Chinook Salmon Escapement Togiak River Watershed

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The US Fish and Wildlife Service, Headquarters Region 7 intends to award a single source Cooperative Agreement to the Bristol Bay Native Association. This notice is not a request for proposals and the Government does not intend to accept proposals. Award will be made 10 business days after this notice. The purpose of this project is to use mark-recapture methods to estimate the total abundance of Chinook salmon and to investigate the effectiveness of aerial surveys to monitor Chinook salmon escapement in the Togiak River watershed. This project addresses the need to obtain reliable escapement estimates for Chinook salmon in the Togiak River that was explicitly requested in the 2008 Request for Proposals for the Monitoring Program. Subsistence harvest of, and spawning and rearing habitat for Chinook salmon in the Togiak River occur within the Federal Conservation System boundaries of the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge. Providing a harvest priority to subsistence users in these waters is mandated under Title XIII of ANILCA. Objectives: 1. Develop a capture site with drift gillnets in the lower mainstem Togiak River and determine the feasibility of capturing and tagging 200 Chinook salmon over the duration of the migration. 2. Detect the ultimate spawning destination upstream of the capture site, via the presence of at least two tagged fish, of a population comprising 10% or more of all the Chinook salmon passing the capture site during each temporal stratum with probability 0.8. 3. Test the hypothesis that the distributions of spawners among strata are equal. 4. Based on distribution and run timing data from 2008, determine whether a single or multiple recapture locations will be necessary to provide an unbiased estimate of abundance in 2009, and identify specific locations. This project will assist the Recipient in carrying out their mission to improve monitoring of Chinook salmon escapement in the Togiak River. The Period of Performance is from June 23, 2008 through May 31, 2010.

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