Watershed partnerships gather momentum
Our new mobile lab Tracker hit the road this past summer for dry season sampling!
The Healthy Waters program has attracted interest from First Nations, communities, and organizations interested in capacity building around water quality and the health of fish habitat, with nine partnerships in place for 2025. The program has been busy collecting and analyzing water samples, reporting on findings, and building our new mobile water pollution monitoring lab: Tracker.
Our Healthy Waters team has visited watersheds around BC: from Whistler, to Vancouver Island, the Nicola River Valley, and the Sunshine Coast. With each partnership, we apply a simple and comparable approach to collecting water in five categories: source water, streams and rivers, road runoff, tap water, and marine water. A high resolution approach to analyzing these samples provides insight about the activities within the watersheds – and among the watersheds – that impact water quality and fish habitat.
We released three reports that detailed early results from the Green and Cheakamus River watersheds in Whistler, and Sqwa:la (Hope Slough). Our findings suggest that while water quality in these watersheds is relatively good, a few emerging concerns provide fodder for action to protect these waters.
Our new mobile lab Tracker hit the road this past summer for dry season sampling! Tracker is bringing knowledge and technical capacity to our watershed communities, and provides a platform for sample collection, storage, and preliminary analysis.
Tracker is poised to provide a vital service in support of healthy fish habitat – but is a project “under construction.” We continue to seek funds to outfit Tracker with additional instruments to increase our capacity to provide on-site results to communities.
Watershed community partners
- Green / Cheakamus Rivers (Whistler Lakes Conservation Foundation)
- Anderson Creek (Pender Harbour Ocean Discovery Station (PODS) and the Loon Foundation)
- Sliammon Creek (Tla’amin Nation and Pacific Salmon Foundation)
- Chemainus River (Halalt First Nation)
- Cowichan River (Cowichan Tribes)
- Tod Creek (Tsartlip First Nation, W̱SÁNEĆ Leadership Council, and Capital Regional District)
- Sqwa:la / Hope Slough (Pelólxw Tribe)
- Nicola River (Lower Nicola Indian Band)
- Louis Creek (Simpcw First Nation)
This is an excerpt from our annual report, Tracking Raincoast into 2025.
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.
We investigate to understand coastal species and processes. We inform by bringing science to decision-makers and communities. We inspire action to protect wildlife and wildlife habitats.
