Port Gamble Harvest Management

The Natural Resource Director/Finfish Manager participated in harvest management efforts to provide sustainable harvest opportunity for PGST tribal salmon and steelhead fishers while helping insure ongoing recovery of ESA listed and other species of concern. The Director executed harvest management objectives that ensured fishery planning consistency with the conservation objectives in plans and initiatives guiding salmon recovery in the Hood Canal region. The Director/Finfish Manager attended fisheries management meetings including the North of Falcon and Pacific Fisheries Management Council meetings to insure that tribal/state management agreements as well as intertribal agreements are best aligned with sustainable fisheries concepts that also proactively address recovery efforts. The List of Agreed Fisheries document was produced from these meetings. This also included annual fishery planning with WDFW, NOAA, NWIFC and HCCC and associated technical and policy committees and groups. The outcomes of these meetings provide the inputs into the fishery models used to establish quotas. The director/Finfish manager also provided insight to the development of annual fisheries agreements and recovery plans. A total of 81 annual and in-season regulations were issued. These harvest management efforts will help develop better options for more sustainable harvests achieve the necessary recovery goals of listed species which will ultimately lead back to healthy natural salmon populations in the Tribes Usual and Accustomed (U&A) area.

This project provides the Port Gamble SKlallam Tribe with valuable infrastructure to effectively manage its salmonid fisheries using appropriate and sustainable strategies that address the recovery of recent Puget Sound Chinook, Puget Sound Steelhead, and Hood Canal Summer Chum ESA listings. Harvest management must be carefully balanced to achieve reasonable harvest opportunity for tribal members while working toward the sustainable recovery of these listed species back to the viable population levels they had only a couple of decades ago. The overall benefit of participating in harvest management activities will be to help ensure treaty and non-treaty fisheries will be conducted in compliance with conservation measures established in Puget Sound Harvest management plan, which were established to promote stock rebuilding efforts.