July 17, 2025 — Nearly three decades into his research on how aquatic systems are responding climate change in Bristol Bay, University of Washington (UW) veteran fisheries biologist Daniel Schindler says smart development will be needed to protect Alaska’s salmon habitat.
“I think it is an important message that Alaska must protect its habitat,” Schindler said in an interview with National Fisherman from a UW field camp in the Bristol Bay watershed, on July 13. “We have destroyed so much habitat in so many places due to ignorance, only to learn afterward how important that habitat was to our fisheries.
“All over the West Coast and in Europe, habitat has been destroyed,” he said. “Alaska still has most of the pieces on the table. We are in a position to protect most of these ecosystems, and I hope we wake up and realize we can seriously degrade their capacity to support fisheries.”
To Schindler and many others, mines such as Pebble and Donlin mine in salmon habitat, along with certain energy and road development projects, pose distinct threats. Backers of mineral exploration and development say that using state-of-the-art practices will protect the fisheries, but history and science do not support these claims.
The University of Washington’s Alaska Salmon Program, which dates back to the 1940s, focuses on all aspects of the ecology and evolution of Pacific salmon in watersheds in western Alaska, the Bering Sea, and Gulf of Alaska. Every summer, as many as 30 researchers, including undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty professors, rotate through several field stations for the program, with a handful of them there for the entire summer.
One of them is Schindler, who began his research there in 1997 on the invitation of UW professor Ray Hilborn before joining the faculty and beginning to teach on the UW campus. Program facilities include a network of field camps on Wood River, Lake Iliamna, and at Chignik.
UW also has a broad web of collaborators in Alaska, nationwide, and globally, but they have to pay their own way to Bristol Bay and for accommodations at the field camps.