Emma Atkinson

Takao Tanabe | Biography Growing up in a Japanese Canadian family, in the tiny hamlet of Seal Cove, British Columbia, Takao Tanabe (b.1926) had no meaningful access to art or the possibilities it offered.

One of my favourite artists, Tak Tanabe, turns 99 today. He has painted beautiful renditions of landscapes I love. Here is a nice biography, including images of some of his work: www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/ta...

Concerns raised over alleged cuts to North Coast salmon monitoring | Globalnews.ca B.C. conservation groups are sounding the alarm over a cut to a government program they claim poses a serious threat to fish stocks.

globalnews.ca/news/1139321...

I *love* the map figure.

The next wave of monitoring cuts crests. Brutal. How do you steward salmon without counting them? You don't.

I am close to this issue & I know nuance abounds but I don't see how hundreds of millions of dollars towards restoration work can be effective without counting the fish we seek to support.

@scibri.com @sebastianleck.bsky.social @cloelogan.bsky.social @canadaland.com @jameswsthomson.com

There's an interesting salmon story here!

These beautiful photos were taken by April Bencze in Musgamagw Dzawada'enuxw territory. These are some of my favourite salmon river homes, it's quite a gift to know them.

Long story short, it is worth counting salmon. It's a cornerstone to understanding & stewarding these fish we care so much about. It's also a nice way to spend time. Walking up a creek, counting fish, seeing them putter their way home. I hope there will be more of it in decades to come.

But even through the lens of rebuilding sustainable salmon fisheries, more monitoring is necessary. Plenty of examples to look to. In 2022, the Pacific salmon fishery pre-emptively withdrew from MSC certification due to lack of sufficient data to inform assessment and set quotas.

Point #3: We're not even monitoring enough for fisheries.

Top line of the paper is that the conservation mandate that came w/ the Wild Salmon Policy has not been accompanied, in-practice, by demonstrated shifts in spawner monitoring to inform those policy objectives.

Asking population-level research questions (which we ought to be doing!) requires long-term time series with consistent (or calibrated) counting methods. Many salmon populations have 4- or 5-year generation lengths. 20 years of data isn't that much when you're trying to understand these fish.

Depending on the question or the conservation objective, many rough abundance counts distributed across the watershed or across the coast may be more useful than highly precise estimates from just a few systems. The tradeoff probably goes either way depending on the Q but it IS a tradeoff!

Upside = we have really good estimates of all the fish that went up the mainstem.

Downside = we often lose information on the distribution of fish within the watershed and how many fish actually made it to spawn.

This info is increasingly crucial as rivers cook and pre-spawn mortality increases.

Point #2: Higher quality estimates from fewer salmon systems = a tradeoff. In some instances, monitoring has consolidated from many coarse abundance estimates to fewer precise counts from, for example, accoustic arrays on the mainstems of watersheds.

The paper tried not to gloss over those important details/context and we reference the growing literature on Indigenous Data Sovereignty which must be considered in rebuilding salmon spawner monitoring. I probably have lots more to learn on that front.

Centralising data has tradeoffs & requires trust. There are important historical reasons why centralising data is not always viewed positively by Indigenous titleholders. There are also examples where the broadscale public salmon escapement database enabled important research w/ First Nations gov'ts

As salmon monitoring and stewardship becomes increasingly distributed across different organisations, Nations, and research groups, the task of maintaining an updated and high quality central database becomes more important & challenging. We need to resource that work.

Point #1: The paper underlines that effective monitoring for the public good means counting those systems AND integrating those data into the publicly facing database. Part of the decline (tho likely not all) may be to do w/ data loss along the pipeline from boots in the water to database managers.

I care about this b/c I work w/ salmon spawner data all the time & am tired of resigning this point to a caveat in every report/paper I write.

These data are FUNDAMENTAL to:
1. Assessing pop'n status
2. Estimating pop'n level stressor impacts
3. Evaluating the effectiveness of recovery efforts

Study finds last decade was the worst on record for salmon monitoring in B.C. and Yukon | Pacific Salmon Foundation A new study has found that the past decade was the worst on record for monitoring salmon populations in British Columbia and the Yukon since broadscale surveys began more than 70 years ago.

The Pacific Salmon Foundation (institutional home to my co-authors) posted a media release which shares highlights and links to the paper: tinyurl.com/mrxzc8wb

I want to specifically highlight a few points made in the paper that are important & get into the weeds a bit (they're interesting weeds!)

In a sentence: the decline in commercial salmon fisheries through the 1980s and 1990s was accompanied by the demise of counting salmon as they return to spawn in their natal rivers and lakes. Today, there are recorded counts for just 1/3 of historically tracked local populations.

Image credit: April Bencze

The last 10 yrs were the worst decade on record for salmon spawner monitoring in Pacific Canada. Any scientist who works with local-scale salmon abundance data knows this. Many papers written about the 'ghost streams' no longer monitored by the streamwalkers of decades past. We wrote another.

Ah, I'll cool it for now, and look forward to reading it when it's out in the world. :)

Hi Dr. Menzies, this looks very interesting. Is there an associated paper that's publicly available?

I'm making a schematic fig with a goal to clearly lay out the steps/structure of a pop'n model simulation. Model tracks within-year seasonal dynamics (e.g., a fishery sub-model during part of the year) and yr-to-yr dynamics. Looking for examples of effective figures balancing clarity/complexity!

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Hey Aerin, I think that Indiegraf might be a version of what you are describing? indiegraf.com/about-us/

Right on! I am working on similar-ish Q's but for spot prawn (Pandalus platyceros) up in BC. The connection to the bioeconomic model is very cool and relevant. Thanks for sticking with it, Iooking forward to reading this! 😊

I am trying to get in touch with a scientist at NOAA Fisheries, Gary Winan. His email address appears to be deactivated and is bouncing back. Any chance that someone on here knows Gary and/or can put me in touch?