OPP-PRF: Exploration of How Historical Climate Events Impacted Pacific Cod (Gadus macrocephalus) Evolution and Fishery Use (2023)

The main objective of our research is to investigate how two late Holocene climatic events affected Pacific cod populations throughout the last millennium. We combined zooarchaeological, archaeogenomic, and isotopic data from Pacific cod bones excavated from archaeological sites in three locations across the North Pacific: Eleanor Island in Prince William Sound, Mink Island in Amalik Bay near the Kodiak archipelago in the western GOA, and Amchitka Island in the Aleutian Islands. Our research objectives are to 1) characterize the population genetic structure, genetic diversity, and effective population sizes of Pacific cod populations over the last millennium; 2) identify genomic signatures of selection in response to historical climatic events and compare to adaptive regions found in modern Aleutian Islands Pacific cod; 3) determine whether there is evidence for genomic evolution following past climatic events related to a change in trophic level; and 4) compare and contrast the seasonality of fishing on fishing grounds between modern and historical time periods. The archaeological samples described above date to three main time periods: pre-Medieval Warm Period (MWP; ca. 2000-1500 BP (before present)), post-MWP/pre-Little Ice Age (LIA; ca. ~1000 BP), and end of the LIA (ca. ~500-200 BP). These data are whole genome resequencing data from 5 Novaseq X Plus lanes from 96 samples. The dataset includes samples that were resequenced to increase coverage so the number of fastq files is 137 for 96 unique samples.
**Data is submitted to Sequence Read Archive (SRA), but embargoed until 2027.**