Atlas of Pacific Salmon: The First Map-based Status Assessment of Salmon in the North Pacific
"Salmon are the world's most complex fishes and no other swimming creatures have so affected peoples' views of themselves and their place in the world. This excellent Atlas is the most illuminating overview ever conceived about these miraculous creatures and their human and biological context."
—Carl Safina
author of Song for the Blue Ocean and Eye of the Albatross
Wild salmon inhabit a vast ecosystem that encompasses the rivers within and the ocean between coastal countries of the Pacific Rim — from glacial melt in Alaska, and permafrost in the northern Russia, to Kamchatkan tundra and the North American temperate rainforests, to the steep and fast rivers of Japan, as far south as Taiwan and Mexico.
But within the past century and a half, many populations have declined in abundance and diversity; without the big picture, we haven't been able to understand or quantify these losses in Pacific salmon populations. Until now.
In this book — the result of a decade's research — author Xanthippe Augerot and colleagues use a common yardstick to measure distribution and risk of extinction for Pacific salmon at a consistent scale across the North Pacific. The Atlas, using more than four dozen maps, presents a never-before seen composite, a pan-Pacific perspective on the status of this genus,
- demonstrating a consistent pattern of risk of extinction marching up both sides of the North Pacific
- concluding that nearly one of four Pacific salmon populations assessed are at risk of extinction
- calling urgently for an improved state of knowledge; the aggregate of these pan-Pacific datasets was at most around 10 percent of stocks in the North Pacific.
In a book that will appeal across audiences, Augerot nests her findings in the greater context of North Pacific people and places; catalogues natural and human-made threats to salmon populations; and describes a North Pacific Ecosystem Approach to solutions toward a future that includes healthy wild Pacific salmon.
Chapter List
* The Fish
* The People
* The Place
* Distribution and Risk of Extinction
* Threats to Biodiversity
* Migration Ahead
Details:
Atlas of Pacific Salmon
12 x 9 inches, 152 pages
© 2004 Ecotrust, $34.95 + shipping
Purchase (via Salmon Nation online store)