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

Oceans (DFO) on short notice, and especially those for the most recent periods. In fact, the samecould be said about other fishery agencies I worked with. This issue aside, the followingcomments [must] focus attention on the perceived gaps and shortcomings (if any) of the draftreport presented by LGL Ltd.Editorial issuesThe report covers much ground and is fairly well written, but many editorial changes seemjustified; there are redundancies, typographical errors, unnecessary and subjective qualifiers,excessive and misleading use of some terms (e.g., derive; when no derivatives or derivations areimplied), incomplete sentences, missing words and etc. The writing style is somewhat verbose,and in many places, a few simple equations would be more suitable than long descriptions.Additional and detailed maps should be provided to help the reader visualize some locations andboundaries not clearly shown by the maps provided. The report contains many references toreports written by or co-authored by LGL staff (self-glorification?), but omits others that addresssimilar issues. Some reports cited are outdated, with more recent ones not mentioned. Somereferences are incomplete, either lacking the number of pages, dates, sources, etc. (e.g., DFO2009b, Gazey 2001-2002, IFMP 2001, Staley 2010). Some citations are inconsistent; that of Holtet al. (2010) on p. 83 is cited as Holt et al. 2009 on p. 159. There should also be a glossary thatdefines all terms, acronyms and symbols used throughout.LGL Response: Our report includes over 165 citations of which only 16 were prepared byLGL Limited. All of the citations of reports prepared by LGL are appropriate andrelevant to the topics being examined. Given the large volume of work LGL has donespecifically related to Fraser sockeye, Bristol Bay sockeye, and stock assessment for Pacificsalmon over the past 25 years, most readers would not be surprised to see citations to these16 LGL reports or papers in this review of Fraser and Bristol Bay sockeye fisheries. Wewill review the citations identified by the reviewers and correct any errors found.Content issuesPage 1. The heading ‘Non-Retention Fisheries’ is used, but the following text focuses primarilyon the so-called ‘en-route losses’, which should not be under this heading since non-retentionfishery issues typically cover by-catch and incidental mortalities after release. In the followingsections, the ‘on-route losses’ refer mainly to differences between escapement estimates from thelower Fraser River monitoring operations (near Mission, etc.), and spawning ground estimates ofmature adults. Differences can be caused by monitoring deficiencies even in the absence oflosses (i.e., deaths per se), and are akin to accounting errors. However, as written, the en-routelosses can also include deaths or removals in-river due to poaching, catch monitoringdeficiencies, predation, stress and physiological limitations, and etc. In recent years, efforts wereM-15