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"Rather than maximizing the number of fish harvested, if you maximized the economic value of the catch, including fixed and variable costs, you might consider harvesting very differently," Hilborn says. "For example, you would not take very large harvests in years of big returns because price goes down as does quality."

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant is for three years and is part of its Wild Pacific Salmon Ecosystem Initiative. The initiative focuses on salmon conservation in pristine areas, in hope of saving healthy systems rather than rehabilitating highly transformed systems, Hilborn says. Other than fishing, the waterways studied by the Alaska Salmon Program are not subject to human activities such as dam building, logging or development.

The money will help expand the scope of monitoring, fund new techniques for sampling and help make the UW database available through the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's Salmon Rivers Observatory Network.

The UW has collected information since 1946, more than a decade before Alaska even became a state. At that time, salmon biology was poorly understood. There were no long-term studies integrating salmon and their ecosystems. So UW researchers developed many basic techniques for counting salmon and understanding their life cycle.

Initially launched to help the processing industry and the federal government understand the size of salmon runs, early UW program leaders also collected basic information about weather, lake levels, emerging insects, zooplankton levels and other fish species and juvenile salmon growth, which distinguishes the data set from other salmon monitoring records.