Evaluating the use of FSC and commercial fishery catch data to inform in-season management of Pacific salmon fisheries

The overall objective of the project is to assess the utility of data collected from commercial pink salmon and Indigenous Food, Social, and Ceremonial (FSC) sockeye salmon fisheries to support Test Fisheries data used to inform estimates of daily sockeye abundance. ESSA will work with partners from the Pacific Salmon Commission (PSC), Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), commercial fishers (Canfisco, Area B Harvesters), and FSC fishers (A’Tlegay Fisheries Society) to determine the feasibility of using data from commercial and FSC fisheries to support in-season estimates of daily abundance. While previous work demonstrated that commercial sockeye fishery catch data was a promising source of information to supplement test fishery catch data (Cave 2017, Ma et al. 2019), commercial fisheries for sockeye in the last decade have only opened on dominant-cycle years (i.e., 2010, 2014, and 2018), limiting the utility of this information. This project seeks to extend these promising results to other fisheries – namely the FSC sockeye fishery, which occurs in most years, and to the pink salmon commercial fisheries (odd years), thereby improving the utility of information gained from fisheries for in-season planning.