PURPOSEFUL and expensive plans to promote salmon recovery around Puget Sound will get in each other's way, if there is no integration of effort.

Integration is the appealing word that turns up in watershed assessments done by Shared Strategy, the groundbreaking effort to unify salmon restoration throughout the Sound. The concept seeks to link good intentions into one, productive outcome. The challenge is to look out for duplicative or counterproductive efforts. News of a new Cedar River sockeye hatchery is a case in point.

Scientists are pondering disastrous returns of sockeye salmon headed through Lake Washington to spawning streams.

Times reporter Warren Cornwall found scientists puzzling over apparently lethal higher water temperatures last season very close to home. Then sockeye suffered a devastating one-two punch with poor ocean conditions this year.

For sport fishing and tribal interests, the mystery was another chapter in a perplexing sockeye saga. Some sockeye seasons have been as brief as one or two days, with dawn-to-dusk openings. Other years, there was no season at all.

The city of Seattle proposes a new, replacement sockeye hatchery as part of its formal habitat-conservation plan on the Cedar River. This could be good news. The $12 million hatchery is part of belated amends for the river-blocking dam built in 1901 to provide Seattle with drinking water.

Historically, the fish-producing capacity of hatcheries was seen as a stand-alone triumph, and a license to harvest fish in great quantities, destroy habitat and ignore how hatchery fish fit in with wild stocks.

Here is where the integration mantra of Shared Strategy needs to be heeded. Will the hatchery, set for completion in 2007, complicate efforts to recover endangered Chinook salmon? Will increased competition for food and predation complicate Chinook recovery? The answers may well be no, but someone has to pay attention.

Vigilance is also required to ensure hatchery production is not an excuse for backsliding on habitat protection and restoration. Habitat is key. All those future spawners need a home to return to. Complex, well-intended and expensive efforts have to fit together.