Long-term changes in the juvenile Sockeye salmon rearing capacity of the Chignik lakes watershed

Freshwater ecosystems respond rapidly to perturbations in climate, geomorphology, and population abundances. For migratory species in interconnected habitat networks, local habitat conditions can control the productivity of individual populations. Asynchronous variation in habitat quality can simultaneously stabilize ecological processes at broad scales but also complicate the understanding of ecosystem dynamics. We investigated habitat-specific trends in indicators of the rearing capacity for juvenile sockeye salmon in a remote watershed in Alaska over the last ~60 years. The motivation of this effort was to understand if the collapse of the local salmon fishery in 2018 could be traced to changes in habitat quality within the nursery watershed. Our analyses describe high variability in the habitat conditions across both spatial and temporal scales, yet do not suggest a decline in the overall sockeye salmon rearing capacity of the watershed. We observed increasing maximum water temperat..., , # Data from: Long-term changes in the juvenile Sockeye salmon rearing capacity of the Chignik lakes watershed

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.8sf7m0d29](10.5061/dryad.8sf7m0d29)

## Description of the data and file structure

Metadata for

Authors: C. Gammelin, D.E. Schindler

Title: \"Long-term Changes in the Juvenile Sockeye Salmon Rearing Capacity of the Chignik Lakes Watershed\"

Year: 2025

Journal: PLOS-ONE

### Files:

* \"Juvenile_Sockeye_Length_Mass.csv\" : Length and mass for juvenile sockeye salmon (*Oncorhynchus nerka*) collected in the Chignik Lakes watershed, AK between 1961-2024.
* \"Lake_Temperatures.csv\" : Summer (June, July, August) Lake surface (< 10 m) water temperatures collected in the Chignik Lakes watershed, AK between 1929-2024.
* \"Resident_Fish_Catch.csv\" : Juvenile sockeye salmon (*Oncorhynchus nerka*), pond smelt (*Hypomesus olidus*), three-spine stickleback (*Gasterosteus aculeatus)*, and nine-spine stickleback (*Pungitius pungitius)* catches in the Chignik Lakes wa...,