Fish-Friendly Infrastructure Opens Up Habitat & Maintains Flood Protection

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The Fraser River and its connected waterways provide migration, spawning, and rearing habitats for many species of wild salmon, including sockeye, pink, chum, coho, chinook, steelhead, and cutthroat trout. However, in the Lower Fraser floodplain, urban and agricultural land development has affected the accessibility and suitability of many floodplain waterways. Other fish species at risk, including eulachon, sturgeon, Salish Sucker, and Nooksack Dace, also rely on floodplain areas as critical habitats for their survival and recovery.

The artificial barriers created for flood control, including dikes, flood boxes, pump stations, and irrigation weirs, have destroyed or extensively blocked many salmon-bearing waterways. In the Lower Fraser, it has been estimated that over 1500 km of salmon habitat is blocked by 410 km of dikes and 342 water control structures. Reconnecting this habitat is crucial for the recovery of salmon and other aquatic species at risk; however, the communities around the Fraser River rely on flood control infrastructure for protection.

The Resilient Waters Project is a multi-phased initiative for salmon restoration and conservation. This work seeks to incorporate fish-friendly flood control infrastructure and restore adjacent habitat in the Lower Fraser Valley between Hope and the mouth of the Fraser River.

Resilient Waters aims to upgrade 10 key flood control infrastructures with fish-friendly designs over the next 10 years and promote new innovations and approaches to improve flood infrastructure and floodplain management for fish across the region. ?As a partner in Resilient Waters, KWL is currently working to upgrade 3 existing flood control structures with fish-friendly designs.? As part of each project, monitoring is conducted to characterize and document the performance and benefits to fish rigorously.

In addition to these new projects, Resilient Waters assesses the effectiveness of a self-regulating tide gate that KWL designed and installed in Colony Farm Regional Park in 2011. ?UBC PhD student Zach Sherker uses Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) technology to monitor fish passage through this structure and compare it with control sites and conventional structures in the same area.? We enthusiastically support this work as we intend each iteration to improve the design.

MakeWay and Watershed Watch Salmon Society lead Resilient Waters with funding from the BC Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund, Pacific Salmon Foundation, and BC Hydro’s Fish & Wildlife Compensation Program.

Project Team: Patrick Lilley, Alan Jonsson, Larissa Low, Andrew Baylis, Sarah Lawrie, Jacqueline Smith, Matt Barry, Sal Fuda, Anton Benes, Oskar von Wahl, Gadwyn Gan, Erica Harvey, Justin Southam, Craig Sutherland.