Tula Quarterly Q1, 2026

Welcome to our first issue of 2026.

In this issue:

• A new terrain model at the Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre lets visitors watch a century of glacier retreat unfold in real time.

• Researchers and Guardian Watchmen on British Columbia's Central Coast investigate the disappearance of a culturally important black seaweed and what it reveals about a changing ocean.

• Scientists, policymakers, and First Nations leaders gather to better understand the impacts of ocean acidification and hypoxia on coastal communities.

• A new open-access platform called CoastConnect helps coastal monitoring programs turn field data into decisions that support stewardship and conservation.

• KelpExplorer, a new open-access platform, puts 40 years of kelp forest change into the hands of anyone with a web browser.

• In the highlands of Guatemala, a new cohort of frontline nurses is preparing to serve communities that have waited far too long for care in their own language.

This issue's cover photo celebrates TulaSalud and all nurses in Guatemala.

The first thing most people notice about the Columbia Icefield is the scale.

Standing beside the Athabasca Glacier along the Icefields Parkway, it’s easy to feel dwarfed by the mountains, the ice, the sweep of the landscape itself. But understanding the full extent of the icefield—what lies above and beyond those visible glacier tongues—is much harder from ground level alone.

Keith Holmes remembers that feeling from a bike tour he did across Canada back in 2010. He rode the Icefields Parkway, stopped at the Athabasca Glacier, stood there looking up, and still couldn’t quite grasp what he was seeing.

“You can kind of get the glacier tongues,” he said. “But the whole icefield above, I never really understood the scope of it.”

Years later, Holmes and his colleagues at the Hakai Institute would build something designed to solve that exact problem—and in doing so, create something Jim Elzinga, one of the founders of Guardians of the Ice, describes as unlike almost anything else in the world.

The result is a glowing 6-by-6-foot terrain model of the Columbia Icefield, now installed at the Columbia Icefield Discovery Centre. Using airborne LiDAR data, projection mapping, and custom-built visualization software, the installation allows visitors to watch glaciers retreat across decades, trace watershed boundaries, and see scientific data projected directly onto a physical landscape.

More than a static exhibit, it functions as a living map of a changing icefield.

Bringing the Data Into View

Hakai and its research partners have been monitoring glaciers and snowpack throughout British Columbia and Alberta, including the Columbia Icefield, since 2014. The primary data source is laser altimetry data, or LiDAR, and high-resolution imagery collected by Hakai’s Airborne Coastal Observatory (ACO). The researchers also collected satellite imagery, glacier velocity measurements and records of glacier retreat stretching back more than a century. The data collected by the Airborne Coastal Observatory feeds into scientific literature and international climate reporting, but Holmes and his colleagues wanted to find a way to bring it directly to the public.

“We were collecting all this incredible data, but a lot of it was just sitting there, being used for academic purposes,” Holmes said. “We were looking for another outlet, a way to share it in a more meaningful way.”

The opportunity to develop a 3D model emerged through conversations involving glacier researcher Brian Menounos at the University of Northern British Columbia, Parks Canada, and Guardians of the Ice, the organization supporting educational programming and exhibits at the Discovery Centre.

Elzinga had long wanted something like this for the gallery. The exhibit had grown dated—a hand-painted plaster terrain model that had served its purpose but belonged to another era. When Menounos mentioned that Hakai had built a 3D model for another project, Elzinga immediately saw the possibility.

“I feel like we went from the 19th century to the 21st century,” he said.

Parks Canada felt the same way. Holmes quickly assembled a concept image showing what a modern projection-mapped terrain model might look like. The response was immediate.

“They were like, ‘Yeah, do it,’” Holmes recalled. “So we just started doing it.”

An Arts-and-Crafts Project at Scale

The terrain model at the heart of the installation was built from airborne LiDAR data collected over years of glacier monitoring flights. Holmes designed the table dimensions specifically to maximize coverage of the dataset, fitting the surrounding peaks, valleys, glaciers, and the Icefields Parkway itself into a single coherent landscape.

Turning that data into a physical landscape took 3 months of nearly continuous 3D printing.

