Can U Dig It - Safe Shellfish Harvesting App

Intertidal clams and oysters are an important traditional food source to nearly all coastal Indigenous communities where they are present. Indigenous peoples of Canada have a legal right to harvest shellfish as their ancestors have for millennia. 

Intertidal clams and oysters are filter-feeding animals. They feed by filtering plankton out of the water using their gills.  Because they are filtering seawater, they also filter and accumulate other particles, including marine biotoxins, bacteria, and viruses, in their tissues. These marine biotoxins, bacteria, and viruses can cause an array of very serious illnesses, even death, to humans if ingested. 

Factors from climate change, water quality, and sewage increasingly impact shellfish food security for Indigenous communities who traditionally rely on access to this food resource, as well as their right to harvest. As ocean temperatures increase, biotoxins and bacteria like Vibrio increase and can lead to seafood becoming unsafe to eat. Further, forms of contamination are introduced to shorelines via sewage run-off, boat pollution, and poor watershed management. Knowledge of how to find places for safe harvesting is being lost as access to these areas becomes increasingly restricted. 

This communication gap exposes harvesters to the risk that their traditional foods are not safe to eat, and areas that are safe to harvest are not easily known. It also contributes to a lack of trust from Indigenous harvesters in Fisheries and Oceans Canada. 

To help harvesters find safe places to harvest clams and oysters and reduce the risk of getting sick from contaminated harvests, the Q’ul-lhanumutsun Aquatic Resources Society is working to develop a mobile app called Can U Dig It. The app will allow harvesters to see geographically and in real-time where it is safe to harvest and for what species, access relevant information regarding reasons for beach closures, types of contamination closures, and information about tides and available species, including Indigenous knowledge about these places and species. This solution will solve a dire communications gap to promote safe shellfish harvesting across Canada and protect Indigenous rights to harvest. Further, it will advance reconciliation efforts by mobilizing data gathered by Fisheries and Oceans Canada that will protect Indigenous harvesters and promote safe shellfish consumption.

The target population for this app is Indigenous seafood harvesters. Shellfish, are important to Indigenous peoples along all of Canada's coastlines. In addition to providing nutrition, seafoods like clams, mussels, and crabs are culturally important to Indigenous well-being through connections to land, water, animals, family, nation, and community. Indigenous peoples have a legal right to harvest and fish for these foods.

Indigenous peoples are currently without easy access to important information regarding this food source. Results from regular tests on beaches for these biotoxins or sanitation issues are difficult to access by the average public, and notices of harvesting closures are rarely trusted as up-to-date, if/when they even make it to shellfish harvesters. Currently, there is no easy way to access or interpret the current tools for communication about shellfish harvesting closures issued by Fisheries And Oceans Canada. There is a web map created by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC) to present information from Fisheries and Oceans Canada on shellfish openings and closures (http://maps.bccdc.ca/shellfish) however most harvesters are unaware of the map, and do not have access to a computer. The map does not work well on mobile devices, and the data is confusing for non-technical users. 

An indigenous led, mobile, easy-to-use app will solve all access issues and help to build trust in shellfish testing data.

This app will support shellfish harvesting and all its interconnected benefits to Indigenous peoples. In addition, sustainable shellfish harvesting practices promote the rejuvenation of shellfish populations, which in turn benefits the shoreline ecosystem, including water filtration, for other species to flourish.

Our app is targeted benefit Indigenous peoples who harvest shellfish for food, social, commercial, or ceremonial purposes, or receive shellfish from others who harvest. The Q’ul-lhanumutsun Aquatic Resources Society (QARS) is a non-profit society serving Cowichan Tribes, Halalt First Nation, Lyackson First Nation, Penelakut Tribe, Stz’uminus First Nation, and Ts'uubaa-asatx Nation dedicated to aquatic resource management, information gathering and sharing, and education. As part of its mandate, QARS has developed the vision for this app directly with its member Nations. The data that this app will publish is relevant to all shellfish harvesting areas across Canada, and could benefit all Indigenous harvesters beyond the QARS member communities.

The concept for the app was developed by the QARS member Nations of Cowichan Tribes, Halalt First Nation, Lyackson First Nation, Penelakut Tribe, Stz’uminus First Nation, and Ts'uubaa-asatx Nation to resolve issues related to access and trust in safe shellfish harvesting areas. QARS has partnered with a technical team at Trailmark Systems who primarily work for Indigenous clients in the development and deployment of innovative technical solutions. QARS and Trailmark have worked together on a number of successful projects over the last five years, and Trailmark has also formed individual professional relationships with the QARS member communities that have trust and innovation as core foundations of these relationships. 

Trailmark and QARS take an agile development approach where engagement and review are built into every phase of app development, from concept to testing. 

