Fisheries and Oceans Canada-Hakai Collaboration

The Hakai Institute is working together with Fisheries and Oceans Canada and other research groups to track our changing oceans.

Our oceans are complex and changing rapidly. To get a better understanding of them requires collaboration.

In the Discovery Islands off northeastern Vancouver Island, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Hakai Institute, and the Salmon Coast Field Station are working together to find the best way to count young sockeye as they migrate from rivers into the ocean.

Salmon have been on a general decline over the last few decades in British Columbia. By comparing different sampling methods, the scientists can provide a more precise estimate of the current health of local sockeye populations.

Two hundred kilometers to the northwest, on the Central Coast of British Columbia, Fisheries and Oceans Canada has partnered with the Hakai Institute to deploy oceanographic monitoring equipment.

In July 2016, a specialized mooring was anchored to the seafloor nine kilometers off Hakai’s Calvert Island Field Station by the Coast Guard ship John P. Tully.

Over the next few years, they will collect a range of information about the ocean from currents to temperature to salinity.

The permanent deployment of this equipment represents a long-term commitment to monitoring our oceans and will add substantial value to sampling already collected by Hakai Institute oceanographers on the Central Coast.

Through collaboration, we are keeping a finger on the pulse of the Pacific in British Columbia.