From the Summer 2025 Sea Star
By Jess Davis, WSG Science Communications Fellow
Big actions often start with simple dreams. Nearly 40 years ago, many Washington state salmon fishermen began noticing declining stocks in salmon populations. Livelihoods impacted, a group of these fishermen felt a sense of urgency to initiate an effort to reinvigorate Washington salmon fishery stocks. The simple dream of reinstating the status quo, of restoring a sense of normalcy in the day-to-day life of salmon and fishermen, is how Long Live the Kings (LLTK) was born.
LLTK is a nonprofit organization that advocates for salmon restoration and sustainable fishing practices in the Pacific Northwest. Their vision? A Northwest where humans, bolstered by a thriving economy, exist in synergistic harmony with vibrant, healthy and flourishing salmon populations. Their work to realize this vision began with starting a salmon hatchery, first on Orcas Island and eventually expanding to Hood Canal. Over the decades, LLTK’s work garnered attention and expanded. Other organizations increasingly launched their own salmon-recovery initiatives. While immensely helpful for restoring local salmon populations, this work was largely localized and often uncoordinated across the groups.
Knowing these efforts would only go so far, LLTK sought to lower the barriers faced by salmon through coordinated action. With support from Washington Sea Grant, LLTK created the Salmon and Climate Initiative to foster connection and collaboration for the sake of salmon conservation on a broader scale.
The issue with localized salmon recovery efforts, or any conservation project for that matter, is that natural ecosystems are all interconnected. They rely on ecosystem health to thrive. Additionally, and of utmost importance for species-specific conservation efforts, natural ecosystems do not adhere to administrative boundaries.
Take the life history of king salmon, namesake of LLTK, for instance. These fish begin as eggs that incubate in gravel beds of rivers or creeks, and once they hatch, they begin preparing for their journey to the sea. Once they move seaward and eventually migrate into the open ocean, they remain there as long as five years, traveling hundreds — if not thousands — of miles during their saltwater residency. This means that one salmon can inhabit countless jurisdictions during their lifecycle: unregulated international open ocean waters, multiple states’ exclusive economic zones, state, or even county regulated rivers and streams. This phenomenon poses a problem in a world where all natural systems are interconnected, yet all regulatory agencies are not.
LLTK hopes to further realize their vision of revitalizing salmon populations through the creation of the Salmon and Climate Initiative. The ultimate goal of this program is to make salmon more resilient to environmental changes, yet LLTK realized that the first step in attaining this goal is to break down barriers between various regulatory agencies and interest groups at the watershed level. This means that they needed to get diverse perspectives from across the Pacific Coast into the same room to answer questions such as, “What is working for you in salmon recovery? What are your limitations and how does climate change affect these? What support are you looking for at a regional scale?”
Before that, however, they needed to identify the key players in the room that would represent these diverse perspectives. To do this, they created a core project team consisting of non-profit (LLTK and the Pacific Salmon Foundation), Tribal (Salmon Defense, Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe), Public (Governor’s Salmon Recovery Office), and Academic (Kerry Naish and Lisa Seeb from the University of Washington) bodies to develop an in-person workshop bringing together local leaders of salmon recovery efforts along the Pacific Coast.
Luckily for all of salmon lovers, they were successful. The first Salmon and Climate Initiative collaborative meeting was held in December of 2023, and included over 70 folks from California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alaska, British Columbia, and Yukon. While this was a strategic development workshop, held to build a collaborative framework and leverage existing local initiatives to galvanize watershed-scale planning and management practices, LLTK did what many thought was impossible: they brought people together from across geographic boundaries and professional spheres, which is no easy task.
During their time together at the Salmon and Climate Initiative collaborative meeting, experts brainstormed ideas for actions that could be included in an action plan for the first five years of the project. In 2025, they began developing the first Action Plan, which will outline specific action items that can be undertaken on a larger scale, such as funding acquisition, dam removal, identification of pathways to introduce salmon species that may be more successful under future environmental conditions, and more. In this short amount of time, over 470 action ideas were described across six themes of salmon recovery and conservation. This scoping meeting is just the beginning; right now, the team is coming together to identify action items that are best suited for the Salmon and Climate Initiative to focus on to enact real change.
The work of LLTK through the Salmon and Climate Initiative represents the groundwork for bringing key players in Pacific Coast municipalities together under the shared goal of salmon and humans living together harmoniously. As LLTK puts it,“The well-being of the Pacific Northwest is inextricably tied to the health of salmon populations.”
To restore these populations to their full capacity, LLTK is taking a cue from our interconnected natural world and breaking down the municipal barriers between salmon recovery efforts.
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Washington Sea Grant, based at the University of Washington, helps people and marine life thrive through research, technical expertise and education supporting the responsible use and conservation of coastal ecosystems. Washington Sea Grant is one of 34 Sea Grant programs supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in coastal and Great Lakes states that encourage the wise stewardship of our marine resources through research, education, outreach and technology transfer.
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AUG
2025