We face barriers related to capacity and skills in promoting the app and gaining a strong user base through awareness. We also require funds to build the real-time notification feature that the communities have requested. This feature will require more time and budget to complete than originally anticipated. Additional features we would like to add are Indigenous knowledge components about shellfish beaches and safe, culturally relevant shellfish harvesting practices.

We currently do not have a sustainable source of ongoing funding to keep the app going, and would like to seek opportunities to achieve this so that the work to date is not wasted and we can realize our vision for a free, easy-to-access tool to keep our harvesters safe and beyond. Further, in the development phases we have found issues with the API of the source data, which if given the opportunity and authority we feel we could meaningfully fix for the betterment of all shellfish harvesters and individuals wishing to access this data. 

The Team Lead works for the communities in which this project is based. 

We live in a data-rich age, however so much data related to our natural resources and food systems are in a format that is inaccessible to the citizens who need it most. Our solution approaches this problem by turning complex data in various formats into an easy-to-access, location-based viewer that is accessible to anyone at any age who has a cell phone. Having an Indigenous-led organization develop this tool will improve levels of trust in this data and put it to work in the areas this data was intended to but fails. This tool will go beyond protecting people from potential illness to promote shellfish harvesting and rejuvenate this long-held cultural practice in a safe and meaningful way. There are other examples of the need to make environmental data accessible, such as the spraying of pesticides in forestry practices, the location and timing of contamination from industry, etc. Serving publically available data in this easy format is a potential catalyst for other similar yet equally important projects. 

We feel that we hold responsibilities to our member Nations to present a solution that ensures access to safe shellfish harvesting areas and puts this data into the hands of the individuals who need it most, in a format that is culturally appropriate. Shellfish harvesting restrictions have significantly impacted the Aboriginal rights of these Nations, so having this tool to assist individuals in locating beaches that are safe to harvest will be transformational. Illness from eating contaminated shellfish can be serious, chronic, life-altering, and even life-threatening for individuals with other medical conditions. Preventing this hardship through this tool will further mitigate the impacts of harvesting restrictions on Aboriginal rights and support community wellbeing. 

In the next 5 years, we hope that Can U Dig It will be a trusted source for all shellfish harvesters and a well-known name in the promotion of trusted data on shellfish harvesting. We would like to have completed the real-time notification system, and educational resources related to Indigenous Knowledge of harvesting practices. We would like to secure long-term and sustainable funding and partnerships with Fisheries and Oceans Canada to assist them in their reconciliation mandates. 

We measure our goals by the number of downloads that the app has had and how much interaction and positive feedback we gain on social media. Feedback from our member Nations on its effectiveness and how well it reflects their vision is also how we measure success. Additional data on food-borne illness related to shellfish consumption could potentially be accessed from the BC Center of Disease Control to see if the app has reduced these incidents. 

This tool will provide shellfish harvesters with the information they need to safely exercise their Aboriginal rights to harvest shellfish for themselves and their families and communities. Our members have told us that they currently do not have easy access, nor do they trust the notices they get (if they get them) that the beaches they harvest at could be contaminated. We have also heard from a variety of harvesters through interviews on traditional land use about their experiences, confusion, and lack of trust about sanitation and biotoxin closure notices because these notices are not easily accessible nor are they in a format that is culturally meaningful. This tool is already emerging as a trusted resource for early users of the app. 

We use a flutter app development framework to produce the mobile app along with a map-based viewer. We are working with Indigenous users to translate the effectiveness of the app for this knowledge base, and engaging on meaningful ways to use this tool to share Indigenous knowledge of shellfish harvesting. 

QARS and Trailmark are both women-led. QARS is made up of an all-indigenous board of men and women. Trailmark staff are diverse and include Indigenous and Métis individuals, and members of the LGBTQ communities. Both agencies strive to create inclusive environments by targeting hiring processes to ensure equal opportunity for applicants and creating workplace cultures with zero tolerance for discrimination. 

QARS is a non-profit organization that exists to serve its mandate to its member communities.

Our mission is to work together at a technical level to support sustainability and positive transformation in aquatic resource management practices. 

• To establish a forum for the Members to share traditional and other knowledge;

• To establish a forum where Members can work together to advance fisheries and aquatic resources issues of mutual concern;

• To provide an open and inclusive forum that recognizes the interest of the Members; 

• To respect that the Members may have unique interests;

• To develop effective and legitimate management strategies for fisheries and aquatic resources within the traditional territories of the Members.

We hope to achieve service contracts with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans or the BCCDC, since we will be fulfilling their responsibility to communicate about shellfish harvesting safety. Or we would like to raise investment capital or a combination of the two. 

So far we have raised $75,000- $100,000 for the conception and development of the first iteration of this app. This amount was adequate to develop the concept, create communications, engage with stakeholders, create a beta app for testing, release it to the app stores for use, and develop a subsequent update to the app based on user feedback.