January Newsletter 2017

It’s 2017, our tenth anniversary year! And, it’s hard to believe how far we have come as the Atlantic Salmon Conservation Foundation! We opened our doors with one employee on 1 February 2007 faced with the task of organizing ourselves to become a constructive and supportive force in improving salmon conservation. Today, after funding nearly 400 projects across five provinces, I am comfortable in saying, yes dear reader, we have become a success!

We owe our success to the outstanding volunteers on our Board of Directors and the world class expertise lent by the volunteers serving on our six advisory committees. I am also proud to work, every day, with Darla Saunders and Krystal Binns who lend their expertise to helping our recipients perform their role in attaining salmon conservation results in so many salmon rivers in eastern Canada.

All in all, 2017 is looking very good. We received lots of excellent conservation applications in the latest call for funding proposals. These are now being parcelled-out to our advisory committees for review in January-February. I’ll elaborate more on this in the next two newsletters.

Our featured profile for January is of me, as Executive Director of the Foundation. Although my CV in this month’s newsletter may outline my credentials, it does not say that I have been a salmon conservationist since almost the early 1970s when I started fishing for salmon in New Brunswick. I hooked my first salmon in the Nashwaak River in 1973. Shortly after, I became a member of the Atlantic Salmon Federation, then serving as a volunteer with the NB Salmon Council, finally as an ASF employee. It the ASF that the genesis of this Foundation in advocating to DFO the creation of a trust fund to support salmon conservation in Canada. I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to help shape the Foundation into what it has become, today.

Our January featured project is being carried-out by the Abegweit Conservation Society in a project called “Foundation Knowledge Building for Future PEI Salmon”. This First Nation led, ground-breaking project, seeks to understand the implications for management and protection of Prince Edward island’s genetically distinct Atlantic salmon populations through anailysis of DNA material. We are enthusiastic about this project for its potential applied research benefits applicable across the range of wild Atlantic salmon.

Yours in conservation!

Stephen Chase