Western Alaska Salmon Stock Identification Program (WASSIP): Cooperation Among Stakeholders to Improve Understanding

• Main Authors: Of Alaska Fisheries, Erica Chenoweth, Eric Volk, Bill Templin, Bering Strait, Point Hope
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: Norton Sound; Sockeye; Yukon; Kuskokwim; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.640.9722; http://www.npafc.org/new/publications/Newsletter/NL36/Newsletter36 (26-32).pdf

Program (WASSIP) is a unique collaboration among stakeholders and scientists to address long-standing questions about harvest patterns of chum and sockeye salmon in western Alaska fisheries. Born from frustration with widely divergent regulatory decisions based on limited and controversial data, WASSIP created a framework for representatives from affected stakeholders in western Alaska to collectively design a scientific study to address critical information gaps in a highly contentious commercial and subsistence fishing environment. While engaged in the largest salmon genetics study ever conducted (collecting over 325,000 samples), we established a process where representatives of major regional fishery interests accepted responsibility for the design of scientific investigations that would inform regulatory decisions they must live with. Spanning more than eight years, WASSIP analyzed more than 225,000 tissues to determine stock-specific compositions, harvests, and harvest rates of sockeye and chum salmon in subsistence and commercial fisheries across a vast region of coastal western Alaska, including state-managed marine and inshore waters on both sides of the Alaska Peninsula, Bristol Bay, the lower portions of the Yukon and Kuskokwim River drainages, Norton Sound, up around the east side of the