwe takes the implementation of SDG 14 seriously and is also committed to good land use and agricultural practices to prevent water pollution.
Minister Muchinguri Kashiri said this during a presentation during a Partnership Dialogue on Fisheries at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York today.
Minister Muchinguri told the gathering of partnership organisations, governments, private sector and non-governmental organisations that Zimbabwe has extensive inland water resources with over 10 000 medium to large dams where small scale fisheries operate with permits and in the process contribute significantly to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2 and 3 which focus on ensuring food security and improving nutrition and healthy lives of the Zimbabwean people.
She explained that various measures that Zimbabwe has put in place to ensure sustainable use and management of fisheries through collaboration of law enforcement agents and the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority.
Muchinguri Kashiri also spoke about the regional partnerships such The Zambezi River Authority between Zimbabwe and Zambia, as well as bilateral partnerships with Mozambique and South Africa where the two sides jointly manage fish stocks in shared waters, a move that has reduced overfishing.
“Zimbabwe’s conservation management framework also involves imposing partial fishing moratorium to enhance breeding and replenishment of fish stocks.
Zimbabwe also confiscates illegal fishing rigs and cancels licences and imposes heavy penalties to those who are involved,” she said.
Minister Muchinguri Kashiri also announced that Zimbabwe has launched Command Fishing Programme largely driven by rural communities especially women and youths at a small scale level, and appealed for technical cooperation in technology transfer, and fighting pollution.
“We need financial resources and monitoring capacity to ensure there is no misuse of fertilisers and pesticides which if not properly applied can pollute waters which end up in the seas.

From the California Natural Resources Agency: With the latest science showing that nearly half of California’s native salmon and trout species face extinction in the next 50 years, state agencies have committed to a suite of actions to improve survival rates, including restoring habitat, improving stream flow, removing stream barriers and reintroducing species to ideal habitat.
These actions and more are described in a Sacramento Valley Salmon Resiliency Strategy released today and available here.
These fish travel hundreds of miles of Central Valley streams and spend several years in the Pacific Ocean, so the strategy targets the freshwater streams where salmon and steelhead eggs hatch, the streams and floodplains where young fish rear, the Delta channels the fish must travel to reach the ocean, and the many barriers that hinder adult fish returning to spawn in natal streams.
Reintroduce winter-run Chinook salmon to Battle Creek and the McCloud River.
The State’s aim is to have water districts that divert from these streams reach agreements that improve flow, stream temperature, and habitat conditions for salmon and steelhead.
The Sacramento Valley Salmon Resiliency Strategy mirrors the Delta Smelt Resiliency Strategy developed by the State in 2016 to rapidly improve conditions for an endangered fish species found only in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
The Salmon Resiliency Strategy relies heavily on the 2014 final recovery plan drafted by the National Marine Fisheries Service, which is responsible for recovery of sea-going fish under the U.S.
Other state and federal plans also support the strategy, such as the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s 2016 Battle Creek Winter-Run Chinook Salmon Reintroduction Plan.
A two-year update on California EcoRestore, the state’s effort to restore Delta wetlands habitat, is available here.
Sign up for daily emails and get all the Notebook’s aggregated and original water news content delivered to your email box by 9AM.

A landowner has been convicted of a breach to the Water Pollution Act in Glenamaddy, Co Galway which resulted in a fish kill. At a sitting of Tuam District Court, Michael Conneally of Boyounagh, Glenamaddy pleaded guilty to permitting silage effluent to enter the Yellow River, a tributary of the Clare River, on June 15 2016. David Harrington, Senior Fisheries Environmental Officer at Inland Fisheries Ireland gave evidence of tracing the source of the fish kill back to a pipe originating from a silage pit on Mr Conneally’s land. The pollution incident resulted in damage to fish stock in the Yellow River, which is an important spawning tributary for salmon and trout with the absence of aquatic life noted for a considerable distance downstream. Mr Conneally fully co-operated with officers from Inland Fisheries Ireland and sought…

