Determination of factors affecting poor survival from egg to juvenile in Northeastern PEI

The present study will examine survival, as measured by emergence, from two rivers on PEI, North Lake Creek and Priest Pond Creek. The former river is known to reliably produce salmon juveniles on an annual basis, while the latter often has entire years where juveniles cannot be detected, despite successful spawning. The present study will examine a suite of instream and hyporheic environmental variables including temperature, oxygen, conductivity, ice cover, flow, spawning habitat and interstitial cover from redds located in the mainstem of each river. Emergence traps will be utilized in late spring to quantify the density of fry emerging from each chosen red. Multivariate statistical models will be used to relate emergence to environmental variables, and temperature and flow data will ultimately be used to build water temperature models for climate change scenarios.

Contact: Dr. Michael van den Heuvel, 902-388-0895, mheuvel@upei.ca