Abundance and Trend of Arctic Grayling (Thymallus arcticus) in Index Sites of the Parsnip River Watershed, 1995-2019. John Hagen1 and Nikolaus Gantner2 March, 2020 Prepared for: Fish and Wildlife Compensation Program – Peace Region 3333 - 22nd Avenue, Prince George, BC, V2N 1B4 FWCP Project No. PEA-F20-F-2959 Prepared with financial support of the Fish and Wildlife Compensation Program on behalf of its program partners BC Hydro, the Province of BC, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, First Nations and public stakeholders. ________________________________________________________________ 1John Hagen and Associates, 330 Alward St., Prince George, BC, V2M 2E3;
[email protected] 2 BC Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource Operations, 2000 South Ospika Blvd., Prince George, BC; V2N 4W5;
[email protected] 2019 Parsnip Watershed Arctic Grayling Monitoring Hagen and Gantner 2019 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Over the 1995-2007 period, the Fish and Wildlife Compensation Program – Peace Region (FWCP) consistently monitored Arctic Grayling abundance and trend in the Parsnip River watershed using snorkeling surveys during the month of August in two index reaches of the Table River and four index reaches of the Anzac River. In 2017, FWCP identified the ten- year hiatus in the monitoring program since 2007 as a high priority knowledge gap for Arctic Grayling. The most important component of our study, which was initiated in 2018, has been to address this information gap by resuming snorkeling surveys in these long- term index reaches. This report presents snorkeling survey results from August 2019, the second consecutive year of surveys in these locations. A second component of our study addresses another high-priority knowledge gap for FWCP: the lack of information delineating critical habitats and abundance in other sub-basins of the Parsnip River watershed.