A large-scale study of contiguous fisheries: Pacific salmon running the gauntlet

While the freshwater life history and ecology of both sockeye and chum salmon is well known, less is known of their oceanic migration and susceptibility to nearshore fisheries.  Given their long migrations, interception of these species in fisheries distant from their natal streams is likely but unmeasured.  Generally, stock composition studies are limited to relatively small geographic areas local to the fishery or stocks of interest.  Large-scale, comprehensive assessment of harvests along an entire coast is necessary for a complete picture of the interactions between stock-specific migration and abundances and the human activities of fishing and fisheries management along a geographic continuum.  Western Alaska is a geographically diverse region with highly productive salmon populations that possess varying amounts of genetic structure and a long history of human use.  Collaborating with other laboratories, we have developed comprehensive coastwide baselines of SNPs across both species’ ranges in the North Pacific.  These baselines provide the foundation for genetic stock identification of three years of sockeye and chum salmon harvest in contiguous fisheries along 3,300 km of western Alaska coast.  This provides a more complete assessment of the biocomplexity that rises from the interplay between salmon biology and human activities within this region.