Pacific Salmon Foundation: Salmon Watersheds Program

Tools & Resources

We work to democratize access to Pacific salmon and steelhead data in Canada, supporting data visualization tools and other resources for the community.

Over the past 15 years, we have led a large-scale data synthesis effort identifying and assembling the best available data for wild Pacific salmon and their habitats. This work has been a collaborative exercise with First Nations, federal and provincial governments, non-governmental organizations, independent salmon experts, and academics across BC.

The Pacific Salmon Explorer is our primary data tool for visualizing and communicating salmon data.

Features include:

  • Information on the biological status of salmon and the status of salmon habitats;
  • Data on salmon abundance, catch, and productivity;
  • Interactive maps displaying various natural and human-caused pressures on salmon habitats;
  • Maps showing the location of proposed resource development projects that overlap with freshwater salmon habitat;
  • Access to source datasets;
  • Printable maps and figures.

We also develop “accessory” data visualization tools to support external partners in local planning exercises.

While the Pacific Salmon Explorer is the most widely known data visualization tool we provide, we also create custom “accessory” data visualization tools. Each accessory tool is tailored to the specific needs of our partners and ranges from interactive mapping tools that bring in more local datasets to more complex planning tools to inform monitoring and management decisions.

Examples include:

To discuss developing a custom data visualiziation tool for informing salmon conservation and management decisions, please get in touch!

Resources

We strive to make our data syntheses and analyses transparent and reproducible. Learn more about our data and methods through the links below.

  • Our organizational GitHub account makes available our code (in R and other programming languages) that processes raw data to provide indicators and status assessments shown in the Pacific Salmon Explorer as well as code associated with our applied research projects.
  • The Pacific Salmon Explorer Technical Report describes methods for assessing the biological status of Pacific salmon Conservation Units and pressures on their freshwater habitats throughout BC. 
  • Our Conservation Unit Snapshots (use the document type filter in our Document Library) are the product of a broad-scale evaluation of the current extent and intensity of pressures on salmon spawning, rearing, and migratory habitats as well as the cumulative risks to these habitats.