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; Raymond A. Webster; Margaret Sullivan

doi:10.1071/MF23175

RESEARCH ARTICLE (Open Access)

Previous Contents Vol 75(5)

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

^A , Raymond A. Webster

^A ^* and Margaret Sullivan ^B

+ Author Affiliations

- Author Affiliations

^A International Pacific Halibut Commission, Seattle, WA, USA.

^B University of Washington, Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies, Seattle, WA, USA.

^* Correspondence to: ray.webster@iphc.int

Handling Editor: Daniel Deng

Marine and Freshwater Research 75, MF23175 https://doi.org/10.1071/MF23175

Submitted: 12 September 2023 Accepted: 17 February 2024 Published: 25 March 2024

© 2024 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)

Abstract

Context

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.

Aims

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.

Methods

Water-column profiler data were collected from 2009 to 2018 along the North American continental shelf, during summer fishery surveys focused on Pacific halibut.

Key results

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.

Conclusions

This study has highlighted the efficacy of environmental data in analysing fish distribution and density changes.

Implications

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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