This report discusses a recent Land Use Plan process on Haida Gwaii that agreed that salmon and the riparian forests around freshwater streams are a key indicator of environmental condition, and so also the health and well-being of the people who depend on fish and forests for economic and cultural sustenance.

The members of the Community Planning Forum voiced concern about the accumulated and ongoing impacts of the past fifty years of logging. People wanted to account for the disturbance, to identify the problem areas, the salmon populations at risk, and to create appropriate forest management objectives to protect and restore them.

The problem was there was no landscape-scale map of where fish actually do and don’t go in the islands’ several thousand lakes and streams, nor of the riparian habitats that surround them, nor of the places where logging has disturbed them. Most of the information needed to make such a map existed, but it was widely scattered. The solution was this project by the Gowgaia Institute, in consultation with the Land Use Plan Process Technical team, to assemble as much of the relevant information as possible within a single geographic framework for analysis – a portrait of the distribution of salmon and other freshwater fish and the riparian forest around them.