Wild Salmon Center: Salmon conservation in the North Pacific
Photo courtesy of ©Jason Ching
If one word can go a ways to summarising the Wild Salmon Center(WSC), that word would be scale. The Wild Salmon Center’s aim to protect the strongest wild Salmon rivers around the entire North Pacific demands they tackle some of the wild world’s most vibrant watersheds ranging from the North American west coast to Russia’s Siberian far east. To safeguard such a vast expanse of land and habitats, the Wild Salmon Center focuses on Salmon Strongholds, and build vast networks of alliances to combine local and regional expertise with cross-national oversight.
Crucially, at the forefront of the Wild Salmon Center’s efforts to protect the North Pacific’s numerous watersheds is an express focus on the Safeguarding of the same Wild Salmon that unite our efforts at the Missing Salmon Alliance. After all, by bringing in nutrients from the Oceans and Seas, wild Salmon sit as a keystone for the wider health of many species in their habitats. Their runs, sometimes numbering in the tens of Millions of fish, nourish everything from Bears and riverbeds to the people and communities across the North Pacific.
Photo courtesy of ©Dave McCoy
Yet, the obstacles these wild Salmon face often come from the endeavours of those latter groups. One example, Alaska’s Bristol Bay, a Salmon river with annual returns topping 60 million fish, faces the proposed Pebble mine at its headwaters. A mine that, if completed, would stand as one of the largest open-pit rare metals mines in the world and leak tailings – the toxic chemicals used in the mining process – into Sockeye Salmon’s most important nurseries.
Colossal mines are not the only way that wild Salmon are hampered and, as a result, are not the only ways by which considered human action can help. In over four thousand of Washington’s Olympic peninsula’s coastal rivers, for example, outdated culverts and impassable manmade barriers cut off wild Salmon’s access to key cold water refuges. As such, the work of the Wild Salmon Center and their partners becomes crucial to giving security back to returning Salmon and Steelheads as they contend the Pacific Northwest’s increasingly intense and common summer heat waves.
Photo courtesy of ©Dave McCoy
That said, the benefits reaped by removing these artificial barriers are not limited to Salmon. Along Oregon’s Elk River, local conservation efforts went hand-in-hand with the regenerative agricultural projects of a fourth generation ranching family. These efforts, that included the removal of a manmade blockage on the main creek running through their land, saw the productivity of the farm increase fourfold since the 1970s, even with a quarter of their acreage fenced off for explicit protection.
This combination of focused protection of the North Pacific’s biggest Salmon rivers, local cooperation, and small-scale river restorations shed light on the scale and scope of work needed to keep wild Salmon, and their innumerable dependents, safe and secure. Yet their efforts can only go so far in the face of a planet being warmed by unchecked carbon emissions, which is why we’re so proud to work with them in bringing Salmon School to the COP26 summit in Glasgow this November.
Photo courtesy of ©KenMorrish
As an Alliance of five organisations, we will build on the existing work of our partners and maximise our impact by taking a coordinated approach and vital action in order to halt and reverse the decline of wild Atlantic salmon.
The goal of the Missing Salmon Alliance is to build an evidence-base to influence national and international decision-makers to regulate activities that adversely impact wild Atlantic salmon.
The Missing Salmon Alliance
The MSA is comprised of the following members:
Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, Atlantic Salmon Trust, the Angling Trust with Fish Legal, The Rivers Trust and Fisheries Management Scotland.
https://www.missingsalmonalliance.org