The Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation (HSRC) is a Vancouver-based company formerly run by

Russ George Russ George (Darcy Russel George; born 6 December 1949) is an American businessman and entrepreneur best known for founding the San Francisco–based firm Planktos Inc. which claims to "restore ecosystems and slow climate change". In 2007 he p ...

and funded by the

Old Massett Old Massett, named G̱aw in X̱aad kíl, is an Indigenous Canadian village on Graham Island in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia. It lies on the east side of Masset Sound close to the town of Masset; the area of land it is on is legally designated Ma ...

band of

Haida Gwaii Haida Gwaii (; hai, X̱aaydag̱a Gwaay.yaay / , literally "Islands of the Haida people") is an archipelago located between off the northern Pacific coast of Canada. The islands are separated from the mainland to the east by the shallow Hecat ...

. The company conducted a small scale

ocean fertilization Ocean fertilization or ocean nourishment is a type of technology for carbon dioxide removal from the ocean based on the purposeful introduction of plant nutrients to the upper ocean to increase marine food production and to remove carbon dioxid ...

experiment in 2012. 120 tons of iron compound were deposited in the migration routes of pink and sockeye salmon in the Pacific ocean West of Haida Gwaii over a period of 30 days. The project resulted in a plankton bloom that lasted for several months and was confirmed by NASA satellite imagery. The HSRC scientific team collected a significant amount of oceanographic data using autonomous underwater vehicles ( Slocum Gliders), Argo Drifters, Multi-Spectral Sonar, Surface Seawater samples, Phytoplankton Tows and other methods. The experiment, which was carried out without the knowledge of national authorities, was later described by a leading scientist at the

Natural History Museum A natural history museum or museum of natural history is a scientific institution with natural history collections that include current and historical records of animals, plants, fungi, ecosystems, geology, paleontology, climatology, and more. ...

in London as "hav(ing) had a chilling effect on public trust and on research". In May, 2013, HSRC fired George, removing him as a director of the company, and appointed John Disney as interim CEO. On 15 July 2014, the oceanographic scientific data gathered during the project was made publicly available under the

ODbL The Open Database License (ODbL) is a copyleft license agreement intended to allow users to freely share, modify, and use a database while maintaining this same freedom for others. ODbL is published by Open Data Commons, which is part of Open Kn ...

license.

References

{{reflist Companies based in Vancouver Salmon restoration