Kyle Logan Wilson

• PhD, MSc, BSc
• Applied Quantitative Biologist at Central Coast Indigenous Resource Alliance

Plasticity, local adaptation and evolutionary trade‐offs drive clinal variation in traits associated with lifetime growth. Disentangling the processes and determinants that cause these traits to vary helps to understand species’ responses to changing environments. This is particularly urgent for exploited populations, where size‐selective harvest c...

Freshwater fisheries are complex social–ecological systems spatially structured by coupled feedbacks between people and nature. Spatial exploitation dynamics depend on angler preferences for multiple attributes that influence their site choices. Anglers then reciprocally impact local fish populations through size‐selective catch and harvest. Thus,...

Marine and freshwater ecosystems are increasingly at risk of large and cascading changes from multiple human activities (termed "regime shifts"), which can impact population productivity, resilience, and ecosystem structure. Pacific salmon exhibit persistent and large fluctuations in their population dynamics driven by combinations of intrinsic (e....

Metapopulations are often managed as a single contiguous population despite the spatial structure underlying their local and regional dynamics. Disturbances from human activities can also be spatially structured with mortality impacts concentrated to just a few local populations among the aggregate. Scale transitions between local and regional proc...

Fisheries science uses quantitative methods to inform management decisions that reflect cultural preferences which, in turn, indirectly influence the states of ecosystems. To date, it has largely supported Eurocentric preferences for the commodification of marine organisms under the tenets of maximum sustainable yield, whereby abundances are intent...

Defining the context dependence of ecological states or processes is a fundamental goal of ecology. Stressor-response functions are the quantitative representation of context dependence, where the context (environmental contingency) is defined by location on the stressor (x) axis, and represents a unifying concept in biological science.

Fish length back-calculation from hard structures (e.g., scales, otoliths, spines, etc.) is a commonly used method to reconstruct individual growth rates and sizes at age/stage in the absence of an intensive sampling–resampling timeseries. However, reliable estimates via these methods require the empirical validation of multiple assumptions about t...

In recent decades, chum salmon (Oncorhynchus keta) on the Central and North Coasts of British Columbia have experienced increasing variability and declining abundance. Chum are targeted by mixed-stock commercial fisheries despite declining trends and limited stock assessment to clarify conservation and fishery tradeoffs. We analyzed trends in chum...

The size of an ecosystem affects ecological interactions, but less is known about how ecosystem size may affect social interactions. We posit that ecosystem size could serve as a basis for understanding and contextualizing social interactions, connecting how ecosystem size influences natural resource investment decisions and the use of ecosystem se...

Biological hotspots are places with outstanding biodiversity features, and their delineation is essential to the design of marine protected areas (MPAs). For the Central Coast of Canada’s Northern Shelf Bioregion, where an MPA network is being developed, we identified hotspots for structural corals and large-bodied sponges, which are foundation spe...

Use of extensive but low‐resolution abundance data is common in the assessment of species at‐risk status based on quantitative decline criteria under International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and national endangered species legislation. Such data can be problematic for 3 reasons. First, statistical power to reject the null hypothesis of...

Wild salmon are central to food security, cultural identity, and livelihoods of coastal Indigenous communities. Yet ongoing inequities in governance, declining fish populations, and mixed-stock ocean fisheries may pose challenges for equitable access between Indigenous fishers and other non-Indigenous fishers. We sought to understand current percep...

Population and life‐history diversity can buffer species from environmental variability and contribute to long‐term stability through differing responses to varying conditions akin to the stabilizing effect of asset diversity on financial portfolios. While it is well known that many salmon populations have declined in abundance over the last centur...

Climate-driven changes in the oceans, such as shifts in prey timing and abundance, could influence variability in population productivity of marine fishes. For example, according to the match-mismatch hypothesis, the temporal matching of the young salmon outmigration from freshwater to the ocean relative to the timing of availability of their prey...

Recreational fisheries (RF) are complex social-ecological systems that play an important role in aquatic environments while generating significant social and economic benefits around the world. The nature of RF is diverse and rapidly evolving, including the participants, their priorities and behaviors, and the related ecological impacts and social...

The average size at first |maturity (L50) is among the most important parameters for fisheries management and conservation. This paper aims to compare three different methods for its estimation. Considering a classical approach, a logistic model was used (a) by determining the gonadal stage macroscopically; and (b) by using the GSI as proxy of sexu...

