Urge the Federal Government to Restore Wild Salmon Monitoring Programs.
This year, in the middle of spawning season, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) created a salmon management crisis by shutting down essential monitoring programs in B.C as they failed to secure contracts for the people who count fish in our rivers.
Watershed Watch and our allies at SkeenaWild Conservation Trust and Raincoast Conservation Foundation raised the alarm and shortly after, top DFO managers told us they were renewing contracts up and down the coast.
This is a win, but there’s more work to do. Many key streams are still going unmonitored and stream-monitoring efforts are still at an all-time low. A recently published study found that monitoring of Pacific salmon in B.C. has steadily declined since the 1980s.
We need DFO to know that boots-on-the-ground monitoring is their most critical job. Without monitoring, we don’t know how many salmon are returning, which means we can’t go fishing or protect threatened salmon runs.
With massive federal budget cuts planned over the next few years, we have to make sure the decision-makers in Ottawa keep their priorities straight.
