NOAA Fisheries awards US$9 million grant funding for Pacific salmon recovery

NOAA Fisheries has awarded more than US$9.2 million in grants funded by the Inflation Reduction Act to academic partners that will help recover threatened and endangered Pacific salmon.

These grants are part of the US government's US$27 million investment in Pacific salmon recovery science and will support research that will build upon decades of knowledge from NOAA and its state, tribal, and academic partners.

Six grants have been awarded to four NOAA cooperative institutes. The largest (US$7.48 million) was awarded to the University of California at Santa Cruz via the Cooperative Institute for Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Systems.

UC Santa Cruz researchers across disciplines, including molecular ecology, fisheries biology, and climate science, will work closely with NOAA scientists through the Fisheries Collaborative Program. They will produce transformative research in support of NOAA Fisheries' science-based salmon recovery plans.

"The aim of the work is to create new tools that can evaluate the effectiveness and cost of different recovery strategies and fill critical information gaps,” said Steve Lindley, Director of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center’s Fisheries Ecology Division in Santa Cruz, California. "This will include work across all the habitats that salmon use over the course of their lives—rivers, estuaries, and the ocean."

The other cooperative institutes are located at the University of Washington, Oregon State University, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. NOAA partners with 16 cooperative institutes, which include 80 universities across 33 states.