DFO estimates are terrible. So sad.

[OldBlackDog]

SOMASS CHINOOK BULLETIN # 6 – 2016 Date: September 27, 2016

Somass Chinook Stock Assessment Update

Pre-season forecast:

The forecast terminal return of adult Stamp/RCH chinook to Barkley Sound and Alberni Inlet in 2016 was approximately 118,000 (range 87,000 to 148,000). The predicted adult age composition is 7%, 92% and 1% of 3, 4 and 5-year old fish, respectively.

Reforecast – Runsize Downgraded to 50,000 pcs (reduced September 13th )
Escapement – to September 25th (chinook escapement target for Stamp River - 23,000)

Stamp Falls - 14,360 chinook and 19,629 coho Sproat - 1 chinook and 2,887 coho

Somass Sockeye escapement – 439,000

Catch Estimate: 23,775
Somass First Nations – 12,149
Maanulth First Nations Domestic harvest – 490 Area D Gillnet – 1,723
Area B Seine – 0
Recreational – 9,400

NEXT WEEK'S FISHING PLANS:

First Nations

Tsu-ma-uss (Hupacasath, Tseshaht)
Economic Opportunity –No fisheries planned.
Food Social and Ceremonial - Hook and Line open 7 days a week from the bottom end of Paper Mill Dam Pool in the Somass River to Hocking Point in Alberni Inlet.
Maanulth
Hook and Line and Gillnet open - 7 days a week. 2 designated Area D gillnet vessels to harvest chinook and coho. These vessels will be displaying Maanulth identification flags.

Commercial

Area D Gillnet – No fisheries planned. Area B Seine – No fisheries planned.

Recreational

The Chinook conservation measures in Barkley Sound are in effect. Changes for 2016 include a newfinfishclosureinToquartBayandalsoachinooknonretentionareainEffinghamInlet. For more details see chinook and coho maps available on DFO website.

Stamp River and freshwater sections of the Somass River opened August 25th for chinook and coho retention. Daily quota 2 chinook, only 1 may be >77cm, 2 coho hatchery or wild.
For more information please contact the DFO office in Port Alberni at 250 720-4440.

 

[SpringVelocity]

That is Sept. values. What is the present numbers?

 

[IronNoggin]

That is Sept. values. What is the present numbers?

This is the latest available, as of 13 October:

"Chinook salmon
The total chinook escapement is estimated at 37,841 adults and 4848 jacks through the Stamp
Falls Fishway to October 12, and 199 adults and 6 jacks through the Sproat Falls Fishway to
October 13, 2016."

And if you believe what is written there, then between September 27 and October 12 of this year 23,480 springs magically appeared in the system. That equals over 1,500 per day wandering in and up over those 15 days...

Sorry, but given reported observations of the past & many present, I find that awfully hard to swallow...

Guess I simply find myself agreeing with OBD. And when the "guesstimates" don't line up, downgrade, downgrade, downgrade again, and simply fudge the final numbers eh??

Nog

 

[Whitebuck]

Numbers were nowhere near that in the river in that time period....
Nog is right....

 

[bones]

lol that terrible.

 

[IronNoggin]

lol that terrible.

Nothing - repeat NOTHING is "LOL" about this situation.

Nog

 

[Fishtank]

I have a friend who does river swims and counts fish around that particular area. not sure if he swam that particular river during that time but I'll call him and check

 

[fish brain]

My neighbors son did fish counts on the north Island for about five years. He quit in disgust last year after having been asked repeatedly to inflate return numbers. I always thought he might be exaggerating the story, but perhaps not

 

[OldBlackDog]

My neighbors son did fish counts on the north Island for about five years. He quit in disgust last year after having been asked repeatedly to inflate return numbers. I always thought he might be exaggerating the story, but perhaps not

That is very concerning.
One then questions all the fish counts.
Further, the person or persons asking for the numbers to be inflated should be fired for cause.

