Spawner Surveys Show Overall Increase in Salmon by Kevik Rensink SFEG volunteers and staff have completed another productive season of spawner surveys. Live counts, carcass counts, and redd counts help us to determine project success, and project effects on salmon by specific reach. If the restoration project included placement of large woody debris (LWD) to increase salmon habitat, we are interested in seeing how many returning salmon used the project site to spawn. If the project included fixing a passage barrier (i.e. a perched culvert) to allow fish access, we would like to know how many returning spawners were able to move upstream of the previous barrier. The results of the 2001-02 spawning season demonstrated a dramatic increase in the numbers of all salmonids, with the exception of chinook. Over the past two years the carcasses that were measured increased in size with the exception of chum, which had a slight decrease in the average carcass size (-1.9 inches). SFEG has collected spawning survey data for four years and we feel that we have a good baseline of information. In these four years we have seen the coho run increase by 82% and the chum run increase by 57%. The pink run has increased 46% from two years ago. Although we would like to attribute this success to restoration projects, it would be premature to declare that this is truly the case. At the time of this writing SFEG has not received escapement numbers from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). Until we compare our data to the estimated escapement totals published by WDFW, we don't know for sure that our projects are directly causing the increase in salmonids observed. I would once again like to thank everyone involved in making these spawning surveys possible this year. Thank you Lucy Applegate for creating another great volunteer base including volunteers Marlies Slostad, Janet Kurtz, Lianne Koenig, Sunita Sinclair, John and Peggy Doyle, Mark and Haydee Allred, Susan Swetman, and Nathan Coutsoubos; landowners Gordon Hamerski and Pat Parker, David Gribble, Gene Kennedy, and Mike Wood; SFEG staff Perry Welch, Geoff Martin, Dave Holt, Bob Keller, Dwayne Massey, and Paula Margerum; Skagit System Cooperative's Salmon Corps leader Belinda Paxton; and WDFW's Bob Chichester. We greatly appreciate all the hard work and effort that everyone puts into this very important part of salmon recovery. Click here for a table of spawner survey results for 1998-2002