Aquatic Habitat Restoration, Monitoring & Community Outreach in Antigonish, N.S.

This multi-year project proposes to address degraded habitat for adult and juvenile Atlantic Salmon in South River Headwaters, West Pomquet River, Hartshorn Brook, MacNaughton Brook, Hattie Millstream and Ashdale Brook. In 2024 and 2025, preliminary HSI surveys identified a serious lack of spawning, rearing and pool habitats in all sites. All of the tributaries noted were once high producing salmon streams with their rich habitat diversity, connectivity and cold waters flowing, but due to human influence, mainly poorly managed forestry and agricultural practices adjacent to these watercourses, salmon habitat is sparse and the competition for food and refuge instream has hit an extreme peak leaving the Atlantic Salmon population struggling in these specific watercourses. It is the trend for many watercourses in the Antigonish area to be over-widened, cut off from their floodplains, lacking large woody inputs that create habitat instream leaving the channels with very little habitat complexity, little to no water depth in pools and runs and virtually dried up riffles during the summer months, coupled with the lack of a continuous thalweg, Atlantic Salmon and other fish species get stuck in low quality pools for extended periods of time, becoming over stressed and many end up dying. The proposed sites have other important features connected to them including vital wetland habitats and headwater lakes which all contribute to site selection and prioritization.

The project plan is to install well established, nature-based instream restoration structures (digger logs, deflectors, rock sills, etc.) that are designed to improve spawning habitat, decrease channel width and increase pool depth by mimicking the large woody debris (LWD) that would have fallen into the river naturally before European settlement and resource extraction. Improvements made to instream physical habitat will foster ecosystem resiliency to mitigate impacts of climate change and warming summer temperatures for the foreseeable future. The plan is to install 23-31 instream structures over the next 3 years to restore approximately 36,974m² of river habitat. Another restoration component of the project is to complete larger bank stabilization projects using armour stone to stop extreme erosion issues where river and agricultural areas meet and using tree planting to establish a riparian buffer zone to further stabilize soils and provide vital river ecosystem functions (shade, protection from predators, food web inputs, etc.) that stabilize approximately 1,100m² of  riverbank and riparian habitat. These larger projects will be funded by the Nova Scotia Salmon Association in collaboration with ARA. The ARA’s role in these larger projects was to provide the NSSA with site assessments, oversee project work and provide field work crew labour where necessary. There are also over 20 road crossings through the proposed sites where assessments are scheduled to determine if there are habitat connectivity barriers.

The ARA has a rigorous pre- and post-restoration monitoring program for all projects that includes summer water temperature data collection, Habitat Suitability Index (HSI) surveys, electrofishing surveys and spawning surveys. The data we collect and analyze measures the success of our projects and tracks the change in aquatic habitat and population densities of Atlantic Salmon. At the end of the year, once all the data has been collected and analyzed, the ARA prepares annual reports for each watercourse to present baseline conditions and comparisons to post-restoration data.

The development of a Watershed Restoration Planning document for the Tracadie watershed is also included in the project. Having the planning documents in place for 3 of the 4 major watersheds in Antigonish County has been a huge benefit to ARA in planning restoration, field work surveys and simply being a cost and time-effective tool. The planning document development would included desktop assessment, mapping out the entire watershed and breaking down into Manageable units, conducting extensive field surveys to determine restoration potential and assess connectivity barriers, connect with land owners and stakeholders, data mining and local knowledge acquisition for historical reviews, changes and trends in the watershed and the development of restoration recommendations and type of restoration requires for selected and prioritized sites.

The ARA has had a real push to engage the community in their work and encouraging recreational activities around water to encourage relationships with the environment that will promote conservation mindsets in our local communities. Types of engagement will include project updates and educational content on the social media pages (over 1000 following combined), information sessions for town & County councils to provide updates on project successes and public sessions to have discussions around Atlantic Salmon conservation and what that means for our communities, the environment and our social and economic well-beings.