Improving Fishery Catch Monitoring and Coded Wire Tag Sampling and Recovery of Southern B.C. Chinook and Coho Salmon

Fisheries and Oceans Canada is providing $382,400 over two years via the Partnership Fund to this project by the Fraser Basin Council and the Pacific Fisheries Monitoring and Compliance Panel, an independent collaborative of First Nations, recreational, commercial fishing, environmental and the public at large representatives formed out of the "Integrated Salmon Dialogue Forum" process.

The project capitalizes on the Panel's experience in building catch monitoring capacity to address data quality issues. This experience seeks to improve estimates of mortality and increasing "coded wire tag samples" (CWT) and bio-sampling rates, including tissue samples for genetic testing, from southern BC Chinook and Interior Fraser River and Strait of Georgia Coho stocks. Current catch monitoring sampling programs are failing to provide desired rates of CWT sampling (20% of the catch) for First Nations and recreational fisheries.

The project's three components are to: 1) Enhance capacity and knowledge in fishery monitoring by training First Nation and recreational participants in monitoring techniques; 2) Improve the rate of heads returned (for CWT extraction) and tissue bio-sampling for Chinook and Coho salmon from anglers in the South Coast and Fraser recreational fishery at  marinas,  lodges and at public boat ramps and marinas not covered by regular fishery monitoring survey staff; and 3) Fill monitoring and sampling gaps in South Coast and Fraser monitoring, notably from May to September when fishing effort is high.

Project Number: PAC2017.1
Year(s): 2017, 2018, 2019
Partner: Fraser Basin Council
Principal Investigator(s): n/a
Eco-region: Pacific