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Funding Information: This study was supported by funding from the Scottish Government. Access to the EIMF instruments was supported by grant numbers 383/1109 and 415/1010 from the Natural Environment Research Council. Despite technical advances in archival tag attachment and functional longevity, long-term tracking of individuals of some fish species remains prohibitively difficult. Here we combined high resolution stable isotope sampling of otoliths, genetic assignment, growth increment analyses and a simple movement model to inform a hidden Markov model of the location of individual wild Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.) at sea. The model provided a reconstruction of North Atlantic migration for a species which is extremely difficult to track throughout its marine life-stage. We show that plausible emigration and return migration patterns can be achieved from wild fish. Simulations of simplified northward and westward movement patterns in the North Atlantic were used to quantify precision and accuracy of the model which differed between these two directional scenarios. Because otolith-derived migratory information does not rely on capture, release and subsequent recapture of the individual, this can be retrieved from any fish. Thus these techniques offer a powerful tool for improving our understanding of the processes that govern movement and survival of individual fish during a protracted and largely unobservable life-stage in the oceanic environment. Publisher PDF

Includes additional detailed tables and figures to complement the main text, for example genetic marker (SNP) information, summary of population genetic statistics, data on Fst relationships of individual salmon populations, and information on releases of salmon in the Baltic Sea.

This supplement contains methods on evaluating population structure, and provides the data sources and raw environmental data used in the present study.

Supplementary data relating to "The early marine distribution of Atlantic salmon in the North-east Atlantic: a genetically informed stock-specific synthesis". Containing cruise, trawl and fish information together with distribution density maps.

Supplementary data relating to "The early marine distribution of Atlantic salmon in the North-east Atlantic: a genetically informed stock-specific synthesis". Containing cruise, trawl and fish information together with distribution density maps.