This story originally appeared in the Spring 2026 edition of Salmon Steward, the Pacific Salmon Foundation’s print magazine.
Biodiversity loss is being felt worldwide, with global wildlife populations declining by 73 per cent since 1970, as reported by the World Wildlife Fund.
For Pacific salmon, biodiversity is key to persistence. Salmon are uniquely adapted to their freshwater habitats, leading to incredible genetic diversity. When some populations struggle in the face of stressors like drought or disease, others can persist, buffering Pacific salmon as a collective against environmental pressures. That principle underpinned Canada’s Wild Salmon Policy when it was introduced 20 years ago.
Yet federal progress in monitoring and assessing salmon populations — the backbone of preventing biodiversity loss — has lagged.
What is the Wild Salmon Policy?
Canada’s 2005 Wild Salmon Policy outlined a long-term commitment to “restore and maintain healthy and diverse salmon populations and their habitats.” It was considered transformative at the time. Two decades later, many salmon populations have continued to decline, and efforts to fully assess them have lagged, highlighting how much work remains to deliver on the policy’s vision.
The Pacific Salmon Foundation (PSF) has been working to narrow that gap. Over the past 15 years, PSF has consolidated fragmented data into a publicly accessible tool, the Pacific Salmon Explorer.
Beginning with the Skeena watershed in 2016 and expanding most recently to the Yukon in 2025, the Explorer now spans all major Pacific salmon-bearing regions in Canada and is continually updated with the latest information.
While federally-led implementation of the Wild Salmon Policy has been limited, the Explorer harnesses the best available data to inform conservation planning and decision-making.
“When it comes to Pacific salmon, we can’t manage what we don’t measure,” says Dr. Katrina Connors, Senior Programs Director at PSF.
“The Pacific Salmon Explorer brings together critical information on salmon and their habitats and makes it freely available to everyone. By making this information transparent and accessible, we are strengthening our ability to understand, assess, and protect the extraordinary diversity that sustains salmon.”
Why salmon biodiversity matters
Across B.C. and the Yukon, there are more than 400 ecologically and genetically diverse groups of wild salmon — called Conservation Units (CUs) — each uniquely adapted to its freshwater environment.
Some have evolved smaller, slimmer bodies to avoid bears. Others have evolutionary history that may help them in the face of warming waters and climate change. Some adapted to return from the ocean when river conditions are favourable.
These unique adaptations strengthen the collective resilience of the entire species, enabling salmon to endure environmental pressures.
“Each Conservation Unit of salmon holds irreplaceable genetic diversity that together provides the ingredients for salmon adaptation to climate change and other stressors,” says Dr. Steph Peacock, a scientist with PSF.
“Maintaining Conservation Units and their habitats is critical to steward salmon through the unprecedented conditions they are experiencing throughout their life cycles.”
The big picture
The Pacific Salmon Explorer evaluates all 427 salmon Conservation Units (CUs) in B.C. and the Yukon. Where enough data exist, the Explorer assigns each CU a biological status of poor, fair, or good. Among assessed CUs:
56% ARE POOR
28% ARE FAIR
16% ARE GOOD
Nearly two-thirds of Conservation Units were data deficient and could not be assessed.
Visit SALMONEXPLORER.CA
To mark the 20th anniversary of the Wild Salmon Policy, the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences published a special collection of articles that reflect on progress toward implementing the Policy and offer recommendations to strengthen its application moving forward. PSF’s submission highlights the Pacific Salmon Explorer’s role in democratizing salmon data — critical to delivering on the promise of the Wild Salmon Policy.
