Evolution of a Salmon Monitoring Platform: an Adaptive Approach to Managing Salmon in a Large Complex Watershed

Pacific salmon management in the Kuskokwim River, Alaska, requires a whole-river perspective for ensuring long-term sustainability and appropriate harvest allocation among subsistence, commercial, and sport users. This perspective is gained by integrating data from a variety of largely independent monitoring projects that index timing, magnitude, and quality of the salmon returns at discrete locations throughout the drainage. The success of the Kuskokwim River salmon monitoring program stems from extensive partnerships among state, federal, private, and non-profit agencies. Collectively, these agencies operate a suite of long-term harvest and escapement monitoring projects which are used to address core research and management goals. The stability of these long-term projects provides a platform for conducting adaptive short-term research designed to address specific information needs. Here we present an example of the effectiveness of this type of monitoring approach by exploring recent efforts by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to reconstruct historical salmon returns, retrospectively, for Chinook, coho, sockeye, and chum salmon. In this example, the Department partnered with federal, private, and non-profit groups to model the historic annual returns by age class for each species– a process that incorporated the full suite of available data and required flexibility from the salmon monitoring platform. This talk will provide an overview of the evolution of the salmon management platform and provide examples of how the platform was adapted to address data needs specific to the retrospective run reconstruction efforts.