The Klamath Basin Integrated Fisheries Restoration and Monitoring Plan (IFRMP)

This plan is meant to serve as a dynamic roadmap that describes the highest priority functional watershed restoration and monitoring actions that can help reverse the declines of multiple native Klamath Basin fish populations to help benefit ecosystems and communities.

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Klamath Basin IFRMP Vision

The vision of the Klamath Basin IFRMP is to provide a unifying framework for planning the coordinated restoration and recovery of native fish species from the headwaters to the Pacific Ocean, while improving flows, water quality, habitat and ecosystem processes.

The IFRMP uses a structured, updatable approach to restoration project prioritization based on a process-based approach. The IFRMP’s underpinnings and prioritization methods identify and address multiple root causes of watershed degradation by prioritizing the restoration of landscape-scale ecological processes and functions to benefit the entire aquatic ecosystem, rather than the traditional focus on addressing the resulting symptoms for individual sites and species.
The IFRMP provides an answer to the basic question:

Given all that we know, which watershed restoration actions will provide the broadest possible benefits to functional watershed processes and native focal fish species, both within each sub-basin and throughout the Basin?

To answer this question, ESSA Technologies Ltd. has drawn on decades of prior and ongoing research and planning efforts in the basin and worked with a diverse group of committed participants from across the basin to develop and apply a multi-criteria scoring method. The IFRMP prioritization method is embedded in the Klamath IFRMP Restoration Prioritization Tool that provides a systematic, repeatable and transparent prioritization framework to identify those restoration actions that yield the greatest benefits to multiple focal fish species. Priorities that emerge from the Tool provide a consistent starting point for more detailed and contextualized discussions about selecting and sequencing Klamath Basin restoration actions.

The primary outputs of the IFRMP planning process are summarized as follows:

  • A list of priority restoration project concepts by subbasin
  • Recommendations for closing important basin-wide gaps in monitoring
  • Cost estimates for these restoration and monitoring priorities
  • Recommendations for ongoing Plan implementation and adaptively updating above products.

These outputs were derived through a remarkably collaborative series of engagements by hundreds of basin participants 2016-2022.

Formally, these outputs and other Plan products are available from the links below:

  1. Executive Summary
  2. IFRMP Plan Document (hi-res 83mb) | (lo-res 49mb)
  3. IFRMP Restoration Action Agenda (2023)
  4. Klamath IFRMP Restoration Prioritization Tool
  5. Klamath Basin Synthesis Report (2017)

  6. Document Library

Tools

The data and mechanics behind our prioritization process are unified in the web-based Klamath IFRMP Restoration Prioritization Tool that allows users to browse project details (including action types, proposed project area, and rough estimated cost ranges), view the individual criteria scores and underlying data that contribute to overall rankings, and explore how rankings change when criteria weights are adjusted to reflect changing restoration priorities.
These tutorial videos are a short and simple way to get acquainted with most features of the tool (however, note that some newer features are not yet reflected in these videos). We encourage you to take a look at the updated tool after starting with the tutorial videos.
View the Prioritization Tool
Guest, read-only access: username: ifrmpguest  /  password: table-box-12

IFRMP Resources

Project Partners:

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Klamath Basin Integrated Fisheries Restoration & Monitoring Plan (IFRMP) completed for the US Fish and Wildlife Service

The IFRMP (Plan) was completed in partnership with the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission and ESSA with extensive input from over 50 partners between 2016 and 2023. After seven years in the making and hundreds of hours of collaborative discussions with tribal, state, federal, and conservation partners, the IFRMP is ready for implementation. The Plan will serve as a dynamic roadmap describing the highest priority watershed restoration and monitoring actions to help reverse the declines of multiple native Klamath Basin fish populations to benefit ecosystems and communities. Focal fish species include Chinook and coho salmon, steelhead, bull trout, redband trout, Pacific lamprey, Lost River sucker (C’waam), shortnose sucker (Koptu), green sturgeon and eulachon. 

“Impacts to native fish have been deeply felt by many who live, work, and fish across the Klamath Basin,” said Service Regional Director Paul Souza. “The IFRMP provides a unifying framework for coordinated restoration and recovery of native fish species from the headwaters to the Pacific Ocean, while improving flows, water quality, habitat and ecosystem processes for the benefit of local communities.”

The IFRMP is made up of several components including:

  • A list of shorter-term priority restoration project by subbasins known as the Restoration Action Agenda 
  • Cost estimates for restoration projects
  • Recommendations for closing basin-wide gaps in monitoring 
  • Cost estimates for restoration and monitoring priorities 
  • Recommendations for ongoing implementation and adaptively updating the above projects.

This work has delivered the vision of the Klamath Basin IFRMP to provide a unifying framework for planning coordinated recovery of native fish species from the headwaters to the Pacific Ocean while improving flows, water quality, habitat, and ecosystem processes. It is very rare to achieve the degree of sustained collaboration afforded by the IFRMP planning process and to emerge with a Basin-wide package of practical restoration and monitoring priorities. 

The Plan is now available for use by all partners and stakeholders engaging in fisheries restoration and is intended to be updated periodically as restoration work is completed and as new ideas and information are brought forward. 

All are to be commended for their efforts and the legacy of collaboration that was created.