Current salmon management centers around heavy exploitation of mixed stock fisheries and disregards the negative effects this policy has on discrete stocks of all salmon species. Not until we recognize the importance of implementing an assessment plan for discrete salmon stocks, based on the necessary information, can we fulfill our constitutional obligation to preserve the sustained yield of all stocks of the resource.

The need for this change in management philosophy and implementation of a discrete salmon stock assessment policy is heavily supported by information from the scientific community. The National Research Council of the National Academy of Science assembled the leading experts in the field of salmon management and published Upstream: Salmon and Society in the Pacific Northwest, in December 1995.

An extensive review by leading experts to analyze data on salmon stocks, their decline and options for intervention supports the need for discrete stock assessment. The following is excerpted from their findings:

• Because of their anadromous life cycles and homing behaviors and the variety of environments they occupy, each species tends to differentiate into local breeding populations that are in general reproductivity isolated from other populations and adapted to each stream. To sustain productive natural populations of salmon, it is crucially important to maintain this genetic variation and local adaptation.
• When fishing occurs on a mixture of populations with different stock-recruitment functions and fishing cannot be regulated at a rate appropriate for each component population, the stage is set for overfishing of the less abundant components.

The conclusion of this report points out the potential deficiency in Alaska's current management philosophy and supports the need for the discrete salmon stock assessment policy. The experts conclude:

• The long-term survival of salmon depends crucially on a diverse and rich store of genetic variations. Because of their homing behavior and the distribution of their populations and their riverine habitats, salmon populations are unusually susceptible to local extinction's and are dependent on diversity in their genetic make-up and population structure. Therefore, management must recognize and protect the genetic diversity within each salmon species, and it must recognize and work with local breeding populations and their habitats. It is not enough to focus only on the abundance of salmon.

In order to uphold our Constitutional mandate to provide for sustained yield, we cannot afford to ignore the biological realities and maintain the status quo. The passage of SB 13 is intended to redirect our attention from the past mistakes of allocation driven management system toward a system which will fully meet our constitutional responsibility to sustained yield.