Teaming Up 2015: Enhancing Recovery of Endangered Anadromous Salmonids Across North America

Salmon hold an iconic status along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of North America, historically providing critical ecosystem services and substantial economic benefits to both regions. Overharvest, passage barriers, habitat destruction, and other factors have resulted in extirpation of approximately 30% of Pacific and over 90% of Atlantic salmon populations in the contiguous United States. At southern portion of their range, many native populations of Atlantic salmon, steelhead, and Pacific salmon are protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and Canada’s Species at Risk Act. At the 2012 National American Fisheries Society meeting in Minnesota, biologists and managers from the Atlantic and Pacific came together to share experiences in endangered salmonid conservation. This resulted in productive dialogs and new partnerships that led to a journal special issue with over a dozen collaborative papers. It is time to again make this connection across coasts to discuss recent developments conservation of endangered and at-risk salmonids. While there is a large and productive research effort on each coast focused on salmonid conservation, opportunities for sharing information between Atlantic and Pacific theaters of operation are less common. Building upon the success of 2012, the Teaming Up 2015 symposium will again bring together pairs of Pacific and Atlantic salmonid biologists to identify areas where collaboration between these research communities would be beneficial.