Blogs

This is an important time of year for fish scientists. For those who work on salmon and trout, at least. During these few weeks, they get out into the river and begin to get an idea of how successful the last breeding season may have been.

The first recordings of returning tagged salmon to the River Frome this year happened more than a month later than in 2017. However, this will hopefully be the first of many tagged multi sea-winter salmon returning to the Frome in 2018.

GWCT Fisheries Scientist Will Beaumont recently spent two nights tagging juvenile sea trout on their way to sea as part of the SAMARCH project.

GWCT Senior Fisheries Scientist Bill Beaumont explains how technology used to track salmon has advanced since work began in 2003.

The Partnership agreement with the Environment Agency is proving to be very beneficial for discussing ideas and for gaining the various permissions etc. that the project requires for the SAMARCH sampling campaign.

THE team of fisheries scientists, who have been tagging salmon and trout smolts on the River Frome, were interviewed by the media on Monday 11th September.

The low number of juvenile salmon (called smolts) leaving the River Frome in Dorset for their feeding grounds in the North Atlantic in the spring of 2017 (called the smolt run) quantified by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust in collaboration with Cefas and the Environment Agency is likely to result in a decline in the numbers of adult salmon returning to our rivers in the next few years.

On the 20^th and 21^st of June 2017 the GWCT fisheries scientists met with some 25 staff from the 9 other SAMARCH partners in Rennes, France for the first project steering group meeting.

The GWCT is proud to be the lead partner on a major EU-funded programme that will provide vital research on rapidly declining salmon and sea trout (salmonid) populations in the Channel area.