It will be another year of heightened conservation for the annual harvest of Yukon River chinook on both sides of the border.

Yukon and Alaskan management staff on Wednesday told the international Yukon River Panel in Whitehorse that measures are being taken to ensure enough of the troubled chinook stock reach the spawning grounds.

While Wednesday’s agenda for the Whitehorse meeting involved mostly technical presentations with numbers and graphs, there were those who used the open microphone to emphasize the cultural importance of the chinook.

For 17 years now, Teslin Tlingit elder Madeline Jackson has not set a net for chinook.

She told panel members how her two teenage granddaughters in the audience are skilled at cutting fish, how they knew how to clean and prepare fresh water fish from the lakes. But they’ve never cleaned a chinook salmon, she said with regret.

Jackson said there must be a continuing united front to revive the chinook stocks, a front so strong the whole world will take notice.

“My mom used to say, ‘take what you need, do not take it all, because there are some people coming behind you.’”

The 12-member Yukon River Panel is a joint Canada-U.S. management body that meets twice a year to receive technical input and discuss conservation and harvest strategies.

It began meeting in Whitehorse last Sunday. Wednesday and this morning were the only sessions open to the public. The meeting was scheduled to conclude this afternoon.

Alarm bells over the rapidly shrinking annual migration of chinook salmon have been going off for years. But the urgency has become louder in the last couple of years.

So much so, Alaska almost eliminated its passionately guarded subsistence fishery last summer, and the aboriginal food fishery in the Yukon was non-existent.

In the summer of 2011, for instance, Alaska’s subsistence fishery harvested 40,211 chinook, according to records.

Last year, it took 3,281, and even those were incidental catches while fishing for other salmon, along with chinook caught in research test fisheries.

In the summer of 2011, the Yukon’s aboriginal food fishery harvested 4,550 chinook, down 3,000 or 4,000 fish from the annual harvests of a decade earlier. Last year, the aboriginal fishery took 100, mostly for ceremonial purposes.

Chief Eric Fairclough of the Little Salmon-Carmacks First Nation described how the Northern Tutchone of the region were culturally linked to the chinook.

Today, he told the panel members, their traditional fish camps are being overrun with willows because nobody’s using them.

And yet, his First Nation is in a constant battle with government over development proposals that have the potential to do significant harm to whatever salmon stocks remain, the chief said.

Fairclough they’re now facing the Yukon government’s Next Generation Hydro project. It’s a proposal to identify a site and develop the territory’s next major hydroelectric dam, a proposal that will inevitably have a significant impact on salmon stocks, he said.

Duane Gastant’ Aucoin of the Teslin Tlingit Council told panel members one of the 10 potential sites calls for a dam across the Teslin River.

Thirty per cent of Canadian salmon use the Teslin River, he said.

“We met with the Next Generation Hydro people and said, ‘are you nuts?’”

Aucoin assured the panel the Teslin Tlingit Council will continue its fight to protect salmon stocks.

He thanked all those along the Yukon River who made sacrifices by not fishing for chinook last summer.

“The Teslin Tlingit Council would still like to see it happen again this year, and for the entire cycle (chinook life cycle of seven or eight years),” Aucoin said. “What was started last year, shutting down the fishery, we need to keep doing that at least for one cycle.”

Alaska scientist Stephanie Schmidt put up numbers Wednesday showing how the return of chinook salmon of Canadian origin would routinely hit 160,000 fish or higher in the 1980s and early ’90s.

In the last decade, however, the annual migration of Canadian chinook has plummeted, and was at an estimated 64,773 last summer, she explained.

Schmidt estimates this year’s total run of Canadian chinook will be between 59,000 and 70,000.

Scientists on both sides of the border acknowledge they don’t know exactly why the chinook salmon stocks are in so much trouble.

Though they generally agree the problem goes well beyond just harvest levels, and are likely associated with changing environmental conditions.

Alaska will again be implementing chinook fishing closures and rigorous conservation plans to fulfill its international treaty obligation of ensuring at least 42,500 chinook reach the Canadian border, Schmidt said.

She said Alaska’s harvest of 3,281 last year was the lowest on record.

For the most part, Alaskan communities who rely on the chinook for food are still in full support of tough conservation measures, though that support is not as rock solid as it was last year, Schmidt told the panel.

Mary Ellen Jarvis of the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans told panel members conservation will also be a priority on the Canadian side.

But until officials have had a chance to discuss this summer’s approach with Yukon First Nations, she said, she isn’t able to say exactly what the management plan will look like on this side of the border.

The harvest of an estimated 100 chinook last year was also the lowest ever, according to available records.

Jarvis said the harvest that did occur was mostly for ceremonial purposes.

With no targeted fishing for chinook in Alaska last summer, an estimated 63,431 crossed into the Yukon, all but 100 or so reaching the spawning grounds.

The estimated spawning escapement of 63,331 was the largest in five years.

The spawning escapement in 2013 was 28,669, well below the minimum spawning target of 42,500.