3 Methods
3.1 Collaborative GIS Environment
Geographical Information Systems are essential for developing and communicating restoration plans as well as the reasons they are required and how they are developed. Without the ability to visualize the landscape and the data that is used to make decisions it is difficult to conduct and communicate the need for restoration, the details of past and future plans as well as and the potential results of physical works.
To facilitate the planning and implementation of restoration activities in the Neexdzii Kwah (and elsewhere within the Widzin Kwah Water Sustainability Project area), a collaborative GIS environment (titled restoration_wedzin_kwa) has been established using QGIS and Mergin Maps (source code here. This environment is intended to be a space where project team members can access and view and contribute to the amalgamation of background spatial data and the development of restoration as well as monitoring for the project. The collaborative GIS environment allows users to view, edit, and analyze shared up to date spatial data on personal computers in an office setting as well as phones and tablets in the field. At the time of reporting, the environment was being used to develop and share maps, conduct spatial analyses, communicate restoration plans to stakeholders as well as to provide a central place to store methodologies and tools for conducting field assessments on standardized pre-developed digital forms. The platform can also be used to track the progress of restoration activities and monitor changes in the landscape over time helping encourage the record keeping of past and future restoration activities in a coordinated manner.
The shared QGIS project was created using scripts currently kept in dff-2022 with the precise calls to project creation scripts tracked in the project_creation_and_permissions.txt document kept in the main QGIS project directory. Information about how GIS project creation and update scripts function can be viewed here with outcomes of their use summarized below:
- download and clip user specified layers from the BC Data Catalougue as well as data layers stored in custom Amazon Web Services buckets for an area of interest defined by a list of watershed groups and load to a geopackage called
background_layers.gpkgstored in the main directory of the project. An additionallateral_habitat.tifflayer is also clipped to the user defined area and loaded to the project. - A project directory is created to hold the spatial data and
QGISproject information (ie. layer symbology and naming conventions, metadata, etc.).
- Metadata for individual project spatial layers is kept in the
rfp_trackingtable within thebackground_layers.gpkgalong with tables related to user supplied stream width/gradient inputs tobcfishpassto model potentially high value habitat that is accessible to fish species of interest.
## QRis
# [QGIS Riverscapes Studio](https://qris.riverscapes.net/) (QRis) is a free plugin for QGIS that helps you digitize your riverscape data. QRis is a great planning tool for helping users with spatial representation of riverscapes.
#
# QRis has two distinct types of features:
#
# * Static: These are features that are relatively permanent, such as the valley bottom.
# * Dynamic: These are features that change over time, such as the active channel.
#
# QRis will be a useful tool for digitizing the upper Wetzin'kwa river and prioritizing restoration sites. To start using QRis, follow the instructions for [getting started](https://qris.riverscapes.net/getting-started/).3.2 Aerial Imagery
Scripted processing and serving of UAV imagery collected during the project is available at https://github.com/NewGraphEnvironment/stac_uav_bc/ (Irvine [2025] 2025). OpenDroneMap was utilized to produce orthomosaics, digital surface models (DSMs), and digital terrain models (DTMs) (OpenDroneMap Authors [2014] 2025). To support efficient web-based access - imagery products were converted to cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs) using rio-cogeo, then collated accordiong to the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification with pystac and uploaded to S3 storage Amazon Web Services (2025). A titiler tile server was set up to facilitate interactive viewing of the orthoimagery and an Application Program Interface (API) leveraging stac-fastapi-pgstac is served at https://images.a11s.one to enable linking of collection images through QGIS as well as remote spatial and temporal querying using open source software such as rstac (Development Seed [2019] 2025; stac-utils 2025; Simoes et al. 2021).
3.3 Open Source - Iterative Reporting
A key question we have been asking ourselves is:
“What is the most useful way to present information?”
From our perspective - the most useful way to present information is in a version controlled format that allows it to be interactive, reproducible, read online, served out as a static document, updated, copied, used as a template, etc. Iterative reporting, managed with a version control system such as git (see example of tracking edits here) with a permissive license is a great way to do all those things. Although there is a steep learning curve to using programming tools and producing this type of product and although it can be quite time consuming - it then allows leveraging of all the components of the work to future projects for everyone. Licensing is also key for work to be shared. MIT License is an example of a license that promotes collaboration and sharing/leveraging of work while.
From our perspective - restoration planning are the type of initiatives that are well suited to an iterative reporting format such as can be demonstrated within this code repository which builds and serves this online report.
3.3.1 Issue and Discussion Tracking
Issues and discussions are effective ways to track tasks, enhancements, and bugs for the project. Issues can be used to keep track of all the things that need to be done, and can be used to discuss in-line with references to code used to address them linked to the issues through git commit messages. Issues for this project are kept here and
discussions are kept here.
3.3.2 Tables and Figures
There are many tables within this document that can take a long time to format. Within this document the tables have been imported often as simple csv files or pages of an excel workbook and pulled into the project using scripts. This allows others to access the data and use it in their own projects. These tables can also then be easily updated with new data as it becomes available often with the formatting for presentation to reader handled by the scripting. Any figures used in the reporting are saved in the project here and can be leveraged by others.
