Thank you.
As Dan said, the impetus for the report was that we'd been doing fisheries management in Yukon for 20 years and it was time to take a close look at what we'd been doing and where we wanted to go. It was an effort to bring together all of this historic and contemporary data into one place and lay out the context in which we manage fisheries, some of the specific conditions of fisheries in the north, and an assessment of how we were doing.
The first time we brought data together into one place, we looked at it across the territory, and within specific bodies of water or on a species-by-species basis. We asked ourselves how these populations were doing. We asked whether we were using the management tools we wanted to use and that were appropriate to get the information we need to make good decisions. We went into a lot of detail about individual species and the kind of information we used to collect them over that 20-year period in particular, and then looked forward to whether we should be doing things differently in the future. At the end of this report, we had useful lessons in terms of the things we wanted to be focusing on for the next 20 years of fisheries management, and new and arising concerns.
To jump to some of the lessons learned here, overall the fish stocks are primarily very healthy in the Yukon. There are some notable exceptions, but they're exceptions that we know about and spend more time managing. We found that our ability to monitor these populations had some constraints, and the report really prompted us to examine new ways, novel ways, more cost-efficient ways, and also more robust ways, of monitoring fisheries so we could make some good science-based decisions as to how we manage these stocks.
Communication with our partners, as Dan laid out very well in the introduction, and the context in which we do fisheries management in the Yukon, is unique. It has some shared aspects with other northern jurisdictions, but in the context of the final agreements, the way we do our work with our first nation partners and regional resource councils is a very important component of that. Strengthening those relationships was something we found to be important.
There were a few trends and threats on the horizon that we were aware of and that we're starting to work toward addressing. One of those is aquatic invasive species. We're still in quite a healthy state in regard to aquatic invasive species, but we know it's a threat. It's one we're conscious of. We're beginning to develop some programs around that because we can see the detrimental effects of these introductions elsewhere.
Those are just a few of the take-home messages from this work that we've done.
I'll leave it there, Mr. Chair.