Evaluation of Bay Management Area Scenarios for the Southwest New Brunswick Salmon Aquaculture Industry in the Context of Water Exchange, Fish Health and Resource Interactions and the System Framework of the Salmon Aquaculture Sustainability Plan

Description

The marine salmon farming industry in southwest New Brunswick is presently implementing actions described in the June 2005 document Sustainability Plan for Atlantic Canada Salmon Farming. This Sustainability Plan, prepared by the salmon farming industry, has been accepted by the government-led Federal/Provincial Task Force on Fostering a Sustainable Salmon Farming Industry for Atlantic Canada. This Sustainability Plan describes a reformation of salmon farming from a production-driven to a market-driven structure, the overall intent of which will be to eliminate the requirement for forced-selling of fish and the resulting unacceptable market conditions. The Sustainability Plan establishes the need to apply environmental and fish health PBS in a 3-site rotational system that would have one site of every 3 fallowed for up to one year. This supports consolidation of production to sites that match environmental with operational and economic conditions. It also supports application of consistent audited Codes of Practice to the sector, as well as focused research and development programs.

The goal of this project is to proactively and preliminarily evaluate the relative merits of Bay Management Area boundary scenarios proposed by the salmon aquaculture industry in terms of hydrographic separation for fish health purposes and potential interactions with major fishery resources and activities in the coastal zone of the southwest New Brunswick area.

The project will be carried out over an 18 month period with the majority of the work being conducted during the first six months of the project (October 2005 through March 2006).

Program Name

Aquaculture Collaborative Research and Development Program (ACRDP)

Year(s)

2005 - 2007

Ecoregion(s)

Atlantic: Gulf of Maine, Scotian Shelf

Principal Investigator(s)

Fred Page
Email: Fred.Page@dfo-mpo.gc.ca