 

[agentaqua]

There is also a further extrapolation done in the office after the streamwalkers data is turned in (area under the curve estimate). That extrapolation is often much more unsupported than any inflated field observations made by the streamwalkers. The quality, or the limits of error of that extrapolation depends upon the number of streamwalks and their quality.

 

[winter chrome]

My neighbors son did fish counts on the north Island for about five years. He quit in disgust last year after having been asked repeatedly to inflate return numbers. I always thought he might be exaggerating the story, but perhaps not

Ok, I'll nibble on this one...

First of all, I don't know who your neighbours son is, but I assure you he wouldn't have been asked to inflate his raw field counts. you only see what you see in snorkel surveys. I have been on the NI for 10 years doing these counts and if anything I feel the raw counts are drastically low... fish are very good at hiding, plus if not swimming in optimal conditions you are limited by visibility, many deep and wide pools that fish move into as they see a "seal" like object floating down the river. Sunny conditions are the worst for counting fish, all you see is the flocculants in the water and sun rays. Seeing the bottom, or identifying fish becomes very difficult. I cant speak for how things are done in Alberni, but there is no "inflating" of numbers.

Estimates are usually "index" based. Meaning that its not a true escapement estimate, just a number to compare year to year. I think it would be very difficult to put an actual escapement number on a river with out a fence or method of capturing all fish that pass a certain point (Stamp/Somasshas this...).

agentaqua is correct in his statement about the extrapolations being done in the office. Observer efficiency, horizontal/vertical visibility, % habitat observed are all measurements collected in the field that are used as part of the AUC. Survey life also greatly effects AUC output (survey life is the amount of time a fish is observable in the river, entrance to death).

Many piece of data used to "try" and estimate salmon in the rivers. Not really a simple thing.

The more surveys conducted the stronger the estimate. So if there is 1 snorkel survey done on a river it will have a huge "estimate error" statistically. bump it up to 10 surveys and you will reduce the amount of error, but still may not be overly accurate with what is in the river.... Tough to explain.

could more work be done to improve these estimates... yes, but it all costs money... which has been cut cut cut cut from the west coast.

 

[winter chrome]

Further, the person or persons asking for the numbers to be inflated should be fired for cause.

sure OBD....

 

[TheBigGuy]

Ok, I'll nibble on this one...

First of all, I don't know who your neighbours son is, but I assure you he wouldn't have been asked to inflate his raw field counts. you only see what you see in snorkel surveys. I have been on the NI for 10 years doing these counts and if anything I feel the raw counts are drastically low... fish are very good at hiding, plus if not swimming in optimal conditions you are limited by visibility, many deep and wide pools that fish move into as they see a "seal" like object floating down the river. Sunny conditions are the worst for counting fish, all you see is the flocculants in the water and sun rays. Seeing the bottom, or identifying fish becomes very difficult. I cant speak for how things are done in Alberni, but there is no "inflating" of numbers.

Estimates are usually "index" based. Meaning that its not a true escapement estimate, just a number to compare year to year. I think it would be very difficult to put an actual escapement number on a river with out a fence or method of capturing all fish that pass a certain point (Stamp/Somasshas this...).

agentaqua is correct in his statement about the extrapolations being done in the office. Observer efficiency, horizontal/vertical visibility, % habitat observed are all measurements collected in the field that are used as part of the AUC. Survey life also greatly effects AUC output (survey life is the amount of time a fish is observable in the river, entrance to death).

Many piece of data used to "try" and estimate salmon in the rivers. Not really a simple thing.

The more surveys conducted the stronger the estimate. So if there is 1 snorkel survey done on a river it will have a huge "estimate error" statistically. bump it up to 10 surveys and you will reduce the amount of error, but still may not be overly accurate with what is in the river.... Tough to explain.

could more work be done to improve these estimates... yes, but it all costs money... which has been cut cut cut cut from the west coast.

