Current Activities

Bill has been Program Manager for Marine Salmon Interaction (MSI) of Auke Bay Laboratories (ABL) since the 1980s, providing management and leadership for a program that focuses on a wide variety of stock assessment studies of Alaska’s salmonid resources within their respective ecosystem components. Principal Marine Salmon Interaction tasks include three major field activities as well as two laboratories at in the Auke Bay area. Field activities involve: 1) year round research at the Little Port Water Marine Station on Lower Baranof Island focusing on stock enhancement technologies, hatchery-wild stock interactions, life history and genetics studies on Chinook salmon and steelhead; 2) research at Auke Creek Station on the Juneau road system where a long-term data set of freshwater and marine survivals are maintained for seven anadromous salmonid species together with special studies on some of those species; and 3) Southeast Coastal Monitoring (SECM) that conducts a long-term time series of inshore and coastal ecological surveys on juvenile salmon and their epipelagic cohorts in the diverse marine habitats within the region. The MSI program also manages laboratories at ABL that assess code wire tag data (CWT Lab) and diet and energetics of salmonid species (FEDZ Lab).

Background

Bill has a B.S. in zoology and M.S. in fisheries from Oklahoma State University. He first worked in Alaska in 1958 as a graduate student temporary at Brooks Lake in Bristol Bay. Bill returned to Brooks Lake as a permanent fishery biologist in 1960 where he studied sockeye salmon and associated species in the Naknek River System. In 1965 he began working in Southeast Alaska where he was involved in pink, coho, and Chinook salmon research on life histories and stock enhancement for many years at Little Port Walter. Bill has served on a number of Federal, state, and international advisory groups or panels, including the Governor’s Fishery Council in the late 1970s and early 1980s that developed the framework for the successful stock enhancement hatchery program in Alaska today. He is currently active in North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission (NPAFC) and Pacific Salmon Commission (PSC) technical committees.