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.

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:

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.
Guest, read-only access: username: ifrmpguest  /  password: table-box-12

IFRMP Resources

Project Partners: