Development of methods for monitoring and analyzing salmon river thermics

Description: Thanks to the deployment of numerous thermographs along salmon rivers by FQSA, the organization has now a continuous important quantity of data. FQSA intends to analyze the data to identify thermal refuges and to develop methods for the inventory and identification of these specific habitat areas.

The objectives of the project are to:

1. Continue to collect water temperatures data on salmon rivers;
2. Analyze available data to identify thermal refuges;
3. Develop a method to locate and characterize the areas of potential thermal refuges using a geographic information system (GIS);
4. Recover data on thermal refuges in the watersheds of Québec salmon rivers from various stakeholders for the centralization and distribution of this data;
5. Raise awareness among salmon rivers managers and users to challenges created by water temperature fluctuations within the context of climate change.