3.4 Resources

Overview      Introduction   Standard procedures   Other considerations      Resources      Results and next steps

Salmon are among the most heavily studied fish species.  Practitioners can take advantage of decades of studies in which researchers have devised approaches to meet a wide variety of challenges.  These range from the practical logistics of dealing with factors like visibility, floods, debris, and fluctuating temperatures and flows to the difficulties of variable sampling efficiencies, observation biases, and differing catchabilities by time, species and size.   While much of our advice on the site applies to fish populations monitoring, the same principles apply to fish habitat monitoring references for each can be quite relevant and helpful in planning and implementing field data collection activities.

Examples of key information resources for fish population (p) and habitat (h) data collection include:

• Tested experience for 13 principal freshwater sampling methods and five additional techniques can be found in the  Salmonid Field Protocols Handbook: Techniques for assessing status and trends in salmon and trout populations (p)

• Standard Methods for Sampling North American Freshwater Fishes by S.A. Bonar, W.A. Hubert and D.W. Willis (eds) 2009. American Fisheries Society. 335pp. (p)

• Pacific Northwest Aquatic Monitoring Program's Methods paper for sampling and analyzing benthic invertebrates in freshwater (p)

• Clallam County (WA) Streamkeepers' Quality Assurance and Monitoring Resources (h)

• Washington Department of Ecology's Status and Trends Statewide Monitoring Framework (including field methods and protocols) (h)

• Aquatic and Riparian Effectiveness Monitoring Project's (AREMP) Field Protocol Manual, Aquatic and Riparian Effectiveness Monitoring Program (h)

• Effectiveness Monitoring for Streams and Riparian Areas: Sampling Protocol for Stream Channel Attributes and Sampling Protocol for Vegetation Parameters - PacFish/Infish Biological Opinion (PIBO) (h)

• Fisheries and Oceans Canada's (DFO's) Biological Sampling Manual for Salmonids (p)

• Fisheries and Oceans Canada's (DFO's) Salmon Scale Sampling Manual (p)

• Fisheries and Oceans Canada's (DFO's) Salmon Genetic Sampling Manual (p)

• British Columbia Ministry of the Environment's Fish Collection Methods and Standards (p)

• British Columbia Resources Inventory and Standards Committee - a site with links to various data collection resources (h and p)

• Pacific Streamkeepers Federation Handbooks and Modules - a site with links to various data collection resources (h and p) and stewardship resources

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