The State of Pacific Salmon in British Columbia, 2018

The Pacific Salmon Foundation (PSF) provides this report on the present state of Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp.) in British Columbia (BC). This report was commissioned by the Coastal First Nations / Great Bear Initiative in their role as Secretariat to the BC Wild Salmon Advisory Council. In this report, we specifically refer to the state of salmon as opposed to a status assessment since the latter requires the existence of abundance targets or biological reference points that do not exist for most BC Pacific salmon. The challenge before us is to summarize the state of over 8,000 combinations of species/streams in BC. Resource managers have never ‘managed’ each of these combinations and have now developed the concept of salmon ‘Conservation Units’ under Canada’s Policy for the Conservation of Wild Pacific Salmon (2005) that aggregates these combinations into 432 Conservation Units 1 in BC.