Creating Habitat Connectivity

Comox Valley Project Watershed is focusing on the restoration of three marine habitats – kelp, eelgrass and saltmarsh – to facilitate connectivity between the subtidal, intertidal and foreshore zones in the estuary.

Striving to re-establish habitat connectivity is an important element of restoration design since human activity and alteration of the landscape has caused an increasingly fragmented habitat.

Many species rely on different coastal habitats to fulfil their life cycle. Migrating salmon depend on these habitats for foraging and protection from predators as they out-migrate to the ocean as juveniles, and then once again when they return to spawn as adults. Kelp, saltmarsh and eelgrass also provide crucial habitats for a variety of other fish, birds, mammals and invertebrates.

The net productivity of these three habitats exceeds that of most ecosystems and they are vital to sustaining the “salmon highway”, the migration routes for five species of Pacific Salmon