the Pacific Herring Spawn and Nurseries Project

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - A citizen scientist project to photograph pacific herring spawn along the West Coast, from Alaska down to California, has been underway for two months. It is based in the Comox Courtenay area, and one of its many partners is the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI).

According to project lead Jacqueline Huard, a scientist with Project Watershed, “I work with the Coastal Forage Fish Network. We are very community scientist based and so working on a herring project in iNaturalist just was a natural fit for us. The network that I work with already has quite a bit of outreach. I wanted to encourage the folks that we work with to put their data somewhere where they could also access it. The goal is two fold, both to collect some data and address a gap, but also to get it out to the public and have a publicly available data set for the public and created by community scientists.”