Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim salmon harvest

The Yukon, Kuskokwim, Norton Sound and Kotzebue subsistence-priority fisheries, where commercial chum and Chinook openings hinge on meeting escapement first. This page tracks Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim's cumulative commercial salmon harvest from ADF&G's Blue Sheet, by species, against the area's preseason forecast. The numbers are common-property and cost-recovery catch in thousands of fish, preliminary and updated through the season; sport, subsistence and personal-use harvests are not included. Percent of forecast is a share of the full-season projection, not a good-or-bad call, and it climbs as each species opens and peaks: early low percentages are the run still building, not a weak year.

Arctic-Yukon-Kuskokwim covers the largest geography of any area here, from Norton Sound down through the Yukon and Kuskokwim river drainages, and it operates under a different priority than the rest of the state. Alaska law puts subsistence use first when a resource cannot support every use, and in the AYK that is not a theoretical clause: Chinook and chum returns to the Yukon and Kuskokwim have run far below their historical levels for years, and both subsistence and commercial fishing have been restricted or closed outright as a result.

What that means for this page is that a low or absent commercial number here is usually a management decision rather than a market one. Escapement is monitored on the Yukon with sonar projects at Pilot Station in the lower river and at Eagle near the Canadian border, the latter counting fish against an obligation under the Yukon River Salmon Agreement with Canada, and commercial openings wait on those in-season passage estimates. Where commercial fishing does proceed it often targets summer or fall chum rather than Chinook. Yukon River Chinook returns covers how those sonar counts are read.