2024 Wild Coho Forecasts for Puget Sound, Washington Coast, and Lower Columbia

Run size forecasts for wild coho stocks are an important part of the pre-season planning process for Washington State salmon fisheries. Accurate forecasts are needed at the scale of management units to ensure adequate spawning escapements, realize harvest benefits, and achieve harvest allocation goals.

Wild coho run sizes (adult ocean recruits) have been predicted using various approaches across Washington’s coho producing systems. Methods that rely on the relationship between adult escapement and resulting run sizes are problematic due to inaccurate escapement estimates and difficulty allocating catch in mixed stock fisheries. In addition, escapement-based coho forecasts often have no predictive value because watersheds become fully seeded at low spawner abundances (Bradford et al. 2000). Furthermore, different variables in the freshwater (Lawson et al. 2004; Sharma and Hilborn 2001) and marine environments (Logerwell et al. 2003; Nickelson 1986; Rupp et al. 2012; Ryding and Skalski 1999) influence coho survival and recruitment to the next life stage. Therefore, the accuracy of coho run size forecasts can be improved by partitioning recruitment into freshwater production and marine survival. In this forecast, wild coho run sizes (adult ocean recruits) are the product of smolt abundance and marine survival and are expressed in a matrix that combines these two components. This approach is like that used to predict hatchery returns where the starting population (number of smolts released) is known.

Freshwater production, or smolt abundance, is measured as the number of coho smolts leaving freshwater at the conclusion of the freshwater life stage. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) and tribal natural resource departments have made substantial investments to monitor smolt abundance in order to assess watershed capacity and escapement goals and to improve run size forecasts. Long-term studies on wild coho populations have been used to identify environmental variables contributing to freshwater production (e.g., low summer flows, pink salmon escapement, watershed gradient). For stocks where smolt abundance is not measured, smolt abundance is estimated by using the identified correlates and extrapolating information from neighboring or comparable watersheds.

Marine survival is defined as survival after passing the smolt trap through the ocean rearing phase to the point that harvest begins. Marine survival of a given cohort is measured by summing coho harvest and escapement and dividing by smolt production. Harvest of wild coho is measured by releasing a known number of coded-wire tagged wild coho smolts and compiling their recoveries in coastwide fisheries. Coastwide recoveries are compiled from the Regional Mark Processing Center database (www.rpmc.org). Tags detected in returning spawners are enumerated at upstream trapping structures. Results from these monitoring stations are correlated with ecological variables from the marine environment to describe patterns in survival among years and watersheds. The identified correlations are used to predict or forecast marine survival of wild coho cohort for a given year.

The WDFW Fish Program Science Division has developed forecasts of wild coho run size since 1996 when a wild coho forecast was developed for all primary and most secondary management units in Puget Sound and the Washington coast (Seiler 1996). A forecast methodology for Lower Columbia natural coho was added in 2000 (Seiler 2000) and has continued to evolve in response to listing of Lower Columbia coho under the Endangered Species Act in 2005 (Volkhardt et al. 2007). The methodology used in these forecasts continues to be updated; the most notable update in recent years has been in the methods used to predict marine survival.

Table 1 summarizes the 2024 run-size forecasts for wild coho for Puget Sound, Washington Coast, and Lower Columbia River systems. Forecasts of three-year old ocean recruits were adjusted to January age-3 recruits and compared to recent (10-year average) January recruits in order to provide appropriate inputs for coho management models (expansion factor = 1.23, expansion provides for natural mortality). The following sections describe the approach used to derive smolt production and predict marine survival.