Nature Conservancy Program Uses the Chum Salmon as a Test : Northwest: More than 300,000 fingerlings have been released into Willapa Bay on the Washington coast.

LONG BEACH, Wash. — Government policy protected the chum salmon’s tastier and more esteemed brethren, such as chinooks and sockeyes. Logging wrecked many of the chum’s spawning sites.

But after losing four-fifths of its population in Willapa Bay, the beleaguered fish, also known as the dog salmon, is making a comeback with the combined aid of local citizens and out-of-town conservationists.

In the last six months, scientists have released more than 300,000 fingerling chum into Willapa Bay, on the Pacific coast of southwest Washington. A main stopover for migrating birds on the Alaska-to-Mexico flyway, it’s the cleanest large estuary in the lower 48 states, federal scientists say.

If the lowly salmon species can prosper after several more releases, its recovery will mark the first success in a series of planned efforts to restore the bay’s ecological balance and sustain its health.

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The chum project is a test case for the Nature Conservancy’s “Last Great Places” campaign, billed as the largest-ever private fund-raising effort for conservation. It is one of hundreds of projects that the organization is conducting from Virginia to Indonesia.

The nonprofit Conservancy, headquartered in Arlington, Va., has raised more than $255 million in the last three years for the protection of rare plants, animals and whole ecological systems at 75 “Last Great Places” in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Pacific and Asia.

Among those places:

* Barrier Islands, Virginia’s Eastern Shore: 55 miles of undeveloped Atlantic beaches, unspoiled maritime vegetation, forests and salt marshes.

* Cache River Wetlands, Southern Illinois: home of 40 endangered or threatened plants and animals, including cypress trees that scientists believe may date to A.D. 300.

* Big Darby Creek, Central Ohio: one of the healthiest and most diverse aquatic systems in the Midwestern United States.

* Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve, Northeast Peru: home of several endangered species, including the pink river dolphin and the spectacled caiman.

* Lore Lindu National Park, Sulawesi, Indonesia: home of a majority of the threatened or endemic species on the world’s 10th-largest island.

Campaign money is being spent to acquire land, conduct scientific research, create new species-protection programs and enrich existing ones. The objective: to control or help manage entire landscapes the organization deems biologically and geographically unique.

Included are rural waterways, coastal dunes, urban tall-grass groves, islands, forests, swamps and mountaintops.

“We have a humility about the difficulty of this,” said W. William Weeks, chief operating officer of the Nature Conservancy, which has helped protect nearly 7.9 million acres in the United States since its founding in 1951--the world’s largest private sanctuary system.

Trying to protect whole ecological systems is complex. More traditional approaches to conservation generally involve acquiring property, fencing it, studying its species and lobbying governments for special laws or conservation funds.

By broadening their geographic scope and working with local residents, businesses and governments, the Conservancy and others experimenting with ecosystem management argue, they can more effectively safeguard core preserves and influence the way adjacent land is used.

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“Traditional conservation methods cannot always guarantee protection of biodiversity,” said Nature Conservancy spokesman Ron Geatz. “Many of our smaller preserves established a decade ago now are under pressure from encroaching development and environmental degradation. We had to rethink our strategy.”

The Nature Conservancy is soliciting aggressively to meet its $300-million goal by late next summer.

Although the organization’s big-picture approach is cheered by many, including the U.S. Interior Department, others take a more skeptical view.

“Ecosystem management is a concept that everybody’s been real quick to embrace, but nobody knows what it’s going to look like when we get there,” said Ann Notthoff, senior planner with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco.

“The devil is in the details,” she said, “and it’s important to make sure you come up with something that meets the needs of habitats and species in the long run, as opposed to just bringing all sides to the table, signing off on an approach and moving on to the next project.”

Despite its determinedly non-confrontational, businesslike approach, the Nature Conservancy sometimes encounters resistance from local residents and property owners

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At Willapa Bay, which is surrounded by a rural logging and fishing community with high unemployment, opinions are divided over the presence of the Nature Conservancy and its major partner, Ecotrust, of Portland, Ore.

Pacific County Commissioner Skip Wilson said he sees no merit in the chum-rearing effort, because “nobody’s going to fish them.”

He said the Conservancy’s tax-exempt purchase of 2,500 acres of old-growth cedars for the Willapa Bay project--it’s one of the last stands in a region dominated by industrial tree-farming--deprives the county of much-needed tax revenue.

‘It’s kind of like buying a new car,” he said, “shining it all the time but never driving it.”

Nature Conservancy officials acknowledge that their most important task at any site, domestic or international, is gaining the support of local people. At an increasing number of sites, the organization promotes what it calls “compatible” development activities such as tourism, housing and agriculture.