July Newsletter 2016

It’s summer, though we were beginning to wonder with our cold & wet early June!! High water can be good for conservation, especially for the early runs in many of our rivers.

As of mid-June we have signed-off on nearly all of our 61 2016 projects and sent the first payment. We believe very strongly in putting the much needed funding into the hands of recipients as quickly as possible, so they can get projects going. Our policy is 50% up front, followed by 25% as an interim payment and the final installment of 25% upon receipt of the final project report.

Later tis year we will schedule project audits of several projects. We try to be strategic about it in doing up to one-third of our projects, as it’s not feasible to audit every project each year.

This month’s volunteer of the month is Mike Durant, who joined our Prince Edward Island Advisory Committee in 2013. Mike is President of the Central Queens Branch of the PEI Wildlife Federation and also serves on the executive of the PEI Watershed Alliance. We are fortunate to have Mike’s expertise available to our PEI Advisory Committee to enable first class project funding advice to the ASCF.

The featured project for July is being delivered by Dr. Craig Purchase, Associate Professor of Biology & Ocean Sciences at Memorial University. Craig is examining the offspring quality of virgin/repeat spawning grilse salmon in the Rennie’s River in the heart of St. John’s, NL. We are very excited with this project, given the challenges of reintroduction of salmon into an urban setting and the high visibility of this project. We look forward to learning the results.

Have a great summer!

Stephen Chase

Executive Director