Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Montana Fishery
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

Understanding the mechanisms that influence burbot in the Wind/Bighorn River drainage will assist in making sound management decisions to maintain sustainable populations. Several studies have been conducted on burbot in the Wind/Bighorn River drainage and we do not propose to repeat those studies. Hubert et al. (2008) summarized much of the research on burbot in the Wind/Bighorn River drainage and concluded that the cumulative effects of high exploitation and entrainment likely have the largest impact on burbot populations in the drainage. Thus, we propose to evaluate the extent of exploitation within the upper Wind River drainage. The methods used to obtain exploitation rates will also provide information on population abundance within the studied lakes and large-scale movement patterns throughout the Wind River drainage. Exploitation, abundance, and population growth (obtained from three years of population abundance data) will be used in simple deterministic population models to better understand the effects of exploitation on burbot populations and guide management of burbot in the upper Wind River drainage.