Restoring salmon habitat: salmon stewardship

Restoring salmon habitat: salmon stewardship

Any fish, any kind of seafood. All of those rely on having a healthy near-shore environment. We're very, very reliant on this interconnectivity between rivers and the nearshore and the open ocean free of plastics, free of contaminants.

And that's why we're out there is to try and pick some of that up.

The bottom of the ocean is actually, I think a lot of people think of it as almost like a desert, almost like the deep sea, but the nearshore so the part that we most interact with as people. The part that we go down to the beach and see, that's the part that's the most alive.

Our beautiful Pacific salmon, at some point, they have lived part of their life in an eelgrass bed.

Today we're out here doing an underwater marine debris cleanup in Oak Bay. And that is basically having our divers go down and they tag the debris, and then we get a crane barge in here that comes out, lifts everything up after it's been tagged, and we put it in the dumpster and make sure it's properly disposed of.

Oh, it's super rewarding. Yeah, it's a great job. You know, you get down there, and like, you see the impact, you see the difference. You go into a degraded habitat and like the eelgrass is all torn up. We get the chance to go in and clear out all that debris, all that rubbish. It's a really, really, really rewarding job. And I love it. It's the best job on the planet.

Roger.

Yeah.

You should start to find a bare spot with a bunch of debris that looks like it came from a sailboat.

So we work with a lot of different partners. So SeaChange is really about inclusivity and working with community members. And so right now, the funding that we've received from the BC Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund, and also through the Aquatic Ecosystems Restoration Fund, is allowing us to do this work the way that we envisioned. So creating that inclusive community.

So the funding that we receive from DFO is really, allowing us to do this whole program and to be part of this larger community and bring everybody together.

Partnership is integral, to the work that we do. We're really invested in funding projects that focus on the restoration of our aquatic ecosystems and habitats.

So there's a lot of good work going on right now, but we have to keep going with continuing to restore our lost and degraded habitats.

SeaChanges call to action has always been just get involved in any way that you can. I mean, there are so many groups like ours across Canada, in your own backyard who are out there caring and who are out there doing something, even if it seems small and insignificant. It never is when you've got hundreds and thousands and millions of people all doing the same thing. It becomes a really significant action.

If every single one of us can do that. There's no problems we can't resolve.