Klamath River Juvenile & Spawning Salmon Monitoring to Inform Fish Harvest and Water Operations Management
Juvenile Monitoring
To aid in management of Klamath Basin fisheries and water resources, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in collaboration with the Karuk and Yurok Tribes, monitors outmigrant juvenile salmon in the Klamath River between Iron Gate Dam and the Trinity River confluence using rotary screw traps and frame nets. Juvenile salmon at these sites are typically monitored from late winter through late spring or early summer.
Data collected through this project include weekly trap catch, size, and disease prevalence of juvenile salmonids and other fishes.
These data are being used to estimate juvenile Chinook salmon production in the Klamath River Basin above the Trinity River, calibrate and validate models of juvenile salmon production, and quantify disease prevalence in juvenile salmon.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, in collaboration with the Karuk and Yurok Tribes, conducts annual fall-run Chinook salmon spawning surveys on the mainstem of the Klamath River from early October through December to provide valuable information for coast-wide salmon harvest management.
Spawning surveys include monitoring redds, carcasses, pre-spawn mortality, fork length frequency, age composition from scale analysis, hatchery composition, and female-male ratio.
These data provide valuable information to estimate the “escapement” or amount of a salmon population that does not get caught by commercial or recreational fisheries and return to their freshwater spawning habitat.
Biologists monitoring western ridged mussels in the Klamath River. USFWS photo
The Fish and Wildlife Service has many other long standing data collection activities on the Klamath (on the mainstem and elsewhere within the watershed) such as water quality, temperature, habitat modeling, green sturgeon surveys, western ridged mussel relocation and monitoring and more.
