Newly Published Research Maps Forage Fish Hotspots Across the Canadian Salish Sea

Project Watershed is excited to announce that our recent manuscript Modelling Forage Fish Species Distribution in the Canadian Salish Sea has been published by Frontiers in Marine Science. This is a fancy title that could also be “where are the small fish in the northern Salish Sea?”

This big 3 year effort identifies open water – aka pelagic – forage fish hotspots across the Canadian Salish Sea. By identifying where forage fish are most likely to occur, managers, researchers, and conservation organizations can better mitigate impacts to and protect the little fish that feed us all.

The author team includes Project Watershed’s own Sammy Alkhalifa and Jacqueline Huard, as well as Dr. Cliff Robinson (DFO, retired), Dr. Doug Bertram (ECCC), and Dr. Maycira Costa (UVIC).

Forage fish are small schooling fish that form the foundation of marine food webs. They are a critical food source for salmon, seabirds, marine mammals, people, and many other species. Despite their importance, surprisingly little mapping work has been done to visualize where all these hotspots are across the region and how they compare to each other.

Using more than 20 years of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) juvenile salmon survey data (see Map 1), the team those data points with environmental information such as ocean currents, nutrients, and zooplankton abundance, and plugged it all into coding programs (R) and applied some modelling wizardry.

The resulting heatmap (see Map 2) highlights areas most likely to support high concentrations of forage fish. As you can see some of those hotspots include the Fraser River delta, southern Vancouver Island in Haro and Juan De Fuca Strait, the Gulf Islands, Discovery Passage in Campbell River, and numerous coastal inlets. These findings provide an important new tool for marine spatial planning, oil spill preparedness, and cumulative effects assessments.

While our earlier models focused on Pacific sand lance intertidal and nearshore sandy bottom habitat, this publication presents new multi-species pelagic habitat leveraging large, pre-existing DFO bycatch data.

A special congratulations to lead author Sammy Alkhalifa and the entire project team for bringing this work to publication. This research support conservation and stewardship efforts throughout the Salish Sea.

 To read the full article yourself, follow the link below to the open access research paper.