Firstly, winter chrome, let me state I totally respect your opinion and experiences working in the field. However, in any work place supervisors sometimes treat employees very differently. Just because you have never been asked to inflate figures does not mean that hasn't occurred with others. In the workplace unscrupulous supervisors know which employees they may be able to pressure to take short cuts, or perform tasks they have no right to ask them to do. Younger workers, new hires, or women are often targets of these types of requests. They are often perceived as someone easier to pressure into doing something improper. Perhaps, you being a long term worker who is obviously concerned about doing your job correctly, were deemed a poor candidate to approach for this type of request. Supervisors know exactly who in the workplace to pressure to do things improperly. Even if they are not successful in getting the worker to do something improper, they choose a person that they feel is unlikely to report them. This is why managers have gotten away with things like sexualy inappropriate conduct in the workplace for years. They know exactly who to target, and who is unlikely to report them. You may have simply have been deemed a very poor candidate for this type of request. Just because you have never been approached, does not mean it hasn't happened to others.

As you stated, budget cuts within the department have been rampant for years. Whenever budgets are getting slashed there is pressure on managers in any office to have their area seen to be performing well. In the case of fisheries, I could easily see a manager wanting his area to appear to be on target for escapement forecasts. In these days of never ending budget cuts, what manager wants to have his department seen as under performing.

I'm not saying this practice is common place, but I could certainly see it happening. The run forecasting within the DFO has been notoriously poor for years, and one day the axe will fall. As a manager, most would rather be seen to be having their department on target, so the axe doesn't fall on them if it does come down.

I may be completely wrong, but from almost 40 years in the work force that's my take on things. It's a cover your butt world for middle management in today's rapidly changing workplace. There's lots of unscrupulous managers and supervisors out there, and all they're concerned about is making themselves look good to upper management.

Sadly, that's my perception of today's workplace. I don't think the DFO is any different. If anything, I'm guessing the constant budget cuts make it far worse than than the average workplace in Canada. I suspect far worse than that has occurred within the DFO in past years, so not much with them would surprise me.

 

[Cuba Libre]

Its not just BC estimates that swing widely http://www.eastoregonian.com/eo/loc...elhead-fishing-closes-early-on-columbia-river

 

[Dave]

The direction of this post bothers me. I was not much involved in stock assessments in my DFO career, but I knew many technicians, biologists and managers who were. They were all excellent, professional, and loved their work. Never, ever, did I see or hear of any “manipulation of data”. And trust me, if this was true I and my peers would have known via the internal grapevine.

Any manager that would have suggested fudging data would have been quickly ostracized by his/her peers.

Sorry, I’m calling ******** on this until more information becomes available.

 

[TheBigGuy]

but they had no problem making dfo scientists rewrite environmental impact assessments to give business the green light. Lots of shady things went on during the Torry tenure in office.

 

[TheBigGuy]

What’s wrong with DFO?

