Coastal Environmental Baseline Program – Port of Vancouver (Tsleil-Waututh)
Learn about how the Tsleil-Waututh Nation are characterizing the coastal ecosystem and environmental conditions in and around the port of Vancouver.
The Coastal Environmental Baseline Program (CEBP) was established in 2017 as one of the initiatives under the Protecting the Marine Environment pillar of the Government of Canada’s Oceans Protection Plan. This Program contributes to coastal and waterway protection by providing funding for scientific activities that help us learn more about Canada’s coastal ecosystems.
Transcript
Spencer Taft: The Coastal Environmental Baseline Program for DFO, it's a great example of a program within DFO that has an overlapping or complementary mandate for a lot of work that Tsleil Waututh does. It’s collecting data about the current conditions of ports across Canada, including Vancouver and Burrard inlet, which is core of Tsleil Waututh’s territory. Tsleil Waututh’s stewardship work, involves a lot of monitoring of the ecosystem conditions, current conditions to understand the health of the environment, allowing us to understand the entirety of change in Burrard inlet from the time of European contact.
Janet Mossman: Tsleil Waututh is looking at everything from juvenile salmonids to forage fish to bivalves on local beaches. They're also looking at ocean acidification. So they're really looking at a comprehensive look at the ecosystem. They want to know how one aspect is affecting another.
Colin Rawlinson: It feels good being part of something for the community on a bigger level. People always wandering up – kids, groups, and school groups. “What are you doing? What are you doing?” And in a place like the cove, that spreads, word of mouth, quicker than it does on the internet.
Haley Crozier: Today, what we're going to be doing is some beach seining for juvenile salmonids. We're going to be doing some ocean sampling with an instrument called the CTD. And then we're also going to be doing some crab surveys looking at what they crab populations are like on the inlet. Beach seining, what we're doing is we're looking for juvenile salmonids is which is one of my favorite things that we do.
So we approach the beach that we're going to, one person hops off the net, the boat comes out, out, away from the beach, backs up, does a loop so that the net comes out straight and then the boat goes in. Another person hops off and we pull the net in. And then we get a variety of species, including pink chum and coho.
And we measure a subset of each of those species. We keep them in a bucket until we've done three sets at that beach. And then we release them all. And then we all have all of that data.
With the crabs. What the goal is of those surveys is to actually get a better understanding of the crab populations on Burrard inlet. So we look at things such as like the helth of the crab, the sex, if they've been mating recently. And a couple other parameters.
The other thing that we're doing is some of our ocean surveying. So this is looking at parameters in the water column such as conductivity, temperature, dissolved oxygen and a few other things. And that goes all the way from the sea surface to the sea floor so that we really capture what is in the water column all the way down.
I grew up in Tsleil Waututh territory. I actually went to high school with a couple of my coworkers, and I've learned a lot working with the crew, things that I never would have otherwise learned.
Colin Rawlinson: I think having that traditional knowledge and simply put, the lay of the land. We know a lot of what's going on around here. Our people use this land and fed off this land and cared about the quality long before it became a job.
Spencer Taft: There is that traditional knowledge and ancestral knowledge Tsleil Waututh can bring and that includes an understanding, a really intimate understanding of the territory in a lot of different ways.
Colin Rawlinson: Being out on the water everyday, gives people a sense Tsleil Wauthuth people do care. We're there every day.
Janet Mossman: So the fact that the first nations and coastal organizations are deciding on what they want to collect data on and how they're going to collect the data.. and it’s pretty exciting the data sets that we're getting out of that approach.
Haley Crozier: As you hear often indigenous communities think seven generations ahead. And I think that's so important for everyone to consider because we want to leave things better than how we found them.
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