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Reservoir and river operations/senior water rights The Upper Basin Program cannot rely entirely on the protection of existing, undeveloped flows for fish recovery. The reoperation of existing federal water projects under Section 7 of the ESA and the acquisition of senior water rights and storage supplies for the fish- es are also important program components. . The 1992 biological opinion on the operation of Flaming Gorge Reservoir is the most prominent example. This opinion recommended dampening the unnaturally high flow levels in nursery habitat downstream on the Green River in the late summer and fall, and that a five year research program be established to examine what reservoir operations would best stabilize winter flows and approximate more natural spring peaks. A similar research program in preparation for the biological opinion on the operation of the Aspinall Unit reservoirs on the Gunnison River in Colorado is beginning its fourth year. . Studies are nearing completion for saving and oper- ationally sharing canal seepage and administrative spills in Colorado's Grand Valley. The emerging strate- gy is for the Upper Basin Program to fund capital improvements that would allow the same deliveries to the Grand Valley farms with lower river diversions. This abatement in some of the most senior diversions on the river would enable storage of water upstream at Green Mountain Reservoir, which then could be released to improve fish habitat and generate hydropower along the way. . Under the biological opinion for Ruedi Reservoir on Colorado's Fryingpan River, the BOR is making deliv- eries of about 20,000 acre feet per year out of this reservoir to the fish habitat in the Grand Valley and has entered both short and long term lease agreements with the CWCB to legally protect the instream use of those deliveries. The Colorado Division of Parks, the CWCB and the FWS have just negotiated a similar lease agreement to protect the instream use of up to 2,000 acre feet of storage water per year released from Steamboat Lake to fish habitat on the Yampa River. In both cases, the storage water leased for the fishes had not been contractually committed to other project purposes. . A river operation and management plan is being actively considered for the Yampa River in Colorado. Under this plan, storage releases from the enlargement of a fairly small, off mainstem reservoir could augment both the CWCB's recent baseflow filing and new, junior water development within the allowance left by the CWCB's converse instream flow right. Another inter- esting feature of this plan is that the Colorado River Water Conservation District would voluntarily retire a number of senior conditional water rights that it holds in the Yampa River subbasin, which would materially improve the relative priority and legal strength of the CWCB's instream filings. Restoration of floodplain habitat In offering a broader perspective on quantifying the flows needed for recovery, Stanford emphasized the importance of re-connecting and restoring highly pro- ductive side channel and floodplain habitat for the list- ed fishes and recommended that a set of hypotheses about the function of such habitat in a riverine ecosys- tem be tested. This element of the Upper Basin Program faced some difficult questions about how much direct and continued manipulation of floodplain habitat was needed, whether an objective should be to construct and operate ponds to grow out and augment fish populations, and whether the restoration of flood- plain habitat without continued direct management would benefit non-native fishes more than listed fishes. 53