About

We are group of researchers with Fisheries and Oceans Canada in the Pacific Region. Our group conducts research and provides science advice on Pacific salmon ecology and management. This includes developing quantitative tools and using retrospective and forward looking analyses to evaluate management actions in the face of uncertainty. Much of our work supports salmon assessment and fishery management and we increasingly seek to understand how a changing environment mediates the effectiveness of management actions.

We are committed to Open Science and doing our work in a reproducible, transparent, and publicly available manner. We benefit immensely from collaborations with others at DFO, academic institutions, state and federal agencies, and First Nations and non-governmental organizations.

Examples of topics our research group works on include:

• Salmon biocomplexity and mixed-stock fisheries (Connors et al. 2020, Moore et al. 2021, Connors et al. 2022, Freshwater et al. 2019)
• Responses of Pacific salmon to a warming and more crowded ocean (Connors et al. 2020; Connors et al. 2025)
• Incorporating cultural values into ecosystem based fisheries management (Adams et al. 2022) and the development of benchmarks, reference points, and rebuilding targets.
• Assessing robustness of transboundary fisheries assessment and management frameworks to spatial scale mismatch (Kapur et al. 2024) and climate change (Committee for Scientific Cooperation 2023)
• Linking population models with habitat data to improve assessment of data limited salmon stocks (Atlas et al. 2025)
• Detecting and accounting for time-varying population processes in salmon science and management (Wor et al.; Holt et al. 2025)
• Evaluating management options for salmon, including harvest, hatchery, and habitat management levers (salmonMSE)
• Spatiotemporal distributions
• Predator-prey interactions