CANFISHPASS Live

The Canadian Fish Passage Assessment (CANFISHPASS) app is part of the Canadian Aquatic Barriers Database (CABD) project developed by the Canadian Wildlife Federation (CWF). Freshwater ecosystems are maintained by flows that regulate water temperature, distribute food and nutrients, and facilitate the movements and migrations of fish and other aquatic species. Unfortunately, aquatic barriers, like dams and stream crossings (e.g., culverts), across the country disrupt these processes and are barriers to fish passage, fragmenting freshwater habitat. The first step in addressing these issues is to map and identify barriers. This helps us understand the scope of the problem, advocate for change, and prioritize barriers for ecological restoration. The CABD is the most comprehensive aquatic barrier inventory in Canada, having compiled information from over 800 existing data sources. However, the CABD isn’t perfect – data gaps still exist! Filling these data gaps is a huge job because we need to visit these structures on the ground to confirm whether they exist and evaluate whether they are barriers to fish passage. With hundreds of thousands of potential barriers, CWF can’t do this alone so we’re hoping you can help! CANFISHPASS turns everyone into a community scientist, allowing you to visit the location of potential aquatic barriers and perform quick, easy assessments to contribute key information and improve the CABD. No specialized training or equipment is required – just your smartphone and a bit of curiosity! By answering a few simple questions and taking photos of the site in the app, you can help us: - Confirm the existence of dams and stream crossings on the landscape and identify unmapped structures - Collect basic information and photos to help us learn more about the structure, including classifying what type of structure it is - Broadly assess whether these structures are barriers to passage for fish and other aquatic species - Engage with you to raise awareness of the impact aquatic barriers have on freshwater ecosystems and inspire action to support barrier rehabilitation and connectivity conservation and restoration initiatives Every assessment submitted through CANFISHPASS will be directly integrated into the CABD datasets, helping to ensure that practitioners and decision makers have access to the best available data to inform conservation, restoration, and infrastructure asset management and confidently take meaningful action to replace problematic structures with nature-based designs, while increasing the resiliency of both the infrastructure and ecosystems. This project is partially supported by financial contributions from Fisheries and Oceans Canada. It is also funded in part by the RBC Foundation, in support of RBC Tech for Nature. -- Check out the CABD web tool: https://aquaticbarriers.ca/ Learn more about CANFISHPASS and the CABD: https://cabd-docs.netlify.app/ Privacy policy: https://cwf-fcf.org/en/about-cwf/policies/privacy-policy.html Terms of Use: https://cabd-docs.netlify.app/docs_user/docs_user_app/terms_of_use_copyright Need help, have feedback, or want to request a new feature? Contact us at [email protected].