Over the past five years, scientists and researchers from Simon Fraser University have been trying to better understand changes to habitat, salmon and the impact of climate change throughout the Skeena Watershed.
SFU biological sciences Liber Ero Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Michael Price has been leading the research and recently published a study showing how juvenile salmon in Northwest B.C. have adapted to climate change over the past hundred years.
This research, built on Price’s previous research, confirms that some juvenile salmon are growing faster than they did a hundred years ago due to climate change by the warming of deep, glacial-fed lakes that seem to becoming more productive over time.
Price and his colleagues’ paper was published in the journal Global Change Biology, and found that the annual freshwater growth of juvenile salmon is substantially higher in recent years than it was a century ago, by about 35 per cent.
