Prince William Sound Herring Program in the Gulf of Alaska Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Affected Area

The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council (EVOSTC) initiated funding for the integrated research program in Prince William Sound (PWS) in 2009. The PWS Herring Survey program occurred between 2009 and 2013. The Herring Research and Monitoring (HRM) program began in 2012 and is continuing. The Herring Research and Monitoring program is administrated by the EVOSTC under five-year contracts with a total anticipated duration to be twenty-years in length, concluding in 2032. The HRM program is designed to be able to change focus every five years. This changes the types of data collected and the number of projects within the program. The overarching goal of the HRM program is to improve predictive models of herring stocks through observation and research. The monitoring efforts provide surveys of disease prevalence, adult biomass, juvenile abundance index, and condition of young of the year herring. A series of process studies are aimed at improving our understanding of individual components of the herring life cycle. These studies include determining the age at first spawn, identifying population genetic structure, analysis of herring scales for growth patterns, intensive surveys of juvenile populations and conditions, analysis of fatty acids to determine migration distances, improving validation of acoustic measurements, disease related studies, acoustic tagging, development of nonlethal sampling methods, and modeling of herring populations.

This dataset is a single text file containing a manifest of data produced and archived under the PWS Herring Program. The PWS Herring Program datasets have been submitted as individual collections for long-term archive. This manifest is a master compilation listing all of the archived datasets generated by the HRM program in the 2012-2016 time period, with some project data extending back to 2009. The manifest includes the project name, EVOSTC project number, principal investigators, dataset description, time period, and the identifying number for the PWS Herring Program datasets.