Money, politics and conflicts of interest:
these are DFO’s main failings. The agency is
woefully underfunded, both in terms of research
capability and conservation policy implemen-
tation. Continued lobbying to Ottawa to
provide more research dollars has fallen on
deaf ears to date. Cuts to enforcement budgets
over the last two decades have also seen DFO’s
ability to prosecute environmental violations
greatly reduced. John Werring, a fish biolo-
gist with the David Suzuki Foundation, says:
“They’ve reduced enforcement capability so
greatly that there are now just seven inspec-
tors for the entire Pacific Region, to respond
to everything from illegal fishing to habitat
destruction. This is a situation doomed to fail.”
Secondly, although conservation principles
have been added to the Fisheries Act in recent
years, DFO’s primary function remains the
management of harvesting of salmon, not
protection. Accordingly, political pandering
to commercial fishing interests—indeed, any
business interest affecting salmon or their
habitat—almost always overrides science.
In his 2007 book analyzing the collapse
of the east coast cod fishery,
Who Killed the Grand Banks
, Alex Rose castigates DFO for
its blatant support for overfishing of threat-
ened stocks, citing page after page of damning
evidence of DFO’s imperative to serve busi-
ness rather than conservation. “Every new
employee soon learned that, as an agency, we
existed to support the commercial fishing
industry. Period,” writes Rose.
Rose devotes two chapters in his book to the
BC salmon fishery, writing despairingly that
DFO is managing west coast salmon into extinc-
tion the same way the department oversaw the
disappearance of east coast cod: “It breaks my
heart to say it, but there are just too many striking
similarities between Atlantic cod and Pacific
salmon. I believe we’re at the tipping point.”
In those chapters, Rose documents a litany
of poor management decisions in BC from the
1970s onwards, all aimed at support for industry,
and all of which have had disastrous conse-
quences for Pacific salmon. Some of those
decisions were simply inept. DFO dumped
fertilizer into the Babine Lake system, for
example, to enhance population growth in
the local sockeye stocks. The experiment was
successful for sockeye, but has resulted in the
decimation of several other threatened species
in the bycatch of eager fishermen netting
the now abundant Babine Lake sockeye run.
Rose describes other decisions of DFO as
outright criminal. In 2006, BC Institute of
Technology students discovered millions of
juvenile salmon had died as a result of a DFO-
supported gravel-mining operation on the
lower Fraser River. Gravel extraction is big
business on the Fraser, but highly risky to young
fish which depend on gravel beds for survival.
“[DFO officials] would have had to be blind
in order to not know the risk of gravel removal
was more than trivial,” BCIT fisheries biolo-
gist Marvin Rosenau told Rose.
Indeed, frontline DFO staff did know of
the risks. But according to Rose, when they
protested the approval of the gravel opera-
tion, they were overruled by senior executives
in Ottawa. The same frontline staff told
the BCIT researchers that DFO could and
should be charged under the Criminal Code
for failure to meet its statutory responsibilities.
No prosecution ensued, however.
The same year, documents obtained by
Watershed Watch Salmon Society under the
Freedom of Information Act revealed that DFO
managers on the Skeena River had bowed to
political pressure from commercial fishing
groups and turned a deliberate blind eye to
illegal overfishing of endangered stocks on
the river. According to Watershed Watch,
DFO’s management plan required commer-
cial openings to end on August 6, 2006. But
after intensive political lobbying, fishing
continued for another month. An internal memo from DFO biolo-
gist Steve Cox-Rogers confesses: “We said we would fish selectively to
minimize harvest impacts [but] we caved under pressure.”
These are just some of the known examples of DFO management
decisions with negative impacts on salmon. Ultimately, says Rose, “While
there are some good and honourable people within DFO, as a former
employee I have to say the organization is intellectually bankrupt.
Politics always takes priority over policy and the fish. This is all about
greed, because fish equals money and no-one wants to admit that we’re
[annihilating] our wild salmon resource.”

Above excerpt is from:

https://www.watershed-watch.org/Sockeye-Focus-Nov2009.pdf

Further examples:

http://commonsensecanadian.ca/fraser-gravel-mining/

http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/04/19/SalmonKillsMining/?PageSpeed=noscript

 

[Whitebuck]

I am very close to a biologist who left DFO a few years ago and went to a different branch of government because any hard work or findings were swept under the carpet or ignored by Ottawa. Months of work and results clearly showing that mines,logging, netting would hurt a watershed would be ignored.

In BC fudging numbers or estimates is all too common when big money is involved!

 

[winter chrome]

I have to say close only counts in horse shoes and hand grenades...

I assure "fudging" numbers is not common, sorry white buck.

I can not speak to higher level politics, but at regional level things are on the up n' up. Dave above has a great view and understanding of things in DFO at the ground level.

I am very close to a biologist who left DFO a few years ago and went to a different branch of government because any hard work or findings were swept under the carpet or ignored by Ottawa. Months of work and results clearly showing that mines,logging, netting would hurt a watershed would be ignored.

In BC fudging numbers or estimates is all too common when big money is involved!

 

[agentaqua]

I think what is missing - so far - in this forum discussion - is an explicit acknowledgement that DFO has many compartments - where stock assessment is separate from those responsible for making many decisions such as openings and environmental assessments. It has been my experience that stock assessment has been consistently whittled away wrt funding - over many years. I believe they do the best they can with the resources they have available - and the limits of error are inherent with the methodologies - rather than solely with observer bias.