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Some estates have extensive records of salmon caught
on their beats, dating back into the nineteenth century.
These records provide an invaluable insight into how
fish populations on the Tay have changed. However,
most of these records have never been investigated
and their stories remain untold.
The Tay Foundation is contributing to a project to
collate these records, commit them to computer and
perform analyses on them. By placing current fish stocks
into context with the past, these records will help
inform present day management.
The project is due to report in the latter part of
2007.
Courtesy of the Tay Salmon Fisheries Company we have
found daily rod catch data for over 50 beats stretching
from 1913 to 1935. It is thought that this data was
originally collected by P.D. Malloch. Most of this
data has already been entered.
We are also have data
sets for many of these beats from the 1940's to 2003
which are being converted to a standard format.
We are also grateful to many individual estates who
are providing additional catch books so that we can
fill in any gaps.
By the end of the year we will have perhaps the most
comprehensive set of representative rod catch data
for a major catchment spanning an entire century.
Rod catch data is recognised as having major problems
in terms of accurate statistical analysis, but by collecting
such a large data set we hope that these can be offset.
Furthermore we have historic and current scale
readings from the catchment,which will enable us to
break out individual populations
with greater accuracy (to separate out grilse, 2SW,
3SW).
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