Decimated by drought, salmon fishing teeters on the brink in California.
To receive it regularly, please sign up here.
Five dry years brought abysmal conditions for the hatching and survival of new fish.
The number of adult fall-run Chinook salmon has subsequently plummeted, with regulators this year expecting the worst return ever of fish to spawn on the Klamath River: 54,000, down from 1.6 million in 2012.
It’s a brutal blow for the salmon fishing industry.
State and federal officials have imposed severe restrictions, with ocean and river fisheries in the most northern swath of California closed entirely for the rest of the year, even for recreational anglers.
The Joint Committee on Fisheries and Aquaculture will try to bring further attention to the salmon fishing crisis with a hearing on its causes, impacts and possible policy actions, 1 p.m. in Room 2040 of the Capitol.
That issue, a symptom of the state’s broader housing crunch, will be the focus of the Joint Committee on the Arts’ annual review of the creative economy, 1:30 p.m. in Room 3191 of the Capitol.
Those who need help putting it all into context may want to check out the latest conference from the Independent Voter Project, the largely corporate-funded nonprofit that promotes a less partisan approach to politics, focusing on the state of health care in California.
They will present ACA 15, a proposed constitutional amendment requiring voter approval of enhanced pension benefits, 10:30 a.m. in Room 125 of the Capitol.

Over 1,200 tonnes of fish have so far died in several haors (water bodies) of Netrakona, Sunamganj, Habiganj and Kishoreganj districts, said fisheries and livestock secretary Maksudul Hasan Khan on Sunday, reports UNB news agency. Of them, Netrakona saw the most deaths of fish, he said while talking to UNB over phone. The fish might have died for various reasons, including water pollution…

Commercial salmon season slashed by lingering drought impacts.
California’s commercial salmon industry is being slashed this year because of lingering environmental impacts from the drought.
In a decision expected to make chinook salmon scarcer at markets and restaurants, federal fishery managers called Tuesday for sharp restrictions on commercial catches in response to low numbers of the adult fish swimming off the Pacific Coast.
“It’s a financial disaster.
This is really going to hurt people who rely on fishing for a living, both culturally and in the pocket book.” The Pacific Fishery Management Council called for sharp restrictions that limit the commercial season to August and September off the coast from Pigeon Point near San Francisco to Point Arena in Mendocino County.
This represents about half the season in normal years.
The entire commercial salmon season will be canceled this year in an area from Florence in southern Oregon to Horse Mountain south of Eureka to protect struggling Klamath River salmon, the Pacific Fishery Management Council decided.
While officially a recommendation, the advice is expected to be adopted by May 1 by the National Marine Fisheries Service.
Federal fishery biologists say the restrictions are warranted because of diminished numbers of adult fish swimming off the Pacific Coast before they return through the Delta to spawn in Central Valley rivers, or return up the Klamath River to reach spawning grounds there.
Members of the federal fishery council say sharp fishing limits are necessary to protect Central Valley chinook salmon, including the endangered Sacramento River winter run salmon.

PORTLAND — The Endangered Salmon and Fisheries Predation Prevention Act, introduced April 8 by U.S. Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) and Kurt Schrader (D-OR), aims to “clear up inefficiencies and red tape to allow more effective management of alarming predation levels by California sea lions on Columbia River spring Chinook and other species.” If approved by Congress and the president, the legislation will authorize states and tribes to remove a limited number of predatory sea lions.
It allows active management of the growing Columbia River sea lion population and removes a requirement that individual sea lions be identified as preying on salmon before they can be removed.
So while there are management efforts to reduce pinniped predation in the vicinity of Bonneville Dam, this management effort is insufficient to reduce the severity of the threat, especially pinniped predation in the Columbia River estuary (river miles 1 to 145) and at Willamette Falls.” A limited removal program has been in effect since 2011 but the NMFS review concluded that the current program doesn’t do enough to protect endangered salmon.
This represents a 5.8 percent loss of the 2016 spring Chinook run a quarter mile of Bonneville Dam alone.
NOAA Fisheries Service also estimates that up to 45 percent of the 2014 spring Chinook run was potentially lost to sea lions in the 145 river miles between the estuary and Bonneville Dam.
Tribal leaders have expressed support for a key provision in the bill that would provide the Warm Springs, Umatilla, Yakama and Nez Perce tribes with access to the same authority currently available only to states.
Those who suggest that this — sea lions eating fish near Bonneville Dam — is a natural phenomenon are not familiar with either the normal habitat of sea lions or the hard-fought compromises that so many in the Columbia Basin have reached in order to try and have a productive fishery,” the Yakama said.
“Our tribes are working hard to restore ecological balance to a highly altered and degraded river system.
“The Endangered Salmon and Fisheries Predation Prevention Act honors the underlying intent of both laws while providing professional fisheries managers with tools to manage both protected and endangered species.” Sea lion populations have seen resurgence under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
In 1972 when the Marine Mammal Protection Act was passed, the California sea lion population hovered around 30,000 animals.