Recent work in watersheds from Alaska to California has emphasized the central role of food in salmon resilience and recovery. A foodscape perspective expands our view of watershed management to consider the sources, phenology, and pathways of key food resources. It also focuses our attention on the conditions that allow salmon (and other mobile consumers) to track and exploit feeding opportunities across the riverscape. Like every aspect of salmon habitat, the foodscape has been (and continues to be) altered, simplified, and often severed. But unlike work on fish passage, water quality, or instream flow, we are only now beginning to realize the challenges and opportunities for recovering and maintaining healthy, functional foodscapes.

 

Join us as we examine “foodscapes in action” – specific projects and places where foodscape thinking is being applied to salmon conservation and recovery. This session will bring together stewards, managers, and researchers, who are developing methods to study, monitor, and restore foodscapes. We will consider foodscapes in relatively intact watersheds, which shed light on the key trophic pathways and spatiotemporal patterns of foraging and growth potential that support salmon populations. We will also consider foodscapes in heavily impacted systems, which provide a novel lens to consider how alternative restoration actions promote diverse and connected foraging and growth opportunities for fish. In both contexts, foodscape thinking reveals opportunities to find new and productive tools that can help move the needle on salmon population abundance, diversity, and resilience – opening new possibilities for watershed stewardship and bringing optimism in a time of ecological crisis.