Survival and movement of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) in freshwater

Survival and movement are fundamentally important processes that structure vertebrate populations. For mobile populations, mortality and emigration represent the only two ways that individuals are lost from a population and because each acts in concert with the other, it is neither possible nor practical to estimate or consider one with out estimating or considering the other. When it comes to Atlantic salmon, growth is a third factor that is inextricably linked to the fate of individuals. The individual-based approach used in this work facilitated disentangling these three processes for multiple Atlantic salmon cohorts in two streams in New England. Advancements of this work include: (1) development and testing of stationary passive integrated transponder (PIT) tag detection techniques for tracking movement of stream fish; (2) new methods to incorporate emigration information into capture-mark-recapture models to assist in decoupling emigration from true mortality; (3) elucidating the effect of local movement on estimates of true survival; and (4) examining the effects of size on growth, survival and movement over multiple seasons.