Salmon Steward

ALMOST 20 YEARS AGO, Pacific Salmon Foundation science advisor Dr. Brian Riddell was working on assignment with federal Conservative MP John Fraser when the former fisheries minister asked a question. "With the computers today, why can't the people of B.C. see where the salmon are?" It was a simple enough query but with various branches of government collecting data on salmon for decades, accessing it all remained a challenge. "The di…culty with the available data was that the responsibility for collecting and maintaining it was spread not just across di‡erent departments, but also between the federal and provincial governments," Riddell explains. "If, for example, First Nations wanted to have the assessments for streams in their territory, they would write to DFO and request specific information. What they weren't able to do was access the wider data to compare how salmon were doing in their territory to that of their neighbouring Nations and beyond. There was no way to access the big picture." Without that big picture, strategic planning and management decisions about B.C.'s salmon populations and habitat could only be done in isolation; there was no way to integrate the data into a solid, province- wide strategy, or to implement the federal Wild Salmon Policy throughout B.C. That's why the Pacific Salmon Explorer is a game-changer. With funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and DFO's Coastal Restoration Fund, PSF has built a public online visualization tool that finally allows scientists, First Nations, federal and provincial governments, NGOs, and the public to see where the salmon are and how they are doing across B.C.'s most north and central coast. "Within a couple of years," Riddell notes, "you will probably have all of B.C. and the Yukon in the system." The implications for successfully managing the province's salmon population and implementing the Wild Salmon Policy are huge. SCALING UP A SYSTEM FOR SALMON The first salmon-bearing region piloted in the Pacific Salmon Explorer was the Skeena — the second-largest watershed in B.C., and the second-largest salmon-producing system in Canada. "As soon as we developed this system for the Skeena, First Nations, DFO and the province expressed an interest in doing something similar for other regions of B.C.," says Katrina Connors, director of PSF's Salmon Watersheds Program. The massive backend database of the Salmon Explorer was built, populated and developed with the ability to scale up in mind. The Explorer is designed to be easily updated as new info becomes available. The goal is to provide a timely and easily accessible source of data for the public and decision-makers alike. The Central Coast was added to the Explorer last October, and in February similar information was made available for the Nass. The Fraser and Vancouver Island are being worked on now. Connors says this data collection is not DEMOCRATIZING DATA How PSF's Pacific Salmon Explorer is making salmon data accessible to all The Pacific Salmon Explorer was launched in the Skeena, where loss of prime estuary habitat like eelgrass, Sockeye enhancement developments, bi-catch in fisheries, increasing major developments and lack of shared data inflamed conflict over salmon management. 12 2019 psf.ca TAVISH CAMPBELL BY FIONA MORROW

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