Southeast Alaska (SEAK) and Canadian aggregate abundance-based management (AABM) fisheries harvest Chinook salmon originating from throughout Southeast Alaska, Canada, and the southern U.S. This diverse mixture of migrating stocks requires a comprehensive coastwide genetic baseline to accurately estimate the stock composition of harvests. The overall goal of this project is to use a phased approach to develop a coastwide Chinook salmon single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) baseline to estimate the stock composition of harvests in SEAK and Canadian AABM fisheries.
The two biggest hurdles to assembling a coastwide Chinook salmon SNP baseline are: 1) no single agency has all of the baseline tissue or DNA samples necessary to adequately represent coastwide Chinook salmon production, and 2) different agencies do not all necessarily use the same SNP panels. To address these hurdles, we have worked with collaborators at the University of Washington (UW) to compile lists of SNP markers and populations screened by agency and university labs from Canada and the U.S.