Fishery-Independent Salmon Stock Monitoring and Assessment

The Environment Agency seeks support to develop and implement fishery-independent monitoring methods for assessing salmon stock status in English rivers. Current assessments rely primarily on angler catch data to estimate annual egg deposition against conservation targets. However, declining salmon populations and increasing climate-related fishery closures are reducing the reliability of catch-based data, particularly for small rivers. This opportunity requires suppliers to enhance existing fishery-independent data collection and analysis methods to provide robust, alternative data sources that can reliably parameterize stock assessment models when traditional angler catch records are insufficient. The work supports the Environment Agency's statutory obligation to conduct annual salmon stock status assessments across English river systems.