*Our 2025 Living Planet Report Canada (LPRC) used 5,099 population records for 910 species to track wildlife loss over time. But ecosystem health can’t be fully captured by a single knowledge system alone, so LPRC 2025 includes Indigenous perspectives from across the country. *

Kianna Bear-Hetherington, a Water Guardian, is a proud Wolastoqey woman from Sitansisk, also known as St. Mary’s First Nation, in Fredericton, NB.

Kianna Bear-Hetherington, a Water Guardian from Wolastoqey Nation.

*Kianna Bear-Hetherington is a proud Wolastoqey woman from Sitansisk, also known as St. Mary’s First Nation, in Fredericton, NB. She grew up swimming and fishing in the lakes and rivers of her community and has always had a deep connection to the land and waters. *

*Listening to Elders and Knowledge Holders taught her a lot about the sacred relationship with the land and water, such as not to separate ourselves from nature — a teaching that eventually led her to work on fisheries in her community. *

Through her work with Wolastoqey Nation New Brunswick — the technical advisory body for the six Wolastoqey communities in the province — she has been able to deepen her understanding of her own identity.

Here’s what Bear-Hetherington told us about the changes she’s noticing in the Wolastoq, the importance of intergenerational knowledge, and the value of data.

The entire river system and the impact on the whole ecosystem is really clear. I have heard many of our Elders talk about how things used to be — how the river was full of salmon and the land gave us the food and medicine we needed, and how connected we felt to everything around us. And now with the way the river has been altered, that balance has been lost. It’s been a real struggle for our communities and for the species that used to thrive here. It’s really sad.

I have an education in environmental management. I know how this all works. I can’t even swim in the waters right in town. And my elders used to talk about how the water used to be so clear. You would be able to see the bottom, and now it’s really brown. I know a lot of sewage goes into the water, too, and that is just right up the road from me.

Deterioration of wildlife is a loss of culture

Intergenerational learning is so, so important. And I feel like we’ve lost that. Changes like colonization and industrial development have had a huge impact on our communities. For generations, our people lived off the land and the river, gathering the foods and medicines from the water.

But now we’re seeing a loss of these resources, and many of our people in our community no longer have access to fresh, clean fish, such as salmon. I wouldn’t eat the fish that I’m fishing, which used to be a key part of our diet and culture. Now the waters are polluted with chemicals, and it’s no longer safe to gather food from the riverbanks like we once did.

On land, you also find the moose with glyphosate — an herbicide that is commonly sprayed in our forests. It’s not really safe to eat. We don’t really have full transparency of what chemicals are being polluted there and how they have affected our communities’ well-being.

Illustration by Shawna Kiesman

Monitoring helps guide decisions and advocacy

Wildlife monitoring and data collection are central to everything that we do. The more information we have, the better equipped we are to protect the land and wildlife. It guides our decisions and ensures we’re taking the right actions to protect our territory.

This data also gives us the ability to advocate for stronger protections and to push for policies that align with our values. The data is a tool we used to make sure that our voice is heard, and that our traditional knowledge is being respected alongside that scientific data as well.

Ensuring future generations thrive

I know that these animals and medicines are a part of the balance in our ecosystem, and also deeply tied to our way of life. I just worried about how climate change and all these industrial activities and the continued disruption of our land and waters will really affect their populations in the future.

When we work to heal the waters, we’re not only healing the land but also our communities. My role is about ensuring that future generations will be able to connect with the land and waters and wildlife the way we always have. How much we’ve gone through as people and how much we’re still fighting for our inherent and treaty rights is what keeps me going in the work that I do for my nation.

Our Living Planet Report Canada 2025 reveals the most severe average wildlife population decline to date. Explore what’s happening in habitats across the country — and how we can halt and reverse wildlife loss before it’s too late.