# An example of this can be
# seen here in Table \@ref(tab:kable-resources) with the actual file served
# [here](https://github.com/NewGraphEnvironment/restoration_wedzin_kwa_2024/tree/main/data):
read_csv("data/aquatic_restoration_resources.csv") %>%
fpr::fpr_kable(caption_text = "Aquatic Restoration Resources.")3.3.3 Data Sourceing from Skeena Salmon Data Centre
Whenever possible we have attempted to tie into existing data govenment infrastructure in the Skeena region by downloading data directly from the Skeena Salmon Data Centre using the application programming interface to their CKAN database. To facilitate and simlify this process we developed a function to download data from the CKAN database and load it into local versions of the project repository. This fetch_package function is kept in the scripts/functions.R file of the project and can be used to download entire “packages” of data from the Skeena Salmon Data Centre.
3.3.4 Documentation of Workflows
Select workflows were documented in memo format to illustrate the process used for others and promote reproducibility/leverageing of Neexdzii Kwah. The memos are stored in the memo directory of the project here and can be viewed in Table Table 3.1 by downloading the .html documents to a local computer and opening in a web browser such as Chrome (usually a double click of the document will open it in the browser).
## make a tibble of the list and display it as a fpr_kable
list.files("memos", full.names = FALSE) %>%
tibble::tibble(memo_name = .) %>%
fpr::fpr_kable(caption_text = "Memos stored at https://github.com/NewGraphEnvironment/restoration_wedzin_kwa_2024/tree/main/memos.",
scroll = FALSE,
scroll_box_height = "300px"
)| memo_name |
|---|
| dfo_stock_assess.html |
| historic_site_tidy.html |
| track_sites_restoration.html |
3.4 Historic Information Regarding Impacts and Restoration Initiatives
Historic information regarding impacts and restoration initiatives, prescriptions and activities is an important component of the restoration planning process. A wealth of information is present for the Neexdzii Kwah however it is located in many different locations and not always spatially represented. To address this, a comprehensive review of past impact indentification and restoration recommendations is underway. This review included a review of the literature, interviews with local experts, and a review of the restoration prescriptions and activities that have been conducted in the Neexdzii Kwah. For information regarding relatively recent restoration efforts such as physical works conducted through Healthy Watersheds Initiative, representatives from the Morice Watershed Monitoring Trust amalgamated all information located on physical drives and either provided emails with the data attached or provided links to the data for the study team for download and review. This information was then subsequently downloaded and re-uploaded to a OneDrive folder for the study team to access.
3.5 Future Restoration Site Selection
3.5.1 Evaluation of Historic and Current Imagery
Evaluation of historic and current imagery to understand and quantify watershed characteristics and morphological changes in the Neexdzii Kwah and its major tributaries over time and guide future restoration efforts. This will require that the study team acquire, georeference, archive and analyze historic imagery for the Neexdzii Kwah watershed and compare with an analysis of recent data to quantify historic changes in stream morphology resulting in loss of quantity and quality of water and fish habitat. Through this process we hope to highlight areas of historic dredging, realignment, and floodplain disconnections due to infrastructure that have degraded watershed health and fish habitat.
3.5.2 Fish Passage
At the time of writing, extensive work related to fish passage restoration planning was underway in the Neexdzii Kwah watershed
as well as other areas of the greater Skeena watershed. Methodology for this work is presented in Irvine and Schick (2025), Irvine and Schick (2024), Irvine and Wintersheidt (2023),
Irvine, Wintersheidt, and Schick (2023), Irvine (2021) and Irvine (2018). Although these references detail work primarily related to linear connectivity
(ie. upstream/downstream) there is also ongoing work related to lateral connectivity (ie. floodplain connectivity) with methodology related to disconnections due to the linear infrastructure documented in bcfishpass (Norris [2020] 2024) here.
The results of this analysis and future analysis incorporating major roadways as well (currently under development) will be added to the shared QGIS project and used to inform future restoration activity prioritization.
3.5.3 Local Knowledge for Riparian Area and Erosion Protection Site Selection
To facilitate project activities in the short term - the project team conducted site visits to areas of known riparian removal and bank erosion where landowners are amenable to project activities including erosion protection, installation of cattle exclusion fencing and riparian planting.
3.5.4 Delineation of Areas of High Fisheries Values
Past work to spatially delineate areas of high value habitat known to be utilized historically for chinook and sockeye salmon spawning (among other data) undertaken by DFO, Arocha Canada and others has been stored within a secure location and linked within the shared GIS project. Wilson and Rabnett (2007) includes descriptions of traditional Wet’suwet’en Fisheries sites within the Neexdzi Kwa which will be spatialized for the project.
3.5.5 Parameter Ranking to Select Future Restoration Sites
Analysis of background and current data can be used to inform priority ranking criteria used to select sites for restoration activities in the long term. Although the process is ongoing - GIS and user input parameters were selected based on ongoing project team meetings and review of available spatial information to rank future restoration sites. Using custom functions and scripted workflows based on layers kept within the shared GIS project - we prioritized proposed sites dynamically based on a range of metrics and user defined ranking. Scripts to conduct the analysis can be found here with custom functions here.