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Conservation of Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) has become increasingly important as major populations have declined in abundance to the point of being listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The complex life-history of Pacific salmon species and the diversity of habitats they occupy require multifaceted recovery efforts, and the metrics needed to evaluate species status and progress toward recovery are necessarily complex. Formal decision support systems (DSS) are designed to assist decision-makers in integrating and evaluating many factors. We describe a knowledge-based DSS for evaluating the biological status of Oregon coast coho salmon (O. kisutch). We then compare our DSS to similar tools and consider its advantages and disadvantages. We show how the DSS can provide a transparent and logical framework linking multiple criteria across geographic scales for a unified assessment. Once constructed, the DSS can serve as an institutional knowledge base, codifying the pathways from data to criteria evaluation and supporting consistent future status evaluations with a path to incorporating new knowledge over time. The DSS was not trivial to implement, nor is it easy to explain to resource managers, and we offer suggestions to address these problems. The DSS was particularly helpful in providing a logical and reproducible way to quantify multiple risks and assess progress toward recovery across multiple spatial and temporal scales. Development of this DSS is an important step in the evolution of assessment tools for salmon conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]