Advancing the Science of Life-History-Based Modeling for Pacific Salmon: an Overview

Pacific salmon have been diminished because of habitat degradation, dams, pollution, hatchery management, and overfishing. The combination of these assaults has resulted in “lost baselines” regarding expectations for the number, productivity, diversity, and distribution of spawners that should be filling available habitats, many of which have been degraded, and some of which are new being restored. Conceptual and quantitative models hold the best promise for estimating the abundance and diversity of salmon that should be refilling all available habitats. In this talk, we review developments in computational, statistical, and simulation models designed to assist managers in estimating salmon escapement goals. We suggest that the next generation of salmon escapement goal modeling science must fully integrate habitat, life-history, biological diversity, nutrient cycling, species interactions, and environmental variation into estimates of natural production potential of Pacific salmon. New models must also account for the effects of hatchery, harvest, and hydropower management on the natural production potential. We will set the stage for the remainder of the workshop by providing a framework for evaluating the relative utility of various models for the future. We also provide a brief review of one approach that we and collaborators are developing for estimating full productive capacity of salmonid habitat.