Basin commission meets Friday

SANDPOINT — The Idaho Department of Fish & Game is slated to brief the Pend Oreille Basin Commission Friday on its effort to find a new benchmark to guide winter pool recommendations for Lake Pend Oreille.

The basin commission’s meeting starts at 9 a.m. at the Bonner County Administration Building at the corner of U.S. Highway 2 and Division Avenue.

The department resolved to develop new ways of using kokanee research to justify recommendations it makes for winter lake elevations. The department has relied on egg-to-fry survival rates since the 1990s to recommend a higher winter pool.

But the survival rate has fallen into question as a reliable metric after research biologists encountered three straight years of implausibly high survival rates.

The department contends it needs stronger science to buoy recommendations for a higher winter pool, which maximizes the amount of shoreline spawning habitat. Higher winter pools also make the lake easier to access by boaters.

Andy Dux, Fish & Game’s principal fishery research biologist in the Panhandle, is scheduled to update the lakes commission on the latest information in the department’s spawning kokanee research. Dux will also give a presentation on 2013 kokanee population surveys.

The corps of engineers will also be updating the basin commission Pend Oreille River temperature modeling to help determine if releasing water from the lake during the late summer or early autumn would aid downstream trout populations.

The Kalispel Tribe of Indians and BPA struck an agreement last year to examine whether the early release of water could cool the river to improve habitat for bull trout, westslope cutthroat trout and other cold-water fish species.