Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

This research concerns the intersection of global climate change and fishing practices for adult Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.). Canadian aquatic ecosystems are progressively warming. In turn, profound and rapid effects are being felt on economically important fisheries. Abundant and sustainable Pacific salmon stocks are important economically, culturally, politically and ecologically to Canada. Indeed, Canada's last remaining large fisheries on wild fish heavily feature the five species of Pacific salmon. Salmon fisheries that occur in warm water and that result in large numbers of escaped or released fish may be unsustainable because of high levels of delayed mortality due to stress, injury, enhanced infection and triggering of latent diseases. These issues will likely be greatest for in-river fisheries because this is where the adult return migration is typically warmest and river systems like the Fraser River have warmed by ~2oC in recent decades. We will conduct aseries of integrated laboratory and field experiments to test hypotheses concerning the effects of high temperature, capture locale, and pathogen loads and disease on delayed mortality following capture and release of adult Chinook and sockeye salmon in the Fraser River. Our results will have immediate benefits to fisheries management agencies, partners in the proposal, enabling them to modify harvest rates and change retention rules to maximize harvest while ensuring salmon escapement and conservation goals are met. We will also use semi-structured interviews and surveys of individuals who have different roles in the management of adult salmon fisheries to discover how results from capture-release scientific studies, like those proposed herein, could be best adopted and integrated into current management practices, and to learn what barriers could prevent scientific results from being integrated into management practices.