Project Updates

The BCCF/VIU team will use this page to provide semi-regular project updates, including links to yearly summary reports and overviews of ongoing project work.

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Year 1 Project Update

The BCCF/VIU project team wrapped up the spring sampling efforts with volunteers in March 2024, taking a bit of a break through the early summer months.

In the first year of the project, we worked with 30 different groups, connecting with and training over 150 volunteers. These volunteers contributed over 670 hours to the project between September 2023 and March 2024. With our combined efforts, we were able to sample 123 different locations across 56 waterways between Campbell River and Victoria. Over 2,000 samples were analyzed from 6 rain events and ~33% of the samples had 6-PPDQ detected in them. Overall, ~100 of these samples were above the lethal concentration for juvenile (alevin) coho (41 ng/L) and ~50 of them were above the coho smolt to adult lethal concentration (95 ng/L).

Some preliminary lessons learned were:

• Concentrations observed were very dynamic, emphasizing that the timing of sampling is important;
• There was site-to-site variation in concentrations and how quickly 6-PPDQ appeared following a rain event; and
• The ‘first flush’ is not a once-a-year event – dry periods can have a similar effect.

Click here to read the first-year summary report.