Research

While much of our current research is on connections between salmon and ecosystems in British Columbia, our studies have ranged from mating systems of arctic birds to conservation of Cambodian snakes. Someday, we’ll really try to focus. In the meantime, a scan below will provide you with a good breadth of the lab's research interests.

Current Research

Salmon Nutrients and Ecosystems

This is one of the largest field programs on salmon in the world to study ecosystem impacts of salmon. The project encompasses 50 watersheds in a remote part of the Great Bear Rainforest in Heiltsuk traditional territory on BC’s central coast. The adult salmon abundance data we collect is shared with both DFO and Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department (HIRMD).

BC Biodiversity Program

A team of naturalists and researchers working to deepen our understanding of BC’s biodiversity. Through community science, we invite people across the province to help document the plants, animals, and fungi that call these places home. By using photography to record species and sharing observations on platforms like iNaturalist, participants help build a richer picture of the biodiversity found in our protected areas.

Learn More!

A Century of Salmon

We explore the abundance, diversity, and productivity of salmon populations and their habitats over the last century using fish scales collected from commercial fisheries and monitoring programs beginning in 1912. Using advanced molecular genetic and chemical tools, we reconstruct historical population abundances and productivity, and investigate ecological questions about the changes these populations have undergone over the last century of human influence.

Previous Projects

Life Histories & Extinction Risk

A long-standing interest has been in how fundamental life history traits of fishes, such as age at maturity and body size, are linked to the ability of populations to withstand various levels of fishing. Phylogenetically-based comparative studies of these links between traits, population dynamics, and fisheries have ranged from North Sea marine fishes to European freshwater fishes. We were also the first to demonstrate changes in marine fish distributions in relation to climate change (Perry et al., 2005) and that species that shifted northward more rapidly had faster life histories.