The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rolled out proposed "critical habitat" designations Thursday as well as a draft recovery plan for bull trout in the Northwest.

The draft proposals put a premium on habitat that provides "clean, cold, connected" water for bull trout, which were listed as a threatened species in the Columbia, Klamath basins in 1998. A draft recovery plan for the St. Mary-Belly River population east of Glacier National Park has also been developed.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is releasing information and taking comments on the proposals over the next couple months.

The draft recovery plan and critical habitat designations are separate processes, but they go hand-in-hand, said Wade Fredenberg, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist based in the Flathead.

"It doesn't come with any big pot of money, and it doesn't come with any regulatory impact," Fredenberg said. "It's essentially a blueprint for how we are going to get to recovery."

The federal government's draft recovery plan adheres to state plans developed in Idaho and Montana.

"We just kind of picked up where they left off. These recovery plans basically embrace the same concepts that the states developed," Fredenberg said. "We've added a lot of specificity."

On the Clark Fork River, for instance, the federal plan prescribes over 100 recovery tasks, some of them very site-specific.

The Service has determined that fish passage over the Milltown Dam is a requirement for restoring connectivity and recovering bull trout populations on the Clark Fork.

"Whether they take out the dam or put in some type of fish passage, we don't go into that kind of detail," Fredenberg said.

"In the Flathead, there's an emphasis on stopping the further spread of lake trout," he said. That recommendation follows the lead of a management plan developed by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes.

The Fish and Wildlife Service stresses that critical habitat designations do not establish additional regulatory burdens or additional protections like those that came with the listing of bull trout as a threatened species in 1998.

In fact, agency officials have been resistant and even openly critical toward critical habitat designations, viewing them as expensive and redundant efforts.

But in this case, the agency was sued last January by two conservation groups, Montana-based Friends of the Wild Swan and Alliance for the Wild Rockies, and a resulting settlement led to the proposed designations.

Wendi Weber, the service's chief of endangered species, said critical habitat designations do serve the purpose of highlighting the most important waters for conservation efforts.

That's precisely what the environmental groups wanted when they sued, said Arlene Montgomery, spokeswoman for Friends of the Wild Swan.

"We regard critical habitat as a companion to recovery of bull trout," Montgomery said. "It helps the land management agencies know and understand these are the places that are really important to protect or restore habitat, because these are the places that will lead to recovery."

Designations vary widely from Montana and Idaho to the lower portions of the Columbia and Klamath river basins ? covering a total of 18,468 stream miles and 537,722 lake acres in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana. In Montana, it applies to 3,319 stream miles and 217,577 lake acres.

Bull trout populations and habitat tend to deteriorate moving downstream in all of the basins.

In Oregon and Washington, as much as 70 percent of proposed critical habitat is currently unoccupied by bull trout.

"In Montana, it's almost the opposite situation ? we have habitat that's occupied but not considered critical," Fredenberg said.

In the Swan Valley, for example, the only streams identified as critical habitat are Goat, Squeezer, Elk and Lion creeks.

"If we protect those strongholds we'll continue to see bull trout in other places," Fredenberg said.

But the designations address other waterways like Coal Creek, a former bull trout stronghold in the North Fork of the Flathead where spawning has almost disappeared.

Montana also has an unusually large number of bull trout populations that are isolated in lakes. Bull trout in several lakes on Glacier National Park's western border do not migrate downstream. These fish not only lack connectivity with other bull trout, but they are also vulnerable to invasive non-native lake trout.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to hold hearings and informational meetings on the proposals across the four states in January.

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