5 Recommendations

A major challenge in advancing fish passage restoration is the complexity of working across jurisdictions and with multiple stakeholders—rail and highway authorities, forestry ministries, licensees, and private landowners. These partners are often being asked to accommodate priorities that originate outside their mandates and budgets. Convincing them to invest in difficult, high-cost interventions—like modifying crossings or relocating infrastructure—requires navigating uncertainty about costs and ecological outcomes, as well as a disconnect between the benefits to watershed health and the internal pressures or performance goals of these agencies. It’s a tough ask: to take on massive, uncertain projects when they’re already stretched thin with their own responsibilities.

Fish passage restoration across British Columbia is further complicated by the legacy of infrastructure deeply embedded in the landscape. Roads, railways, highways, community infrastructure and private assets often constrain floodplains and disrupt natural hydrological processes. While targeted repairs to individual barriers are essential, they won’t resolve the broader systemic issues without rethinking and restructuring how infrastructure interacts with watershed function. Loss of riparian vegetation and intensive beaver management only add to the degradation. Addressing these challenges means making strategic, well-communicated choices—building trust, and staying committed to a longer-term transformation.

Preliminary top remediation priorities are provided by watershed group. A single definitive ranking of those priorities is not achievable, and the reason is worth stating plainly: the criteria that determine whether a crossing is worth remediating — species present and species possible, habitat quantity and quality, barrier severity, floodplain condition, constructability, and cost — are not measured in common units, so any ordering depends on which criterion is allowed to lead. The deciding constraint sits outside the project entirely, in the capacity and willingness of infrastructure owners and tenure holders to support implementation, both financially and across multi-year timelines. What can be done systematically is to maintain a well-characterised set of candidate sites, so that when a tenure holder is in a position to act, the ecological value of the opportunity and the appropriate scope of work are already understood. Progress is therefore made where opportunity and readiness coincide, and simpler, lower-cost work is pursued to sustain momentum toward the larger commitments.

Government, community groups, landowners, non-profits, industry and other stakeholders should work collaboratively to address the high and moderate priority barriers presented in Figure 4.1. Supporting detail for every site — including links to per-site reporting — is compiled in Table 5.2. Progress on any front is meaningful, and remediating at least one high-priority site per year per watershed group, regardless of its overall rank, is a practical and effective approach.

To enhance fish passage restoration in the FWCP Peace Region:

Site-specific restoration and remediation actions

Advance the replacement of crossing 199663 (Tributary to the Parsnip River) on the Chuchinka-Colbourne FSR in partnership with BC Timber Sales (BCTS), building on the 2025 assessment work and ongoing prioritization conversations with the licensee.
Deliver above-minimum-standards habitat restoration on the two Tributary to Nation River crossings (PSCIS 15201563 and 15201146) deactivated by BCTS in fall 2025 — soil decompaction, riparian planting, and coarse woody debris placement to convert minimum deactivation outcomes into measurable aquatic-habitat improvement.
Support Sinclar Forest Products’ planned road decommissioning and removal of crossings 198692 and 198693 on the Kerry Lake FSR (km 9 and km 8), layering riparian restoration and habitat enhancement on top of the minimum provincial deactivation standards Sinclar will cover. This work is deferred: as of the end of June 2025, Sinclar had not been able to plant the cutblocks the FSR accesses this spring as planned, and so cannot deactivate the road this year. The Kerry Lake and Tributary to Nation River riparian / deactivation sites remain intended field sites for the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) and College of New Caledonia (CNC) seed-bank and native-plant-propagation collaboration described below.
Maintain progress on Fern Creek (PSCIS 125261) — replacement is a high priority given the size of the system and the absence of other downstream anthropogenic barriers. Canfor has procured preliminary engineering designs; finalize partnership financing despite harvest-planning uncertainty.

Capacity building and partner integration

Build a local native-seed and plant-propagation supply chain for FWCP Peace fish-passage restoration sites in collaboration with Shelby Roberts (CNC / UNBC) — connected to native seed collection, nursery stock, and plant production programs in the Peace region — and with Lisa Wood (UNBC) who runs the UNBC seed bank and Food HUB initiative. Locally-sourced conifer seedlings, understory species, and cottonwood / willow material for riparian restoration at Kerry Lake and Nation River tributary sites strengthens the restoration outcomes while giving these UNBC / CNC programs a concrete field application.
Continue to collaborate with WLRS, UNBC, local fisheries experts, FWCP, the Provincial Fish Passage Technical Working Group (FPTWG), and the CEMPRA Project working group to align prioritization, monitoring, and restoration practice across the region.
Maintain strong partnerships with rail, highway, forestry, mining, and Nations tenure holders to support funding, site selection, remediation, and monitoring through adaptive management informed by traditional knowledge and real-time data.

