FY 2017 SRSC Research, Monitoring and Evaluation (RM&E)

For the time period covered by this project, 28 individual test fisheries were conducted by one field operations manager and one technician in the Skagit River terminal area over a 25-week period. Data collected for each test fishery event including catch per unit effort (CPUE) by salmon species and biological data collected from each fish including as length, sex, scale and otolith samples, mark status, and CWT information (if tagged). The data collected from each fishery event were entered into an Access database for future run timing, escapement and run composition analyses.

The test fishery provides information that addresses all major categories of limiting factors: habitat, harvest, and artificial production. All project objectives associated with test fisheries align with NOAA priorities 1, 2, and 3 for FY2017-18. Limiting factors affecting the recovery goals of Puget Sound salmon stocks include habitat, harvest, and artificial production. All project objectives associated with test fisheries will provide invaluable information that will allow quantitative assessments of whether management decisions or actions within each category are having positive or negative effects on the productivity of target stocks of ESA. Therefore, management decisions related to each limiting factor category can be adaptively altered based on the outcome of analyses of data from test fisheries.
Habitat: Data from the test fishery were used to show that Chinook restoration could best be achieved by focusing on habitat restoration actions aimed at the Chinook life-history types that rear for extended periods in river and tidal delta habitat, and test fishery data are being used now to monitor whether production from these restoration actions is in fact achieving expectations.

Harvest: The test fishery-generated in-season run size updates prevent overfishing of coho and chum. These test fishery data have been and are still being used to make harvest management more effective at providing fishing opportunities while preventing overfishing. In addition, the age composition data from the test fishery can be used in spawner-recruit analyses to refine estimates of optimum spawning escapement and exploitation rate, which will improve the health of the runs analyzed.

Artificial Production: The test fishery-generated estimates of indicator stock escapement are used to determine whether the indicator stock programs, which use wild broodstock, supplement the spawning escapement, or subtract from it. If the indicator stock programs more than replace themselves, then supplementation could be a viable restoration strategy, if there becomes a need for it. Finally, the test fishery provides year-to-year documentation of any trends in run timing, age composition, and fish size. If the data start to indicate a loss of some run component or timing segment, or a decrease in size variation, this could indicate a potential loss in the fitness and diversity of the species, and will sound the alarm to take actions to restore the disappearing run component before it is lost. Without the test fishery, a loss in diversity would be much more difficult to detect in time to take restorative actions.

The species composition ratios allow estimates of non-retention mortalities in any non-retention fisheries conducted in the Skagit. These fisheries increase spawning escapement above what it would have been if retention was allowed, and the monitoring allows us to include in spawner-recruit evaluations and preseason forecasts the number of fish killed in non-retention fisheries.