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The Salmon Forest
Project
Nutrients tend to flow from the land to the sea but recent studies by researchers
in Alaska, British Columbia and Washington have focussed
attention on the immense schools of migrating salmon that return nutrients
from the open Pacific Ocean to coastal rivers and terrestrial habitats. Our
research group has observed that black bears and grizzly bears throughout the
British Columbia
coast transfer large quantities of salmon carcasses from rivers into forests
and these nutrients are incorporated into a broad diversity of plant and
animal taxa. We are using nitrogen and carbon
isotopes to quantify the uptake of salmon-derived nutrients by mosses, herbs, shrubs, trees, insects (Multiple Honours projects, MSc by D. Mathewson, PhD by M. Hocking), songbirds (MSc by Katie
Christie), bears and wolves (MSc by D. Klinka, PhD by Chris Darimont)(see
additional projects on Lab Members Page and Publications) . One of the results to emerge
from our studies has been the detection of salmon signatures in the yearly
growth rings of ancient trees and this offers new
opportunities for identifying historical salmon abundance (tree rings ).
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