|
Partners:
NSERC,
DFO (PBS), NOAA (Alaska, Oregon/Washington and Santa Cruz).
Summary:
Pacific salmon are an important fisheries resource for Canada, with
significant links to the regional and national economy, and social and
cultural heritage of costal communities. During the last two/three decades,
the productivity of Pacific salmon has been declining from southern British
Columbia to central California, with the disappearance of several stocks,
which might be linked to large-scale changes in ocean conditions and
associated variability in temperature, nutrients, quantity and quality of
zooplankton, forage fish and predator assemblages. Understanding and
modeling the feeding, foodweb and resource ecology of juvenile salmon on a
continental scale have never been done because it needs coordination of
ocean cruises conducted by Canadian and US federal departments, significant
funding for cruises, integration of inter-disciplinary expertise, and human
resources. To achieve this scale of comparative modeling, it is also
critical to establish collaborative agreements among all the federal
fisheries centers in Canada and USA along the west coast to follow
standardized protocols for sample collection and processing. We have a
unique opportunity to understand and model the continental-scale variability
in: 1) nitrogen and carbon dynamics
using N and C isotope signatures of zooplankton, and foodweb dynamics and
trophic interactions of juvenile salmon; 2) feeding ecology of juvenile
salmon from gut content analyses; and 3) juvenile salmon growth using scales
and otoliths and its link to food quality and food web structure.
With the ship time support of over a million $ per year for sample
collection, and the collaboration with NOAA Fisheries and DFO researchers,
we will be able to achieve the proposed objectives. This project will produce fundamentally important and innovative
sciences on the large-scale spatial variability in nutrient and energy
sources, foodweb dynamics, trophic interactions and growth of juvenile
salmon, which will lead to better understanding and management of one of
Canada’s precious natural resources, the Pacific salmon.
|
