Genetic-Based Estimates of Adult Chinook Salmon Spawner Abundance from Carcass Surveys and Juvenile Out-Migrant Traps

Abstract

Due to the challenges associated with monitoring in riverine environments, unbiased and precise spawner abundance estimates are often lacking for populations of Pacific salmon Oncorhynchus spp. listed under the Federal Endangered Species Act. We investigated genetic approaches to estimate the 2009 spawner abundance for a population of Columbia River Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha via genetic mark–recapture and rarefaction curves. The marks were the genotyped carcasses collected from the spawning area during the first sampling event. The second sampling event consisted of a collection of juveniles from a downstream migrant trap located below the spawning area. The parents that assigned to the juveniles through parentage analysis were considered the recaptures, which was a subset of the genotypes captured in the second sample. Using the Petersen estimator, the genetic mark–recapture spawner abundance estimates based on the binomial and hypergeometric models were 910 and 945 Chinook Salmon, respectively. These results were in agreement with independently derived spawner abundance estimates based on redd counts, area-under-the-curve methods, and carcass tagging based on the Jolly–Seber model. Using a rarefaction curve approach, which required only the juvenile offspring sample, our estimate of successful breeders was 781 fish. Our genetic-based approaches provide new alternatives to estimate adult Pacific salmon abundance in challenging environmental conditions or for populations with poor or unknown estimates of precision.

Received December 7, 2012; accepted July 17, 2013

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank Bryce Glaser, Paul Lodholz, Bryce Michaelis, Steve VanderPloeg, Sewall Young, and Todd Seamons for assistance with the project, and Cherril Bowman for production of the genetic data. We thank Thomas Buehrens, Martin Liermann, George Pess, Todd Seamons, and four anonymous reviewers for their comments. Funding for the project was provided by the Pacific Coast Salmon Recovery Fund, Pacific Salmon Commission's Letter of Agreement (Chinook Technical Committee) and Southern Boundary Fund, NOAA–Fisheries Mitchell Act, and Washington State General Fund.