Partner with Stakeholders and Use Archival Tags to Identify and Characterize
Essential Fish Habitat (EFH) for Chinook Salmon
in the Coastal Waters of California and Oregon

Current Status of Accomplishment or Milestone: Collaborative partnerships with commercial salmon fishermen have been developed through a chartering arrangement with the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. The collaboration is ongoing; fishermen capture the fish that are tagged by PFEL biologists. Initial analyses of data collected from archival tags completed and submitted for publication; additional analyses have also been completed and a second manuscript is in preparation.

The Salmon Live Access Server (LAS) has been developed and is online to serve all archival-tag data that have been collected. Go to: Salmon Live Access Server (LAS)

Background: Despite over 100 years of salmonid research and management, knowledge but habitat use in the ocean remains poorly developed.  Currently, the entire Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) is defined as EFH for chinook salmon, and attempts to relate salmon production to conditions in the ocean must therefore depend on inferences about the conditions that fish actually experience (i.e. the relations depend on descriptions of conditions in places where fish are expected to occur).  Although the inferential approach has been successful for relating chinook production to ocean conditions, identifying the environments that chinook actually experience will provide new insights on the effects of variable ocean conditions.  We are using archival tags to identify the environments actually experienced by chinook and refine the current definition of EFH for Chinook. We have been conducting this work since 2000, but only started partnering with commercial fishermen in 2003.  To date, we have deployed archival tags on 207 chinook, and 25 tags have been recovered from commercial and recreational fishermen (a $100 reward is paid for returned tags).

Purpose of Activity/Goal of Project: Refine current definitions of EFH for chinook salmon and provide an improved basis for developing salmon-relevant indices of ocean condition.  Ultimately, these indices will be used to improve predictions of how salmon populations may be influenced by environmental variation in the ocean.

Description of Accomplishment and Significant Results: Partnering with commercial fishermen has been extremely successful, and has enabled the PFEL to increase data collection efforts by up to four times.  Prior to 2003, only 25-31 fish were tagged in any one fishing season, and up to 6 fish were recovered from any of these annual release groups.  By partnering with commercial fishermen, we were successfully able to tag over 100 fish in 2003, and 11 of these fish have already been recovered.

Initial analyses of the archival-tagging data have been completed and submitted to Marine Ecology Progress Series.  Comments from referrees have been received, and the first manuscript is now being revised.  This manuscript identifies water that is 9-12 °C as essential habitat for chinook salmon during fall.  Further analyses have been completed, and a second manuscript is currently being prepared.  These analyses confirm that chinook consistently use water in the 9-12 °C range throughout the year, but suggest that the depth of chinook habitat changes seasonally.

PFEL's Salmon LAS is online and makes all the data used to identify and characterize chinook EFH available to interested stakeholders.

Significance of Accomplishment (e.g., to the Center, to Management, and to NMFS Strategic plan Goals): Our partnership with the fishing industry is a significant method of involving industry in basic fisheries research. Our finding that chinook use water that 9-12 °C is significant because it indicates that the current definition of EFH for chinook may be too broad in scope. The offshore boundary of the EEZ includes waters that are much warmer than those typically utilized by chinook. The salmon LAS is significant because it allows all stakeholders to have open and transparent access to the same information that we use in our analyses.

Problems: None.

Key Contact: George Watters (831-648-0623, gwatters@pfeg.noaa.gov)