Fish and Wildlife Compensation Program: Peace Arctic Grayling Investigation

This directed project’s objective is to collect available information on Arctic Grayling status, trends, and their habitat in FWCP’s Peace Region, and explain what knowledge gaps remain before conservation efforts can be planned. The project’s report will also provide future field study scopes of work with a detailed description of desired outcomes, recommended methodology and approximate costs. These studies will be linked back to the identified gaps. The report will also cover past enhancement options explored for Arctic Grayling and their habitat in stream settings, both within the Williston area and beyond. The success and failures of past enhancements and the transferability of lessons learned to future FWCP Peace Region work will be explained. The enhancement work discussion will incorporate this knowledge into prioritization of information gaps that could support promising tools for Grayling conservation. With its data-gathering, conservation and enhancement focus, the proposed studies will specifically address FWCP’s Peace Region objectives and also be a complement to provincial management responsibilities.

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Final Report: Executive Summary

FWCP strategic objectives. The FWCP Streams Action Plan (FWCP 2014) identifies two over-arching strategic objectives for the conservation and enhancement of Arctic Grayling and other priority fish species in the upper Peace Basin:

1. Maintain or improve the conservation status of Arctic Grayling populations.
2. Maintain or improve the integrity and productivity of Arctic Grayling habitats.

This study was initiated by FWCP to evaluate the existing knowledge base relative to these strategic objectives, and fulfil objective 1b-1 of the Streams Action Plan:

Review existing information (including provincial management plan), summarize status and trends of Arctic Grayling and its habitats, undertake actions that are within the FWCP scope and lead directly to the development of conservation and enhancement actions, and develop a cost effective monitoring program to assess status and trends.

The study has two components to provide guidance to grant seekers wishing to submit Arctic Grayling monitoring projects through the FWCP’s annual intake of grant applications. This report is the first of these components, and presents extensive background information from past studies of Arctic Grayling in the Williston Reservoir watershed, and from the scientific and management literature. The aim of the report is to identify and prioritize knowledge gaps on a watershed-by-watershed basis, to facilitate a quicker transition to on-the-ground conservation and enhancement actions for Arctic Grayling populations. The second component of this study is a more concise companion document, FWCP Arctic Grayling Monitoring Framework for the Williston Reservoir Watershed (Hagen and Stamford 2017), which provides a condensed list of recommended monitoring needs for implementation in the near term.

Priority information categories. Information gathering was prioritized according to those types of data most relevant to the FWCP strategic objectives, which include:

1. information indicating potential limiting factors for Arctic Grayling populations (e.g. habitat degradation, ecological changes, exploitation),
2. information about the effectiveness of enhancements for Arctic Grayling populations,
3. quantitative population data required to assess conservation status and risk (population structure, distribution, abundance, trend, threats), and
4. geographic information delineating critical habitats (providing habitats for key life history stages and where limiting factors may operate).

In this report, information about conservation status and critical habitats is organized according to conservation units, termed ‘core areas,’ which correspond to the putative i metapopulation structure. Information about limiting factors and enhancements specific for any particular core area in most cases could not be discriminated and are therefore discussed generally for the upper Peace Basin as a whole.

Click the provincial database link below to read the full final report for this project.