NSSA – WATER

Founded in 1963, the Nova Scotia Salmon Association has been a leading volunteer organization promoting the wise management and conservation of our wild Atlantic salmon and trout stocks. The NSSA has 1347 individual members, and 17 affiliate organizations spread from Salmon River, Digby Co., NS to the Margaree River in Cape Breton, NS. We support our affiliate associations with local issues, but also focus on addressing issues that are of a provincial nature with widespread implications for fish and angling opportunities. We have implemented solution-based programs to address and several of these provincial-scale issues including: acid precipitation (the West River, Sheet Harbour Acid Mitigation Program), habitat loss and degradation (the Adopt-a-Stream Program), the expansion of aquaculture (co-founder of a multi-stakeholder review committee) and engagement in recreational fisheries issues and fish conservation education and outreach programs.

The NSSA has a long history as a leader in partnerships and training to build conservation capacity within community groups. It is our philosophy that collaboration between those in the freshwater restoration community is the best way to address the widespread threats which impact the wild species and spaces in our region.

Spurred by significant investment from Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Nature Fund for Aquatic Species of Risk, the NSSA embarked on an ambitious project called ‘Watershed Assessment Towards Ecosystem Recovery (WATER), which is a large-scale initiative across the Southern Uplands regions of the NS mainland. The overarching goal of the project is to implement aquatic habitat restoration across the region. Three main components of this work included:

Strategic Watershed Stewardship Planning to guide ecological restoration work and ensure that the greatest impact is achieved,

Conducting high-impact ecological restoration of stream, river and upland watershed habitats, and

Leading innovation in the development of new tools to address ecological restoration, such as designing and building land-based liming tools and techniques, working with partners to design, build and evaluate artificial coldwater refugia for climate resiliency, and partnering on research to better use novel sampling and analytical approaches to inform freshwater research and conservation, such as new environmental DNA approaches, machine-learning models to understand and predict the relationship between land and water, and incorporating LiDAR into watershed assessments.

Specific to this dataset, the Watershed Stewardship Plans (WSPs) were a key component of the regional planning aspect of the project. The WSPs will develop regional, watershed-level plans to guide restoration efforts to help improve the quality of aquatic habitat, with focus on five key species at risk: Atlantic Salmon, American Eel, Atlantic Whitefish, Atlantic Sturgeon, and Brook Floater.

Each watershed plan describes the current condition of the aquatic habitat and health of the populations within the watershed, identifies knowledge gaps that limit the ability to restore these ecosystems, identifies regions in the watershed with high- and poor-quality habitat for the key species, prioritizes where preservation or restoration efforts should take place to increase the amount of accessible, good quality habitat in the watershed to maximize biodiversity and ecosystem health, and serve as a guidance tool for local stewardship groups.

Water chemistry data, along with eDNA, LiDAR-based habitat metrics, widespread temperature monitoring and a suit of traditional survey data were used to inform the WSPs. For more information, please visit: https://www.nssalmon.ca/water