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Managing Pacific Salmon for Ecosystem Values: Ecosystem Indicators and the Wild Salmon Policy
Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council
Canada's Wild Salmon Policy (WSP) was released in June 2005 with a goal to restore and maintain healthy and diverse salmon populations and their habitats. The strategy aims to include ecosystem values in decision-making by proposing "ecosystem indicators" to monitor the status of freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. The scientific basis for proposing ecosystem indicators within the WSP recognizes that Pacific salmon play an important role in marine, freshwater, and terrestrial ecosystems, including streams, lakes, riparian forests and wildlife food webs. Managers influence these ecosystems by considering changes in fisheries regulations (i.e., harvest levels) and artificial enhancement (e.g., hatcheries). Thus, the role of ecosystem indicators is to provide a measure of ecosystem responses to changes in spawner abundance, thereby helping managers understand how changes in their actions affect freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems.
ESSA was contracted to work with the Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council to help Fisheries and Oceans Canada implement Strategy 3 of the WSP. ESSA's responsibilities included: (1) conducting a literature review to summarize the “state of the science” understanding of how Pacific salmon affect freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems; (2) using this summary to develop conceptual models illustrating the linkages between Pacific salmon and reliant ecosystems; (3) identifying a series of management-relevant questions; (4) proposing a suite of ecosystem indicators that could be used to help answer these questions; and (5) developing a set of recommendations to clarify the next stages toward implementing these indicators.
Nelitz, M., C. Murray, M. Porter, and D.R. Marmorek. 2006. Managing Pacific salmon for ecosystem values: Ecosystem indicators and the wild salmon policy . Final report prepared by ESSA Technologies Ltd., Vancouver, BC. for Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, Vancouver, BC.
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