About Us
No species better symbolize the lands and waters of the North Pacific than the highly migratory salmon.
Goals & Accomplishments
Goals
Salmon are miracles of Nature. The rivers where they spawn and rear define beauty and renewal; the presence of healthy wild populations is a key indicator that our oceans, rivers and forests are healthy. Salmon runs provide the nutrients that are the foundation of the food webs of plants and animals--from microscopic algae to bears and whales--in oceans, rivers wetlands and forests.
Salmon are both the food and the fabric of the natural ecosystems of the Pacific Rim.
The Challenge
Salmon have sustained and inspired people for thousands of years. But runs of salmon are vanishing at alarming speed from many of the rivers and streams that feed the vast Pacific.
In the Pacific Northwest states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California the natural productivity of salmon has declines 80 percent and the salmon are now extinct in 40 percent of their historic range. Each year fewer pockets of pristine habitat remain.
In much of western Canada, many populations are in steep decline as well. Across the Pacific Ocean, wild salmon in Japan are almost extinct and are rapidly disappearing from southern Russia. Habitat loss and an epidemic of caviar poaching threaten salmon in even the most remote parts of the Russian Far East.
The cause of these dramatic declines is no mystery: logging, mining, dam building, diversion of rivers for agriculture, overharvest, illegal poaching and fish hatcheries. Scientists also fear the salmon's decline will be accelerated by global climate change.
Salmon can be saved at modest cost. We believe we must save them. We feel that we have a moral obligation to our descendants to preserve healthy salmon runs and all the myriad life forms they support, around the Pacific Rim.
How We Are Saving Salmon
We direct our efforts solely where there is still time and opportunity to prevent healthy rivers from being destroyed. This common-sense principle guides our work at the Wild Salmon Center.
By locating rivers where the most diverse and healthy stocks still exist, we can invest early and protect them before they are degraded. Freshwater sanctuaries will also safeguard not only salmon--but the entire marine, riverine, and land-based food webs that depend on salmon nutrients to flourish.
We believe that, for salmon to survive, people must share the benefits-and the responsibility-of healthy salmon ecosystems. The Wild Salmon Center supports salmon-friendly economic development, especially when it returns revenues to local communities.
What We Are Accomplishing
Realizing that we must move quickly to save remaining salmon strongholds, the Wild Salmon Center sends rapid biological assessment teams to the most productive river systems throughout the Russian Far East and Pacific Northwest, including some rivers never before explored by biologists. Our teams investigate the ecological value of these rivers then develop effective conservation strategies to save them.
We are working to protect the Hoh River on Washington's Olympic Peninsula--one of the last strongholds for coho and chinook salmon, steelhead and bull trout in the lower 48 United States. The lower river is threatened with logging and intrusive development.
The Wild Salmon Center pioneered the development of sport-fishing ecotourism. The angling component of the Kamchatka Steelhead Project now managed by Wild Salmon Rivers recruits conservation-minded anglers who agree to practice catch-and-release fly fishing while providing financial support and hands-on assistance to scientists gathering data needed to research the ecology of steelhead, trout and salmon stocks in Kamchatka, Russia.
We helped launch the Tillamook Rainforest Coalition, an effort to protect clean water and key salmon habitat for some of the region's last healthy salmon and steelhead stocks in the temperate rain forests of northwestern Oregon.
We organized and hosted the Pacific Rim Wild Salmon and Steelhead Conference, the first gathering of salmon scientists from Russia, Japan, Canada and the U.S. to assess the health of salmon populations and propose international conservation programs for the new millennium.
The Wild Salmon Center is working with the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russian Federation, Moscow State University, the United Nations Development Program and local partners to protect a series of remarkable rivers in western Kamchatka. One of these is the Kol River. The 500,000-acre Kol Salmon Refuge will encompass an entire salmon ecosystem in its natural state--from headwaters to the ocean--and safeguard one of the richest concentrations of salmon, trout and char species on Earth.
Your Participation is Needed
Our goal is to protect the world's key salmon strongholds. We want to guarantee the survival of complex, diverse runs of these remarkable fish in all their natural splendor. Won't you help this important effort succeed? Find out how you can donate to the Wild Salmon Center.