Assessing covariability among populations in the presence of intraseries correlation: Columbia River spring-summer chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) stocks

Abstract

We assessed covariability among a number of spawning populations of spring-summer run chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) in the Columbia River basin by computing correlations among several different types of spawner and recruit data. We accounted for intraseries correlation explicitly in judging the significance of correlations. To reduce the errors involved in computing effective degrees of freedom, we computed a generic effective degrees of freedom for each data type. In spite of the fact that several of these stocks have declined, covariability among locations using several different combinations of spawner and recruitment data indicated no basinwide covariability. There was, however, significant covariability among index populations within the three main subbasins: the Snake River, the mid-Columbia River, and the John Day River. This covariability was much stronger and more consistent in data types reflecting survival (e.g., the natural logarithm of recruits per spawner) than in data reflecting abundance (e.g., spawning escapement). We also tested a measure of survival that did not require knowing the age structure of spawners, the ratio of spawners in one year to spawners 4 years earlier. It displayed a similar spatial pattern.