Creating a living atlas for salmon and salmon habitat in the Lower Fraser
In support of a vision for the restoration and conservation of salmon habitat.
I’ve been working with Dave Scott, Misty MacDuffee and Ross Dixon at the Raincoast Conservation Foundation since June of 2017 developing a vision for salmon in the Lower Fraser. We’ve been reaching out to conservation groups, community organizations, local stewardship groups, streamkeepers, and municipalities to understand how they contribute to the restoration and conservation of salmon and salmon habitat throughout the area.
In support of this vision, I have been collating data sets and building an “atlas” of spatial information related to salmon habitat and conservation that may be of useful for these groups and others with an interest in learning more about the state of salmon and what can be done.
Much of this data currently contained within the atlas comes from provincially available data online, as well as the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and the local stewardship organizations that we have met with. We hope that the map can be used to support decision making, management and education around the status of salmon habitat in the Lower Fraser.
Moving forward we are continuing to identify concrete ideas for salmon habitat restoration and protection and will be updating the atlas as we gain information. We’ve been very inspired by how many people have ideas about how to protect and restore salmon habitat, we hope to map these ideas and will be working with partners at UBC to begin evaluating and prioritizing them. As we continually update this map and gain new information, we have been calling this map the Lower Fraser Salmon Living Atlas.
If you would like to contribute please email me Riley [at] raincoast [dot] org
You can help
Raincoast’s in-house scientists, collaborating graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and professors make us unique among conservation groups. We work with First Nations, academic institutions, government, and other NGOs to build support and inform decisions that protect aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and the wildlife that depend on them. We conduct ethically applied, process-oriented, and hypothesis-driven research that has immediate and relevant utility for conservation deliberations and the collective body of scientific knowledge.
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