Report of the PSARC Salmon Subcommittee meeting, March 9-11, 1999

The authors acknowledged that the contribution of hatchery and wild components in the forecast of the Strait of Georgia stock needs to be examined as do the estimates of exploitation rates used in the analysis. [...] The Subcommittee agreed with the authors summary points that the forecast portends a substantial and very worrisome further deterioration in the status of the Strait of Georgia coho, and that the abundance forecast for Thompson coho is for continued severe depression. [...] Much of the discussion focused upon the utility of producing forecasts for some of the pink and chum salmon stocks given the quality of the catch and escapement data used in the development of the forecasts. [...] However, they are clearly the result of oceanographic changes in the structure of the ocean that may be operating to reduce biological productivity at the base of the food chain over a vast region of the coastal ocean stretching from Vancouver Island north to the Aleutian Islands in the 1990s. [...] The reviewer repeated the concern of the previous PSARC review that the paper failed to test the hypothesis posed in the paper with sufficient rigour to support the conclusions.