The model consists of 36 interlocking blocks, each requiring two to three days to produce. Holmes’s collaborator Marc deMontigny at Toolpath Design, a cabinetmaker and fabricator with a talent for precision design, developed custom alignment pieces so each section would snap cleanly into place. Once printed, the sections were assembled, glued, sanded, painted, and mounted into a finished landscape weighing close to 200 pounds.

“It became much more of an arts-and-crafts project than I expected,” Holmes said. “There was glue everywhere. Ratchet straps. I ended up building a stretcher just to transport it. It felt more like building a giant set piece than a normal science project.”

The technical challenges extended far beyond the model itself.

Projecting imagery accurately onto an uneven three-dimensional surface required custom software, careful optics calculations, and constant adjustments to account for ceiling height, projector throw distance, and terrain exaggeration. At one stage, Holmes discovered the original ceiling measurements for the exhibit space were wrong, forcing last-minute design changes to ensure the projected imagery would fully cover the model.

His collaborator Taylor Denouden, working remotely from Edmonton, developed the projection and alignment systems while communicating with Holmes through a webcam taped onto the projector in Holmes’s workshop.

“There were definitely moments where we were wondering if we were going to pull it off,” Holmes said. “But once we saw it align on the model, we knew it was going to work.”

A Living View of a Changing Landscape

The finished display cycles through 22 different visualizations over an 8-minute loop. Light moves across the terrain in shifting layers: glacier retreat from 1919 to the present day, projected changes toward 2100, ice flow velocity, satellite imagery, albedo data, and watershed boundaries. At times, the model glows softly in deep blues and whites, turning scientific datasets into something visitors can absorb almost instinctively.

Interpretive guides have been known to sit with the installation for an hour or two, working through every layer. Couples stop and talk quietly with one another, pointing things out.

One of the most striking visualizations shows the Columbia Icefield as a continental water source, where meltwater flows toward the Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic oceans—a freshwater system feeding rivers that communities and ecosystems depend on far downstream.

For many visitors, that connection isn’t obvious until they see it mapped. Elzinga has watched the moment land.

“Most people, if you ask them where water comes from, they’ll say, well, I get it from my tap,” he said. “When you put it in context that this is water that feeds millions of people—that’s a really big aha moment. That really connects people at a visceral level.”

The display doesn’t just show the glaciers themselves. It reveals the broader system they are part of, and how that system is changing.

“I think it really helps people understand the magnitude of the icefield and why it matters,” Holmes said. “You can see the glacier tongues from the highway, but it’s hard to understand the whole thing. The table helps with that.”

Because the model is software-driven, new satellite imagery and updated datasets can be added remotely. Holmes thinks of it as a living platform rather than a finished exhibit—one that can keep pace with a landscape that is itself moving quickly. Elzinga sees that flexibility as one

of its greatest strengths, ensuring the gallery stays current as the science develops and the icefield continues to change.

A Living Landscape

Holmes and Taylor Denouden installed the model at the Discovery Centre over two and a half days, arriving after a road trip in a U-Haul with no air conditioning—which Holmes noted, with some appreciation, was at least thematically appropriate given the cargo.

When the gallery reopened, the reaction from partners was immediate.

“Their socks were knocked off,” Holmes said.

Elzinga is more measured, but no less direct. “I’d be hard-pressed to find anything like it anywhere else in the world,” he said. “At least, that’s what I’m telling everybody.”

For Holmes, the proudest moment came on the last day of installation, before he drove back to Victoria. He returned to the table one final time and quietly signed his name underneath it.

It is, he said, a little like sending something out into the world. The projector will cycle. Visitors will move through. The icefield will keep changing. And somewhere under a glowing terrain model on the Icefields Parkway, there’s a name—from someone who wanted people to finally understand what they were looking at.

The shellfish that have sustained coastal communities along British Columbia's shores for thousands of years are facing a quieter threat than the ones that make headlines. No single storm, no visible spill. Just seawater, gradually changing—becoming more acidic, losing oxygen—in ways that make it harder for oysters, clams, and mussels to grow, reproduce, and survive.