Prioritization and modelling integration

Continue using climate modelling (climate-departure analyses, this report’s Appendix - Climate Departure; thermal-regime modelling) to prioritize crossings that enable access to cold, drought-resistant habitats and to anchor adaptation strategies to the watershed-scale climate signal.
Integrate stream-temperature predictions and Growing-Season Degree Days from the collaborative Bayesian Spatial Stream Network modelling (Hill et al. 2024, 2025) into intrinsic-habitat modelling for prioritization, surfacing the thermal regime alongside connectivity, gradient, and channel-width signals.
Calibrate bull trout and Arctic grayling intrinsic-habitat models against areas of known high-value spawning and rearing identified through fish-presence observations in bcfishobs together with research activities (some commissioned for FWCP Peace) — quantifying model uncertainty and refining prioritization.
Dovetail cumulative-effects modelling (CEMPRA framework and related provincial efforts) into the prioritization process so cross-watershed pressures — forestry, mining, climate, hydro — are weighted alongside per-crossing barrier evaluation.
Prioritize detailed assessments in areas with blockages and high habitat potential.

Watershed-scale context — climate departure and floodplain delineation

Continue the climate-departure analysis (Appendix - Climate Departure) — extend the watershed-group ecoregion mapping that bridges regional climate signal to per-watershed barrier prioritisation, refine the per-WSG weighting, and add the variables and seasonal-period breakdowns that surface the climate-driven differences in habitat trajectory across the 16 watershed groups.
Extend functional-floodplain mapping (Appendix - Floodplain Delineation) from the Parsnip River Watershed Group to additional FWCP Peace watersheds so the off-channel habitat inventory — side channels, wetlands, riparian recruitment areas — is available everywhere barrier prioritisation gets done in the region.
Build capacity in partner organizations (Nations, industry, regulators, researchers, community groups) to interpret and use the climate-departure and floodplain layers — through workshops, partner-facing outreach materials, and the public webmap interface — so the opportunities and challenges these analyses surface are visible to the people whose decisions shape watershed-scale outcomes.
Use these watershed-scale context layers to position fish passage where it belongs — inside the broader atmospheric, hydrologic, and geomorphic system that determines whether the habitat above a barrier is gaining or losing value. The per-crossing inventory is the action surface; climate departure and floodplain context provide the weighting and the narrative arc that lets reviewers, funders, and partners understand why a specific barrier matters in its watershed.

Monitoring continuation

Continue effectiveness monitoring at key sites using fish sampling, eDNA, PIT tagging, and aerial imagery — extending the multi-year baselines at Tributary to Missinka River (PSCIS 125179), Tributary to the Table River (PSCIS 125231), and Tributary to Kerry Lake (PSCIS 198692, held as a pre-removal baseline pending Sinclar’s deferred road deactivation).
Expand water-temperature monitoring — a distinct, condition-tracking program separate from the site-level effectiveness monitoring above — as the foundation for understanding climate-change impacts, integrating thermal regime into intrinsic-habitat modelling, and shaping adaptation strategies. This runs both within our own program and in support of the largest regional initiatives (FWCP-funded thermal-ecology research on grayling and bull trout, UNBC-led work on critical habitats, and partner monitoring programs).
Continue to develop a cost-effective monitoring framework that ties baseline + post-remediation data to measurable productivity gains from improved passage.

Data infrastructure for research and collaboration

Develop a public webmap interface to communicate fish-passage priorities, baseline conditions, restoration outcomes, and partner activities to FWCP collaborators, First Nations, industry, regulators, and the public.
Position water-temp-bc as an example of a data-portal model that can be extended or replicated to incorporate other past and future datasets collected by UNBC, cumulative-effects monitoring initiatives, FWCP-funded research, regional Nations, industry tenure holders, and others. Many programs have been generating water-temperature and water-quality records in the region for years; the goal is not to ask partners to hand over their data but to make the data discoverable and queryable through a shared interface so researchers can ask basin-scale questions without per-source data hunts or permission gates.
Support a community of practice around regional water-temperature data with UNBC, cumulative-effects monitoring leads, FWCP partners, and other researchers — focused on collective capacity to ask and answer holistic regional questions about thermal regime, climate-change response, and habitat suitability, rather than every program reconstructing the same regional picture from fragmented sources.
Model and extend the same open-access pattern for eDNA data across UNBC, FWCP partners, and the broader research community — making detections, samples, methods, and metadata queryable in a shared interface rather than scattered across project repositories.