The first relatively complete landscape-scale social–ecological system (SES) model of a recreational fishery was developed and ground-truthed with independent angling effort data. Based on the British Columbia multistock recreational fishery for rainbow trout (Oncorynchus mykiss), the model includes hundreds of individual lake fisheries, hundreds o...

Catch-and-release regulations designed to protect fisheries may fail to halt population declines, particularly in situations where fishing effort is high and when multiple stressors threaten a population. We demonstrate this claim using Alberta’s Bow River, which supports a high-effort rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) fishery where anglers volun...

1. Several new growth models have been proposed to account for the life-history tradeoffs that occur when indeterminately-growing species allocate energy between somatic growth and reproduction. These models can improve the understanding of lifetime growth and life-history, but can be more difficult to fit than conventional growth models. Increased...

Forecasted increases in global temperatures will likely have profound effects on freshwater fishes. Overlaid on increasing global temperatures, human populations are expected to grow, which will increase anthropogenic nutrient enrichment in freshwater ecosystems. Florida (US) represents the equatorial range limit for many freshwater fishes, thus th...

With the 2012 revisions of the federal Fisheries Act there is a need to manage the risk to fisheries productivity from anthropogenic activity; however, the scale at which overall productivity should be managed is not clear. In this document, we review how Ecologically Based Management Areas (EBMAs) are developed using both terrestrial and aquatic v...

Recreational fisheries are empirically tractable examples of social–ecological systems (SESs) that are characterized by complex interactions and feedbacks ranging from local to regional scales. The feedbacks among the three key compartment of the recreational fisheries SES—individual fish and populations, regionally mobile anglers, and regional and...

Recreational fishing effort varies across complex inland landscapes (e.g., lake-districts) and appears influenced by both angler preferences and qualities of the fishery resource, like fish size and abundance. However, fish size and abundance have an ecological trade-off within a population, thereby structuring equal-quality isopleths expressing th...

Effective management of social-ecological systems requires an understanding of the complex interactions between people and the environment. In recreational fisheries, which are prime examples of social-ecological systems, anglers are analogous to mobile predators in natural predator-prey systems, and individual fisheries in lakes across a region ar...

Recreational fishing effort varies across complex inland landscapes (e.g., lake-districts), and appears influenced by both angler preferences and qualities of the fishery resource like fish size and abundance. However, fish size and abundance have an ecological tradeoff within a population thereby structuring equal-quality isopleths expressing this...

Size-at-age information is critical in estimating growth parameters (e.g., the von Bertalanffy growth function [VBGF]) that are used to assess fish populations. Due to gear selectivity, single sampling methods rarely sample all ages or all sizes equally well. Most growth estimates rely on samples from a single gear or a haphazard combination of gea...

Invasive macrophytes drive substantial changes to freshwater fish habitats. Such changes will influence how fish select for habitats, but fish–habitat relationships in many invasive macrophytes are often poorly understood at micro-scales. Fish habitat use is influenced by dissolved oxygen (DO) and habitat complexity, but this response can be nonlin...

Per capita productivity changes in fish populations resulting from competition for limited resources is likely expressed along a spectrum of density dependent mortality to density dependent growth. Simulations and pond/tank-based experiments have shown both increased mortality and decreased growth at high densities. Identifying and quantifying trad...

The quality of fishing opportunities available across the ‘angler landscape’ presumably influences the spatial distribution of angling effort. However, fishing quality and angler effort relationships are both data-intensive and dynamic where the harvesting of fish can homogenize fishing qualities. Fortunately, stocking hatchery-raised fish decouple...

A short story in the journal Nature: In all my years, I've never …" the doctor trembled while checking the readings. "Your son, he's going to die. "

Underwater video cameras (UVC) provide a non-lethal technique to sample fish in dense submersed aquatic vegetation. Fish often inhabit densely vegetated areas, but deficiencies of most sampling gears bias relative abundance estimates that inform fisheries management. This study developed methods using UVC to estimate relative abundance in dense veg...

Submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV) provides important habitat for many fishes. Vegetation serves as nursery habitat for freshwater fish and provides refuge and foraging opportunities due to increased structural complexity, buffering water-movement and recycling nutrients. However, not all SAV coverage provides quality habitat for all fish, and dens...