Environmental conditions on the Pacific halibut fishing grounds obtained from a decade of coastwide oceanographic monitoring, and the potential application of these data in stock analyses
Lauri L. Sadorus![https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0084-9381](/media/client/orcid_16x16.png)
![https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5663-9442](/media/client/orcid_16x16.png)
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Abstract
Establishing baseline environmental characteristics of demersal fish habitat is essential to understanding future distribution changes and to identifying shorter-term anomalies that may affect fish density during monitoring efforts.
Our aim was to synthesise environmental data to provide near-bottom oceanographic baseline information on the Pacific halibut fishing grounds, to establish geographic groupings that may be used as co-variates in fish-density modelling and to identify temporal trends in the data.
Water-column profiler data were collected from 2009 to 2018 along the North American continental shelf, during summer fishery surveys focused on Pacific halibut.
In addition to establishing baseline information on the fishing grounds, this analysis illustrated that environmental variables can be grouped geographically into four regions that correspond to the four biological regions established by the International Pacific Halibut Commission. A spatio-temporal modelling approach is presented as an example of how to describe the relationship between environmental data and Pacific halibut distribution.
This study has highlighted the efficacy of environmental data in analysing fish distribution and density changes.
Oceanographic monitoring provides the ability to detect annual anomalies such as seasonal hypoxic zones that may affect fish density and to establish baseline information for future research.
Keywords: chlorophyll-a, dissolved oxygen, environment, geostatistical model, monitoring, North Pacific Ocean, Pacific halibut, salinity, temperature.
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