Three-Year Analysis of Forestry Effects on Pacific Salmon in Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw Territory and Across Coastal British Columbia
Forestry's Legacy on Pacific Salmon
Salmon Coast has started an exciting project, which aims to provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the legacy of forest harvesting and its impacts on wild Pacific salmon in Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw territory, and across coastal BC.
Changes in the structure and functioning of watersheds from forestry can affect the survival and growth of salmon during their freshwater life stages through various mechanisms, which we intend to investigate and represent.
Collaborative interdisciplinary approaches to research and analysis
Our project has several components to explore salmon and forestry interactions, including statistical modelling of population-level relationships from salmon and forestry time series, historical ecological data assembly, hydrological instrumentation of watersheds, and environmental RNA analysis of temperature stress response in wild salmon.
"Our project is both of local importance to the Musgamagw Dzawada'enuxw community as well as of broad scientific importance for understanding salmon population dynamics."
The outcomes of the project will provide detailed histories of forestry and salmon in the watersheds of Musgamagw Dzawada'enuxw territory, new fieldwork to monitor how salmon are responding to environmental change, and a quantitative analysis of salmon population responses to forestry histories that is scalable to the full British Columbia coast. Our project is both of local importance to the Musgamagw Dzawada'enuxw community as well as of broad scientific importance for understanding salmon population dynamics.
The project is funded through the federally and provincially co-funded British Columbia Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund (BCSRIF). Project partners include the Musgamagw Dzawada'enuxw Fisheries Group Society, the University of Toronto, the University of Victoria, Ecofish Research LTD, and the Pacific Salmon Foundation.
Find out more about our work by checking out our regular reports and related publications
Check out our sea lice reports for each year, which provide detailed information on the year's monitoring findings.
View our complete list of publications for many more articles based on sea lice research conducted at Salmon Coast.