Week 3- Politics & Science

          I began week three of my internship with a progress report, which demonstrated the general process I’ve been following to filter the SELFE data and generate figures as well as what values the other two interns, Cynthia Boshell and Althea Walker, and I are using for the lamprey and salmon filter values. After the progress report we met Romeo Wisco, creator of the hydro-system simulator HYDSIM, to learn about his model and how it might be incorporated into our project. As it turns out, HYDSIM is an enormous database that yields different scenario conditions of hydropower operation. Thus Romeo’s database/model will be very important for future analysis in this project to view habitat opportunity changes in different treaty and hydropower operation scenarios.
          Although Romeo’s database is quite extensive and has many possible scenarios to evaluate, the problems come with choosing which scenarios to evaluate. Because SELFE takes a while to run, it’s important to pick a set of the most influential scenarios of the CRT. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Thus the majority of my third week was spent at CRITFC listening to meetings on which of those 3-5 scenarios are the most important to evaluate and how they should be chosen. The issues at hand are no longer simply limitations with science but rather limitations due to politics and the time-consuming or rather sluggish pace that is politics.