© Tavish Campbell.
Department of Wild Salmon – What is it?
A blueprint to using everything we know
to restore wild salmon.
Concept
The Department of Wild Salmon, DWS, is a Raincoast Research initiative to bring together highly-experienced First Nations and other on-the-ground fishery teams throughout British Columbia with government and university laboratories to use cutting-edge science to restore BC’s wild salmon stocks. The plan uses salmon as the ultimate authority on what action needs to be taken.
Using genomic profiling to read the salmon’s immune system as fish migrate, we can determine what is killing wild salmon and where this is happening. We can then use this information to improve conditions for the fish, removing the barriers to their survival. Through repeat annual sampling of the fish and further genomic profiling, we can determine if these efforts have benefited salmon or not.
The DWS approach will remove the guesswork from understanding what is impacting wild salmon and help avoid spending money on projects that don’t significantly help salmon. It will allow us to strategically get out of the way of salmon where they need us to, and allow salmon to thrive as they pass through communities.
Our premise is two-fold:
- Wild salmon are the ultimate authority on what they need to survive
- If communities knew exactly what was killing wild salmon, they would respond.
Mission Statement
The Department of Wild Salmon will bring together traditional and local knowledge with the best modern science to determine where and how human activity is killing salmon. It will provide an opportunity for humans to adapt their behavior to permit wild salmon and people to thrive in the face of climate change.