Collaborative Fisheries Research: Tracking Ocean Salmon from Hook to Plate



Starting in 2006 Pacific Northwest commercial ocean troll fisheries for Chinook salmon have been severely restircted or closed due to low abundance of Sacramento River and Klamath River fall Chinook. In 2005, anticipating the Klamath River fishery restrictions, a collaboration of fishermen, scientists, and seafood marketers initiated Project CROOS (Collaborative Research on Oregon Ocean Salmon) to explore the potential of genetic stock identification (GSI) to provide fisheries managers with better data to manage harvest. The object was to improve knowledge of stock distributions in the hope of avoiding weak stocks. Fishermen bar-coded each fish caught, recorded the location using GPS, collected fin clips (for GSI) and scales (for aging), along with fish length and depth caught. Data were used to map changing distributions, by stock, throughout the fishery. In 2010, Oregon and California ocean fisheries were sampled weekly from May through September, providing the first broad-scale application of this technique. Data were assembled in a central data base where they can be associated with supporting data sets including oceanographic data, satellite observations, and coded-wire tag data. Potential users of these data are scientists, fishermen, fishery managers, processors, marketers, and the general public. A web site, www.pacificfishtrax.org, is being developed as a portal to these data. This web site is designed to provide access tailored to the needs of specific user groups, and to be extended to accommodate new species, data types, and users. The ultimate goal is to develop a coast-wide data network with flexible tools to serve the full spectrum of needs and services supporting a variety of West Coast fisheries.