Salmon & Sea Trout Archive

A Digital Archive storing non-peer reviewed salmon and sea trout literature and other material.  

The Atlantic Salmon Trust 2011 Sea Trout Workshop drew attention to unique and irreplaceable collections of raw data, unpublished reports in the hands of individuals and organisations, pointing out that these could be exceptionally valuable for future research.

With scientists retiring, and many institutions being reorganised, there is a very real risk that much of this ‘grey’ literature (i.e. scientific papers not published in peer review journals) and other material will be lost.

To avert this, the AST decided to look into the possibility of creating an archive to bring relevant material on both salmon and sea trout together and manage it as a resource accessible to researchers and the public in the future. This resulted in us launching a joint initiative to develop a Salmon & Sea Trout Archive with the Freshwater Biological Association (FBA), which has a large library and extensive experience of developing and managing archives.

The Salmon & Sea Trout Archive, currently split between the “Atlantic Salmon Trust Collections” and Salmon Advisory Committee Reports, is part of a larger meta-archive – the Agriculture and Environmental Data Archive (AEDA) – that the FBA have developed for Defra. The AEDA also contains a large collection of Environment Agency grey literature as well as other material.

Currently, the Salmon and Sea Trout Archive comprises the following categories, but we hope that more will be added in due course:

AST Journals

Prior to 1980, the Trust sent out Newsletters; from that year it produced two Progress Reports* a year.

From 2000 the Progress Report was replaced by a fuller Annual Report and a summer newsletter – Scalereadings.

From the winter of 2004/05 a Journal was introduced, with two editions a year until 2009. In that year the summer journal was replaced by a one-off newspaper style newsletter, with single editions of the journal produced in 2010 and 2011. No journal has been produced since 2011.

* A number of reports are missing, particularly for the Trust’s early years. We would be very grateful for copies of any of these.

Blue Books

The AST’s Blue Books covered a range of scientific and fisheries issues. These include reports of workshops organised by the Trust, scientific reports on selected issue and descriptions of salmon fisheries management in different jurisdictions in the North Atlantic.

Workshop Reports

Reports of workshops and other meetings organised by the AST.

The Salmon Advisory Committee

The SAC was a Government body established in 1986. Its remit covered the whole of Great Britain and its task was “to examine and report on matters relating to the conservation and development of salmon fisheries in Great Britain which are referred to it by Fisheries Ministers”. It produced 10 reports before it was abolished in 1997.

Access the Salmon & Sea Trout Archive and Agriculture & Environmental Data Archive here: CLICK TO ACCESS ARCHIVE

If you or your organisation has literature or scale sample collections that you would like to speak to us about. Please contact Pamela Lowry.