Fraser River sockeye salmon: data synthesis and cumulative impacts

Response: We have removed the italics from the evaluations provided by both Peterman etal. (2010) and the participants of the Cohen Commission workshop so that such formattingdoes not imply that the ratings from those two assessments are identical to the similarlynamed ratings reported by us in our qualitative evaluation. We have also added a footnoteto explicitly address the differences between these approaches.P58: Why are comparisons made among models here when the actual approach is notdescribed until p77?Response: We have added a new section (3.3.6) that provides a high-level overview of ourmethodology such that readers will be introduced to the approach prior to being shownany results (i.e. in Section 4.4.5 that the reviewer identifies and in Section 4.7.2) and will notneed to consult the appendices in order to understand the results presented.The change-point analyses don’t' seem particularly valuable, especially when there isno substantial synthesis of the results.Response: We have kept these analyses and expanded upon our justification for includingthem and improved the discussion of their results, in both section 4.1 and Appendix 4. Wewanted to explore the commonly quoted statements regarding the productivity of FraserRiver sockeye stock being in decline since approximately 1990. We wanted to have anobjective assessment of when and how strong trends in each of the sockeye stocks were,hypothesizing that there may be substantial differences among stocks in the timing andstrength of declines in productivity. If there were groups of stocks with similar changepoints,the similarities among those particular stocks might indicate important factors.These data were also available long before any of the covariate data from the othertechnical reports. Other methods of determining the timing of productivity changes areincluded in Peterman and Dorner (2011) and McKinnell et al. (2011); different analyticalapproaches generate somewhat different results, but the overall conclusions are similar.P63: This report seems to overuse terms like "striking" and "dramatic".Response: Those terms have been removed.Figure 4.5-2 (this figure has no labels): if this is a time-series, then the points should beconnected by a line. That way, inter-annual variability is easier to see.Response: This graph was extracted as an image from the publication cited. We were notable to acquire the underlying data before submitting the draft report and therefore it waspresented in its original form. We have since acquired the raw data, updated to 2010. Wehave now graphed the same data without a trend line but including labels for the axes. Thisfigure is a time-series, but these data should not be connected by a line because the variablerepresents a discrete annual event (i.e. return migration). Representing these data with aline graph would incorrectly imply this is a continuous measure for which values between145