Ocean acidification is sometimes called the "other carbon problem." Both ocean acidification and hypoxia are driven by the same emissions reshaping the climate, but their effects accumulate slowly, below the surface, easy to overlook until the damage is already done. Hypoxia—driven by nutrient pollution and warming waters—depletes oxygen levels, threatening fish and other marine life and compounding the damage acidification causes. British Columbia is a hotspot for both, with changes happening faster here than the global average. Financial losses to the seafood industry from acidification alone are projected to reach hundreds of millions of dollars by 2050. Coastal and Indigenous communities will bear a disproportionate share of that burden.

On March 3, 2026, 115 scientists, community members, industry representatives, First Nations leaders, and government officials gathered in Nanaimo—and online—to take stock of where things stand and where they need to go. The BC Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia Action Forum, hosted by the Tula Foundation, was both an assessment of progress and a call to keep moving.

The forum arrived at a consequential moment. In 2023, the Province released the BC Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia Action Plan, the first coordinated framework for addressing these threats at a provincial scale. Alongside it, the Province provided $2 million for the Climate Ready BC Seafood Program, administered by the Tula Foundation, which funded 11 projects aimed at turning the Action Plan's goals into on-the-ground results.

Those projects were front and centre in Nanaimo. Through lightning talks and panel discussions—and the premiere of a short documentary on the program—researchers and community partners shared what they had built: expanded ocean monitoring networks, new tools for aquaculture operators and hatcheries, and data systems designed to put real-time information into the hands of the people who need it most. Knowledge and training flowed back to Indigenous and coastal communities, not just upward into academic literature.

The forum also provided a chance to further align BC's ocean acidification and hypoxia initiatives with provincial strategies. Charlie Short, Executive Director of Coastal Marine Stewardship and Fisheries for the BC Government, outlined activities for the Province's Coastal Marine Strategy over the next 3 years. A community roundtable discussion, guided by Dr. Myron Roth, Director of Climate Risk Management for the BC Government, highlighted how current actions and future priorities could support the Coastal Marine Strategy—a reminder that ocean acidification and hypoxia work isn't happening in isolation, but as part of a larger effort to secure BC's coastal future.

International dimensions were addressed by Jessie Turner of the OA Alliance, who placed BC's work within global frameworks including the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science and the International Alliance to Combat Ocean Acidification. "British Columbia is a huge part of the OAH legacy effort along the west coast of North America," Turner said.

Throughout the day, Indigenous voices grounded the conversation in something the data alone cannot fully convey: the lived reality of coastal change across generations.

Chief Harley Chappell of the Semiahmoo First Nation spoke on Indigenous food sovereignty and shared responsibility. "We as Indigenous people, we talk all the time of how these are our relatives in this ocean," he said. "These are the ones that don't have voice, and it's our job and our responsibility to bring them voice."

Trent Moraes, Deputy Chief of the Skidegate Band Council and Co-Chair of the Indigenous Climate Adaptation Working Group, was direct about the stakes. "Climate change is not an abstract model to us," he said. "It is visible and lived in our communities."

The importance of being able to harvest and pass on traditional seafoods emerged as a recurring theme—a reminder that what is at stake is not just an industry, but a way of life and a relationship with the coast that stretches back far longer than any western monitoring record.

The forum also looked outward at the data infrastructure needed to sustain this work. Dr. Charles Hannah of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans presented on deoxygenation trends across BC waters. The Canadian Integrated Ocean Observing System Pacific ran a workshop on accessing and integrating ocean acidification and hypoxia datasets in Canada, and previewed an early visualization tool designed to support on-the-go decision-making for hatcheries and coastal communities.

Discussion turned to the challenge of translating scientific monitoring into indicators that decision makers can actually use—connecting measurements in the water column to impacts on species and communities in plain, accessible terms. Continued collaboration and sustained funding were identified as essential, with the Canadian Ocean Acidification Community of Practice named as a key mechanism for keeping that coordination alive beyond the forum itself.

British Columbia has the science, the partnerships, and now the policy architecture to respond to ocean acidification and hypoxia with the seriousness they deserve. But the work is not finished; it is beginning. As Wiley Evans of the Hakai Institute put it: "It was absolutely clear we needed to do something, and this is a step in that direction. It shouldn't be the only step. It should be step one."

The BC Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia Action Forum was hosted by the Tula Foundation on March 3, 2026, in Nanaimo, BC. Forum documentation and resources are available at oceanacidification.ca.

