You Can't Answer It Alone: Merging Survey and Telemetry Data Obtained from a Maine Coastal Estuary

Fisheries technologies and their applications are advancing rapidly.  In the northwest Atlantic region, acoustic telemetry, scientific surveys, and sampling are conducted using a variety of platforms in different environments.  To better understand the causes of high Atlantic salmon smolt mortality in Maine’s Penobscot River estuary that we had previously documented through telemetry studies, we tagged and released 146 hatchery smolts on two dates in 2013.  Salmon movements were monitored via moored acoustic receivers placed through the estuary and inner Bay. We then paired the movement data obtained from the telemetry work with overall biomass estimates from hydroacoustic surveys.  This combined approach not only identified behavioral responses of the tagged fish to their estuarine environment, but also highlighted a spatial mismatch between smolt movements and fish biomass. Overcoming communication and data-sharing challenges is needed to reconcile these differences and to further our knowledge of ecosystem dynamics.