Washington

California legislators are demanding an inquiry into allegations that a local office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reversed the findings of its own biologists in assessing a water-management plan for the state.

An early version of the plan, which Nature was shown, states that a strategy for managing the estuary around San Francisco Bay is “likely to jeopardize the continued existence” of two subspecies of fish, the Sacramento River winter-run chinook salmon and the Central Valley steelhead.

But a later version of the plan — dated September 2004 — comes to the opposite conclusion, stating that it “is not likely to result in jeopardy to the continued existence” of these fish.

Environmentalists claim that the first version of the document was prepared by NOAA biologists in the Sacramento area office and that staff at NOAA Fisheries Southwest Regional Office in Long Beach, California, then rewrote it, with input from the US Bureau of Reclamation, a branch of the interior department, which drew up the water-management plan in the first place. Their claims were first reported in the Sacramento Bee on 2 October.

Bill Jennings, head of the watchdog group Deltakeeper, calls the revision “an outrageous sacrifice of sound science on the altar of expediency, that will lead to the further degradation of fisheries throughout the Central Valley”.

But Jim Lecky, a marine biologist and NOAA official charged with preparing the final report, says that the original version failed to take account of recent adjustments to the water-management plan. “It's much ado about nothing,” he says. “There were some key errors made by the staff. It's not a matter of changing the science.”

Last week, California state senator Michael Machado called for an independent review of the process. And in Washington, Congressman George Miller (Democrat, California) and 18 other members asked the inspector generals at the interior department and the commerce department — of which NOAA is part — to investigate.

Lecky says that a final version of the assessment will be published in a few weeks.