| Abstract/Description or Keywords |
Each year since 1988 the Nechako Fisheries Conservation Program (NFCP) Technical Committee has conducted a suite of projects to monitor the population of Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) that spawn and rear in the Nechako River. The goal of these projects is to provide the information necessary for the NFCP to assess whether or not the Conservation Goal identified in the 1987 Settlement Agreement (Anon, 1987) is being met. As part of this program of studies to monitor Nechako River Chinook salmon, the Technical Committee has conducted annual spawner enumeration projects on the Nechako and Stuart rivers. Since the primary measure of the Conservation Goal is the number of Chinook salmon returning to spawn in the Nechako River each year, the enumeration project has been designed to provide the most accurate estimate possible of the size, timing and distribution of the run. The information collected from the Nechako River is compared to similar information collected from the Stuart River, an adjacent system unaffected by flow regulation, to assist in identifying potential effects of flow regulation on the Nechako Chinook population. Following several years of study on the Stuart River, the data was found to be inconclusive in meeting that objective and, as such, the NFCP Technical Committee decided to terminate the Stuart River spawner enumeration component of the study after 2003. This report summarizes Nechako and Stuart River Chinook enumeration data for the years 1995 through 2003 and gauges performance of this data to that of the 1988-1994 study period. |
