Citizen Salmon Project

The Citizen Salmon project started in 2015 and is a community of curious citizen scientists interested in understanding the origins of the salmon we find in markets, stores, and restaurants. Salmon are vital to Cascadia: a staple of our diet, a key export, and a cultural icon of our region. We conduct most of our lab work at SoundBio, a local community biology lab in Seattle. Check out our progress at citizensalmon.org

Our Mission

We want to understand where we get our food. Here in the Pacific Northwest, salmon is a staple of our diet. By connecting the information about a salmon’s genes and where they were born, we are developing a tool citizen scientists can use to determine the origin of the salmon on their plate.

Citizen Salmon has two major components:

Bioinformatics: Identifying the most informative genes by manipulating large amounts of Salmon data provided in previous papers.
Lab techniques: Developing quick and cost effective protocols to extract DNA and genotype samples.