One of the things we need to better understand is where the bottlenecks are and in which areas along the coast and in the rivers climate change is having its greatest effect. We know that, in freshwater systems, when we have premature mortality of returning adult salmon, they are most likely to die in the areas where they're experiencing prolonged periods of high thermal stress.
Sometimes conditions in a system will allow for cooler water to be introduced. That is obviously more common where there are dams, and unfortunately we don't have as many of those here as there are on the Columbia. But we need to do what we can control, which, for one thing, is that if we're going to rely on hatcheries, we need to produce the most robust fish we can. We know that the condition of fish coming out of fresh water is in one part a predictor of how well they are going to perform in the marine environment when they are exposed to different stressors. If we can produce optimally healthy fish that are ready for that transition to salt water and have as few infections as possible, we will increase the probability that those fish will actually survive long enough to either be prey for killer whales, in the case of chinook salmon, or be available for fisheries.
Certainly climate change affects more than just temperature. It affects the prey availability; it affects the predators, etc., so it is a larger issue than that. But in my view, identifying the areas of the coast—and this is something that I do believe our FIT-CHIPs are going to be really strong for—where there are stressor bottlenecks associated with climate change will allow us to determine what mitigative actions we can possibly take along different parts of the coast.