Lax Kw’alaams Science Team Releases Key Findings on Flora Bank
Press Release
The Lax Kw’alaams Science Team, created to assess the potential risks of proposed developments in our territory, has released its report after 4 years of study. One of the many key findings was this: Flora Bank supports at least 40 salmon populations that come from the traditional territories of at least 10 First Nations.
We discovered a lot more about the project’s potential risks to salmon and addressed the gaps in the environmental assessment provided by PNW LNG. For example, the initial environmental assessment by the proponent did not include any field data on salmon, yet concluded that the project would have no impacts on salmon. That contradicts what we found, after more than 100 boat days, 500 net hauls, and the sampling of nearly 200,000 fish.
Among our conclusions:
- Fisheries scientists have known for decades that the Flora Bank region is particularly important habitat for salmon. Federal and provincial fisheries scientists identified the area as critical salmon habitat and industrialization has historically been avoided due to environmental risks.
- Our data shows Flora Bank does not represent typical salmon habitat. In fact, the Flora Bank-Lelu Island area consistently had the highest abundances of juvenile salmon across multiple years of sampling. Using standardized sampling techniques, catch rates for juvenile coho, Chinook and sockeye were more than twice as high in this region.
- Eelgrass habitat in Flora Bank supports vastly more salmon than any other eelgrass habitat within this region of the estuary. Based on our data, the proposed destruction of eelgrass habitat by PNW LNG poses huge risks to salmon populations. Furthermore, our research makes it clear that planting eelgrass elsewhere will almost certainly fail to mitigate these impacts.
* PNW LNG has stated that juvenile salmon are simply swimming through the Flora Bank area, and not feeding and residing in this habitat. If this is the case, PNW LNG may be less likely to have adverse impacts on salmon. However, we discovered not only are juvenile salmon actively feeding and residing in the Flora Bank area, some are residing for several weeks in this habitat. What this means is any changes to the Flora Bank ecosystem would likely impact the young salmon feeding there.
ILR5