The tide sets the alarm clock on the Central Coast, not the hour. On the best survey mornings, that means boats leaving the docks at Shearwater before the sky has any real light in it—gear loaded, coffee in hand, the water black and flat. Emma Hancock has gotten used to sending her family photos at 3:00 in the morning.

The destination is a rocky intertidal shoreline exposed only at the lowest tides, the kind of place most people would walk past without a second look. What the team is searching for is Pyropia abbottiae—known to the Heiltsuk as łq'st, and by different names to different nations along the coast—a thin, dark blade that peels off the rocks each spring and has fed communities along this coast for longer than anyone has been keeping written records.

It is also, increasingly, a species at the centre of a coastal mystery.

Pyropia has been a food source around the Pacific Rim for thousands of years. Related species are farmed at industrial scale in Japan and Korea—dried, pressed into sheets, wrapped around rice. On the Central Coast of British Columbia, Heiltsuk harvesters and many other coastal nations have gathered it at traditional sites for generations, drying the blades on rocks and racks in the spring sunshine. The harvest is a family affair. Grandmothers sort the piles. Everyone has a role.

What most people don't know—what scientists are still working out—is that the seaweed harvesters recognize each spring is only half the story.

For much of the year, Pyropia essentially disappears. The visible blades die back and the organism retreats into a microscopic filamentous stage called conchocelis, burrowing into calcium carbonate—barnacle shells, mussel shells, limpet shells—somewhere on the shore. You cannot see it with the naked eye. It bores into the calcium carbonate of shells and barnacles, invisible from the outside.

"The conchocelis is a bit of a needle in a haystack," says Hancock, an MSc student in Patrick Martone's lab at UBC who now leads much of the current field monitoring work. Detecting it requires extracting DNA from shell samples and searching for a genetic signal unique to a single species among the roughly dozen or more that share the same coastline.

This hidden stage is not just a curiosity of biology. It may be the key to understanding what happened in 2016.

That year, harvesters across the Central Coast arrived at traditional sites to find almost nothing. Pyropia—present for centuries, woven into the food traditions of coastal nations—had largely vanished.

"No one was expecting that Pyropia would be gone suddenly," says UBC phycologist Patrick Martone, who had been monitoring intertidal communities on Calvert Island when the decline appeared in the data. "And of course, panic sets in, because you think, is it ever going to come back?"

The culprit appeared to be the marine heatwave researchers called the Blob—an anomalous mass of warm water that sat off the coast for an extended period and disrupted ecosystems up and down the Northeast Pacific. Early thinking pointed to hot summer temperatures, or to nutrient-depleted water failing to support growth.

But the story turned out to be stranger and more specific than that.

The very next year, Pyropia came back in one of the strongest seasons researchers had seen in years. That recovery said something important: the population hadn't been killed. Something had simply prevented the blades from forming.

The leading hypothesis now points not to warm summers, but to warm winters. The conchocelis stage appears to need a cold temperature cue before it will release the spores that grow into blades. Miss that cue—because the water never got cold enough—and spring arrives with bare rock where seaweed should be.

"A lot of us think about those really hot summers when the shoreline gets baking hot," Martone says. "But it's the warm winters in this case that I think might have been the culprit."

For Martone, the episode is a reminder of how climate change delivers its surprises. Kelp forest decline is visible, predictable, the subject of well-funded research and public attention. Pyropia's vulnerability operated through a hidden mechanism that nobody saw coming—a cold cue that never arrived, a bloom that simply didn't happen. "I think we're going to have lots more surprises like this in the future," he says.

9 years on from the Blob, the work has entered what Martone describes as a reinvigoration. Hancock is revisiting earlier datasets while expanding surveys north from Calvert Island into Heiltsuk territory, now based out of Bella Bella. The team travels with Heiltsuk Guardian Watchmen from the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management Department, reaching traditional harvest sites by boat in the early hours. The intertidal is one of the harshest environments on earth for life, and one of the most punishing for the people trying to study it. The rocks are boulder-strewn and uneven, and Pyropia can be extraordinarily slippery underfoot. Every step requires attention as researchers work their way across the seaweed-covered shoreline collecting measurements and observations. All of it happens against the clock. The tide doesn’t wait, and every survey is a race to complete the transects before the water rises and the site disappears again. The surveys measure harvestable biomass, patchiness, and shifts in distribution across the intertidal zone. Oyster plates have been placed at sites to try to capture the settlement of the conchocelis stage for the first time in the wild.

