Fraser River sockeye salmon: data synthesis and cumulative impacts

including Shuswap and North Thompson. Some of the data go back 100 years, some just 10years. The Coldwater has two gauges, for example, so it’s on a pretty fine scale.Hinch: The Fraser River Environmental Watch program also has a large monitoring programindependent of that one. It generally operates from spring to fall, with data up the Frasermainstem and in many of the tributaries since the mid/ late 1990s. Dave Patterson canprovide more information.Routledge: It seems almost like an impossible task. You get all this data and look for patterns butI suspect that if there are impacts, they will be local and subtle, such as warm water duringthe return migration on the Horsefly.Peterman: You won’t have ideal data sets for all CUs but you may have very useful data just forsome, so you should not rule it out if you don’t have data for all.Marmorek: We can look at stressor vs. productivity to see if there is a positive, negative orneutral correlation, for example if there is any difference in productivity in areas that havebeen most or least impacted by the Mountain Pine Beetle.Martin: Re cumulative effects and the graph that says the portfolio stays fairly constant overtime, one way of looking at that is that despite the variation in individual stocks, the Fraser isvery resilient because of those different stocks. That you have the same portfolio over 60years highlights the resilience.Pickard: The reality might be multiple stressors.Routledge: It’s upsetting to see the decline in the number of people who are actually out lookingat what’s happening in the Horsefly, for example. We’re sitting here looking at data setsinstead of talking to people who actually see things happening and that poses the risk ofmissing something.PICES advisory report on the decline of Fraser River Sockeye salmonin relation to marine ecologySkip McKinnell, PICESThe presentation opened with a quote from a 1909 media report describing the “discovery” by apre-eminent ichthyologist that the marine refuge for Fraser salmon between the time they leavethe river and the time they return to spawn is located 10 miles off Vancouver Island. Thefollowing slide showed Fraser River sockeye tagging locations spanning the entire NortheastPacific. This, McKinnell noted, highlights the difference between what we profess withoutadequate observations and what we know when there is relevant data.This project looked at marine factors that might be linked to the low sockeye returns in 2009 aswell as the gradual decline in productivity.It turns out that Fraser River sockeye smolts that went to sea in 2005 had the lowest survival onrecord (many scientists anticipated that). Those that went to sea in 2007 had the second lowestsurvival overall, except for Harrison sockeye, which had the highest total survival on record.The winter of 2006/2007 was an “official” El Nino. Each El Nino is different but severalcharacteristics are fairly common, including lower than average sea level pressure in the Gulf ofAlaska, an eastward shift in storm tracks and intensification of storms. Wind patterns tend tofollow the pressure contours, which in the winter of 2007 were blowing towards the BC central49