Fraser River Sockeye Fisheries and Fisheries Management - Cohen ...

Table 3 provides the annual estimates of the number of Fraser sockeye harvested inCanadian First Nation fisheries. The official estimate of the total harvest of Frasersockeye in First Nation fisheries was extracted from PSC annual reports (e.g., PSC 2008).Additional information from DFO was used to parse the total harvest into each of themajor fishery components (Ionson 2009; Bert Ionson, retired DFO Aboriginal FisheriesProgram Manager, Vancouver, B.C., pers. comm.). The overall ratings for sockeye catchestimates for First Nation fisheries were: “Good” for accuracy, “Unknown” for precisionand “Medium” for reliability (Table 4). Catch monitoring for First Nation fisheries wasrated having higher quality than commercial fisheries because of the extensive efforts toverify effort and catch rates using independent surveys instead of reports from fishers(Alexander 2002). Regulations for mandatory landing sites for “Pilot Sales” andEconomic Opportunity (EO) fisheries since 1993, and separation of FSC and EO fisheriessince 2004, have substantially improved the reliability of catch estimates for EO fisheries.Details regarding each of these fisheries and the rationale for our evaluations of catchestimation methods are presented in the following sections.23