—but I'll tell you exactly what we're doing.
One of our main focuses on this sort of thing is the Cowichan estuary. What commonly happens in estuaries is that to get to deeper water we build causeways, or a port, or a mill or something. You can't fracture estuaries and maintain their productivity, because it's all about the connection of the flow from the fresh to the salt, the flats that contain the eelgrass, and then into the deeper water with the kelp. When you break that down and increase the silt load in the rivers, what has happened is that we've lost many of our eelgrass beds. We have about 40 community groups in the Strait of Georgia alone working to see if they can actively restore eelgrass.
In other areas, and in the Cowichan in particular, this year for the first time we got agreement to really open up one of these causeways, put in a bridge, and reconnect the entire estuary so that it now can flow naturally. It's still not natural because it still has the impediments, but there's a much greater flow. We have to look at the natural dynamics of these habitats when we're talking about estuaries.
The other thing we're really focused on is avoiding things like log-booming during smolt migration. In the Cowichan we have a very big problem, where seals use log-booming and prey directly on smolts going to sea. A very obvious response, if we can demonstrate the level of mortality, is to work with that one mill that's left and ask them to dryland sort for two months, not all year, but two months.
This could make a world of difference in production. It also will reduce the bark deposit on the bottom. In some estuaries, that has been there for 100 years, and we have a huge problem. We don't believe that you should even touch it. We think you should cap it, put rock on top, put the sand down, try to contain it, and then let the eelgrass restore itself.
For some of these estuaries, these are big issues.