Introduction & Objectives

The U.S. Navy conducts military training and testing in Pacific Northwest range areas to prepare combat-ready military forces, whereas National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries is responsible for managing threatened and endangered species in marine waters and providing permits to the U.S. Navy. NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Navy share the common goals of minimizing the impact of military training and testing activities on endangered species without compromising training and testing efforts. This project continues and expands vital geographic distributional data within the Navy’s range areas, allowing the Navy the flexibility to proceed with training and testing while providing protective measures for anadromous bull trout, salmonids, killer whales, and baleen whales. This project will specifically support continued Pacific salmonid studies in the offshore waters of the NWTT Study Area and assess their overlap with ESA-listed bull trout, Pacific salmon, and SRKW. 

Objectives include:

1) Determine the occurrence of bull trout within and near the boundaries of the NWTT;

2) Determine the spatiotemporal occurrence of killer whale and baleen whale in the NWTT;

3) Characterize the occurrence of endangered fish species within the NWTT 

Technical Approach

Bull trout will be implanted with acoustic tags with a subset of tags transmitting temperature and pressure data to provide additional information about marine habitat use. Receiver stations will include a SoundTrap for recording vocalizations of marine mammals (in particular killer whales and baleen whales such as humpback whales), and an acoustic receiver for detecting fish tags such as those currently deployed on Chinook and Coho salmon, and those to be deployed on bull trout. 

This project also supports recovery and deployment of two existing and one new passive acoustic recording moorings and the processing of two years of acoustic recordings from two existing mooring locations and one year of acoustics recordings from one new mooring location.  

Progress & Results

Moorings have been recovered and redeployed. Data analysis has begun.