Salmonid Field Protocols Handbook: Techniques for Assessing Status and Trends in Salmon and Trout

Introduction

Xanthippe Augerot

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781888569926.ch1

As of 2003, the Order Salmoniformes (i.e., salmon, trouts, chars) contained 217 valid taxa (Integrated Taxonomic Information System, ); an additional species was described in 2005 (Safronov and Zvezdov 2005). While this book has applications to the full array of salmonid taxa, it is based largely on the science developed on Pacific salmon.

Pacific salmon inhabit streams stretching from California to Japan, encompassing some 31 million square kilometers and spanning hundreds of jurisdictions. They begin their complex life history in freshwater, migrate and mature at sea, and return to their natal streams, where they spawn, die, and deliver vital ocean-derived nutrients to freshwater, riparian, and terrestrial ecosystems. Few fish species are as important to North Pacific ecosystems, native peoples, and coastal economies as Pacific salmon. Their role in nature and value to humankind inspires intensive and frequent study. Whether surveying salmon on the Kamchatka peninsula in Russia or in the Columbia River basin in the United States, scientists need a set of standard monitoring protocols that minimizes methodological errors, maximizes the validity and consistency of data, and allows them to make reliable comparisons and reasonable conclusions across projects and river basins and over time. This book’s objective is to describe a standard set of monitoring protocols and best practices that decision makers and funding organizations can adopt and practitioners can use to design study and sampling techniques, conduct field activities, and manage spatial and tabular data.

The Wild Salmon Center (WSC) and the joint WSC–Ecotrust State of the Salmon Program recently concluded its first range-wide assessment of the risk of extinction for Pacific salmon (Augerot 2005). A formidable challenge was trying to piece together fragmented species data across jurisdictional boundaries, understanding that differences in data collection methods and the uneven distribution of data by species and region were largely responsible. Similar difficulties have been encountered in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. Government decision makers at the Bonneville Power Authority and the Northwest Power and Conservation Council and members of the United States Congress have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to track salmon status and temporal trends across the Columbia River basin only to realize that individual projects cannot easily be “stitched together” due to inconsistent approaches used to collect and count fish.