Reference Condition Approach Bioassessment of Yukon River Basin Placer Mining Streams Sampled in 2006.

An Integrated Regulatory Regime for Yukon Placer Mining was the final report of the Yukon Placer Implementation Steering Committee, submitted to the Minister of Fisheries in 2005. Under a proposed new management regime, the Yukon's placer mining industry will be managed through an adaptive management framework, with the aim of striking a balance between maintaining a viable placer industry and the protection and conservation of aquatic ecosystem integrity and fish populations. The effectiveness of the regime at achieving this balance will be monitored and assessed with appropriate adjustments to the requirements as required. The report recommended that a number of protocols be prepared and implemented in order to monitor the effectiveness of the new management system and among these is one with the primary objective of assessing and monitoring watershed health. A draft Watershed Health Monitoring protocol was completed July 1, 2006, and is currently being reviewed and considered by first nation, territorial and federal government agencies, industry and conservation organizations, and the general public. The draft protocol aims to provide for a process to help assess how effective the new
management regime is for maintaining watershed health and to generate monitoring results that will be used to guide the adaptive management framework assessment and adjustment phases.
After consideration of a number of methods, the Reference Condition Approach (RCA) was selected for assessing and monitoring watershed health under the draft protocol. There were a number of reasons for this choice:
- It is the most robust of many biomonitoring methods
- It is the basis of regional programs in Canada (it is an accepted design under the federal Environmental Effects Monitoring program), and programs in other countries, several USEPA programs in the United States, national programs in Australia and the United Kingdom, and has been adopted under the European Water Directive.
- An RCA program has been underway in the Yukon for a number of years that could be immediately applied to the placer mining areas and augmented by future fieldwork.
When the draft protocol was in preparation in the spring of 2006, meetings were held among those already conducting some type of stream sampling program associated with the Yukon placer mining industry. This included The University of Western Ontario, the federal Department of Fisheries & Oceans, and Environment Yukon Fisheries section. These three groups agreed to collaborate and carry out RCA sampling in 2006 in a manner consistent with that provided for in the draft Watershed Health Monitoring Protocol in order to "test drive" the methodology and assess its effectiveness at achieving the new management regime's objectives. Follow-up Geographical Information System March, 2007 3 (GIS) data collection and data analysis were also carried out as provided for in the draft protocol. In addition, reference sites were subjected to simulated impacts and then the RCA models were applied to these impacted sites in order to demonstrate the ability of the RCA models to detect a known degree of disturbance in streams.

Organization: Government of Yukon | Gouvernement du Yukon