Electrofishing Data from the Restigouche River System, New Brunswick (SFA15)

The Restigouche River system in New Brunswick provides long-term monitoring data for juvenile Atlantic salmon. Fisheries and Oceans Canada collected this dataset via electrofishing surveys from 1972 to 2020, recording fish counts, lengths, and weights. The data supports the calculation of annual production indices for salmon populations.

Use Cases

• Modeling juvenile Atlantic salmon population trends over time based on long-term density indices.
• Assessing habitat suitability for salmon based on spatial distribution data from fixed-site sampling.
• Analyzing incidental catch data of other fish species to understand broader ecological community structure.
• Calibrating catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) sampling methods using successive removal sampling data.

Strengths

• Nearly 50 years of continuous temporal coverage from 1972 to 2020.
• Data collection follows a consistent fixed-site sampling methodology established in the early 1970s.
• Includes multiple biological parameters: species counts, fish lengths, and fish weights.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Sampling intensities vary among years and tributaries, which may complicate direct year-to-year comparisons.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale analysis.

Provenance

Source

Fisheries and Oceans Canada

Collection Method

Electrofishing surveys using successive removal sampling or catch per unit effort (CPUE) sampling.

Time Range

1972 to 2020

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-08 18:31:01.151896; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Restigouche River watershed, New Brunswick, Canada