Tuesday September 1, 2026
The Manila Times —
A new multi-year, multi-partner collaboration aims to empower First Nations communities in British Columbia with salmon genetic analysis tools, technology, infrastructure and skills for fisheries management.
The project has secured funding for the next three years from the First Nations Fisheries Council’s Indigenous Stewardship Fund, the Pacific Salmon Foundation and Genome British Columbia.
Candace Picco (Senior Biologist, Ha’oom Fisheries Society) and Dr. Ben Sutherland (Vancouver Island University and Sutherland Bioinformatics) will lead the development of open-source tools to decentralize genetic stock identification of salmon. This will remove processing bottlenecks, enabling priority setting and allowing independent data access and management for end users, particularly First Nations organizations.
“The overall impact is simplification: having Nation-led genetic processing capacity based on the Nations’ needs, providing autonomy over research questions and data,” Picco explains.
Salmon genetic stock identification analysis at a coastwide level for western Canada currently relies on a single lab: the Molecular Genetics Laboratory at the Pacific Biological Station, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO). Growing demand for their services has outpaced the lab’s capacity. This is an issue for fisheries managers, who need timely results to make decisions. The delay is worse for remote areas, where shipping adds extra time at every step. The DFO lab is a key partner on the project, helping to ensure that the results generated from the decentralized model are compatible with existing datasets.