Linkage Between Coastal Conditions and Migration of Atlantic Salmon Smolts Along the Halifax Line

Understanding nearshore migration of Atlantic Salmon is a key to further improve management and conservation of this species. While monitoring migration remains a challenge, the rapid development of fish tracking techniques and fixed listening arrays leads to unprecedented opportunities to map migration routes and measure their spatial and temporal variability. Proper interpretation and analysis of animal detection patterns relies critically on simultaneous collection of environmental data. The Halifax Line is a fixed array of 256 acoustic receiver stations crossing the Scotian Shelf and deployed as part of the Ocean Tracking Network research program. This study correlates acoustic detections of Atlantic salmon smolts tagged in the Penobscot River, and detected along the Halifax Line, with a wide range of co-located oceanographic data collected from many different platforms (ADCPs, gliders, benthic pods, etc). The objective is to characterize the relationship between environmental conditions and detection patterns of tagged Atlantic Salmon.