Migratory salmon, both as juvenile smolts migrating from natal freshwater habitats to marine feeding grounds, and as adults returning to spawning grounds, experience multiple landscapes or seascapes. These landscapes each have unique environmental conditions (e.g., water temperature and salinity, ocean currents, river flows), and even within landscapes these conditions vary with space and time. Climate change has the potential to create new environmental conditions for migratory salmon to experience. We use a variety of techniques and tools to create links between the complex environments an individual fish experiences and its behaviour and survival. We tag salmon with transmitters that track individual fish throughout their migrations and provide detailed information on muscle activity, 3D-acceleration, behavioural thermoregulation, fine-scale movements, and migration speeds. This information allows us to understand how salmon complete their difficult migration in fluctuating environmental conditions. Our approaches include environmental monitoring to characterize migration experience, simulation models to better understand the role of ocean currents in salmon movements and laboratory studies to isolate the influences of water quality on fish behaviour and survival. We couple a fish’s experience and behaviour with physiological traits to also investigate interactions between individual physiology and the environment. Studies have taken place in the Fraser River watershed, as well as in the marine environment in the Strait of Georgia.

Selected Publications

Freshwater C, Anderson SC, Huff DD, Smith JM, Jackson D, Hendriks B, Hinch SG, Johnston S, Trites AW, King J. 2024. Chinook salmon depth distributions on the continental shelf are shaped by interactions between location, season, and individual condition. Movement Ecology, 12(1), 21. 

Kanigan, A.M., S.G. Hinch, A.G. Lotto, K. Szlachta, S.D. Johnston, S.A. Lingard. 2024. Early-ocean survival and behaviour of acoustic tagged Coho Salmon Oncorhynchus kisutch smolts released into a marine locale from a volunteer-run hatchery. North American Journal of Fisheries Management. 44(2):359-376.

Mayer, N.B., S.G. Hinch, and E.J. Eliason. 2024. Thermal tolerance in Pacific salmon: A systematic review of species, populations, life stages, and methodologies. Fish and Fisheries. 25(2):283-302. https://doi.org/10.1111/faf.12808

Chudnow, R., B. van Poorten, R. Pillipow, I. Spendlow, N. Gantner, S.G. Hinch 2023. Modeling migratory behavior and habitat use of fish in a large, uninterrupted river network: A case study of a migratory salmonid. Ecology of Freshwater Fish, 32(4):886-901.

Nonis, A, S.G. Hinch, and N.C. Coops. 2023. Summer physical habitat associations and movement of sympatric juvenile rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and Dolly Varden char (Salvelinus malma) in coastal streams of British Columbia. Environ Biol Fish, 106:1327–1343 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10641-023-01418-w

Furey, N.B., E. Martins, S.G. Hinch. 2021. Migratory salmon smolts exhibit consistent interannual depensatory predator swamping: effects on telemetry-based survival estimates. Ecology of Freshwater Fish. 30:18–30.   

Brooks, J.L., Chapman, J., Barkley, A., Kessel, S., Hussey, N., S.G. Hinch, Patterson, D.A., Hedges, K., Cooke, S.J., Fisk, A., Gruber, S., Nguyen V.M. 2019. Biotelemetry informing management: case studies exploring successful integration of biotelemetry data into fisheries and habitat management. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. 76(7): 1238-1252.

Furey, N.B., Armstrong, J.B., Beauchamp, D.A., Hinch, S.G. 2018. Migratory coupling between predators and prey. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2: 1846-1853.

Furey, N.B., Hinch, S.G. 2017. Bull trout movements match the life history of sockeye salmon: consumers can exploit seasonally distinct pulses. Transactions of the American Fisheries Society 146: 450-461.

Furey, N.B., Hinch, S.G., Mesa, M.G., Beauchamp, D.A. (2016) Piscivorous fish exhibit temperature-influenced binge feeding during an annual prey pulse. Journal of Animal Ecology 85:1307-1317. *Selected as runner-up for 2016 Elton Prize

Furey, N.B., Hinch, S.G., Bass, A.L., Middleton, C.T., Minke-Martin, V., Lotto, A.G. (2016) Predator swamping reduces predation risk during nocturnal migration of juvenile salmon in a high-mortality landscape. Journal of Animal Ecology 85(4):948-959.

Clark, T.D., Furey, N.B., Rechisky, E.L., Gale, M.K., Jeffries, K.M., Porter, A.D., Casselman, M.T., Lotto, A.G., Patterson, D.A., Cooke, S.J., Farrell, A.P., Welch, D.W., Hinch, S.G. (2016) Tracking wild salmon smolts to the ocean reveals distinct regions of nocturnal movement and high mortality. Ecological Applications 26(4):959-978.

Hinch, S.G., Cooke, S.J., Farrell, A.P., Miller, K.M., Lapointe, M., Patterson, D.A. (2012) Dead fish swimming: a review of research on the early migration and high premature mortality in adult Fraser River sockeye salmon Oncorhynchus nerka. Journal of Fish Biology 81: 576-599.

For other publications, please see our Publications page.