ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of knowledge of the estuarine habitat ecology of salmonids in Baynes Sound, including comments on possible limiting factors. It focuses on the beach seine data because of local interest on the nearshore. Anadromous salmonids are hatched from eggs spawned in freshwater, move to the sea where they attain sexual maturity, and then move back to freshwater to reproduce. The maintenance and recovery of salmonid ecosystem properties such as ecological integrity and resilience could be a central management theme for the Sound. Ecological integrity is said to exist when an ecosystem is deemed characteristic for its natural region and resilience is said to be the amount of disturbance that an ecosystem could withstand without changing self-organized processes and structures. The estuarine ecology of Bayne Sound salmonids is poorly known and ecosystem management of the area would benefit from further detailed studies, using an integrated watershed-estuary-ocean approach.