The Guardian Watchmen are not simply logistical support. Their knowledge shapes the work at every level—from navigating shore landings on exposed coastline to identifying the correct species in the field. Among the roughly dozen or more Pyropia species found along the coast as a whole, Heiltsuk harvesters want only one. Their ability to distinguish it by eye, developed over lifetimes of harvesting, is something no amount of laboratory training replicates. One of the Watchmen, Walter Campbell, looked at survey sites chosen the previous season and was direct: we wouldn't harvest here. The project shifted accordingly.

That collaboration has also revealed something Hancock didn't fully anticipate—how deeply embedded Pyropia remains in community life. Seaweed laid out to dry after a harvest. Families working through the piles together. A grandmother spotting the wrong species by sight and picking it out immediately.

"It definitely is a community binder," she says.

Martone finds something quietly remarkable in the cultural specificity of what harvesters are looking for. Around 20 species of Pyropia occur along the Northeast Pacific coast. Virtually every Indigenous community that harvests the seaweed has settled on the same one.

"I find it fascinating that there's actually quite a bit of diversity out there, but there's something about the deep traditions of collecting this seaweed that just goes across all boundaries," he says. "Is it because it's more nutritious? Is it because it tastes the best? I just find it fascinating that they've all come to the same conclusion."

Hancock now believes the cultural importance of black seaweed on this coast has been substantially underestimated, overshadowed by the more dramatic story of kelp forest decline. Interest is beginning to shift—at the Pacific Seaweed Summit in early May, she saw more people asking questions about Pyropia than she had expected. Heiltsuk Climate Action is focused on food sovereignty and ensuring the traditional harvest persists. A biobanking project run with North Island College is building a genetic reserve against another catastrophic year. Other nations are beginning to explore commercial cultivation—a thread that researchers are careful to keep separate from the more immediate questions of stewardship and food security.

All of it depends on better understanding a species whose most critical life stage has never been directly observed in the wild.

The surveys continue. Samples come back to the lab. The data builds, season by season, toward something that might eventually let researchers anticipate a poor harvest year before it arrives—or support a population showing signs of stress before harvesters reach bare rock.

"If we're looking at winter temperatures one year and they're really warm, we might be able to say—we're worried about the seaweed," Hancock says. "And preemptively take some mitigation steps."

That future is still being built, one low tide at a time. The most critical stage of this seaweed's life remains out of sight, inside a shell, waiting for a cold winter that may or may not come.

Luba Reshitnyk remembers the moment she first saw it all come together on screen—hexagons lighting up along the BC coast, colour-coded from yellow to deep blue, each one a compressed summary of decades of kelp data stretching back to the 1980s. After years of building datasets that lived mostly on her own hard drives and in her own head, she was looking at something anyone could open in a browser.

"I just saw the implications of it," she says. "There'll be a time when the whole coast will be covered, and anyone will get to come here and see that."

That platform is KelpExplorer, and it launched this spring.

Developed by the Hakai Institute and released as part of CoastConnect—a growing suite of open tools for coastal science and stewardship—KelpExplorer brings together kelp canopy data collected from satellites, aircraft, and drones into a single publicly accessible web platform. For the first time, anyone with a browser can explore how kelp forests along the BC coast have changed, year by year, going back nearly 40 years.

CoastConnect itself forms part of a broader movement toward open coastal data infrastructure, complementing initiatives like the Canadian Integrated Ocean Observing System, which helps standardize and share marine observations across the country.

Reshitnyk, a geospatial scientist who leads Hakai's marine habitat mapping program, has spent more than a decade building the foundation for this. The program started in 2014 with researchers hanging out the side of a helicopter, cameras in hand, photographing kelp beds around Calvert Island. Drones arrived shortly after. Machine learning tools like Habitat-Mapper—developed in partnership with Hakai's software team—eventually automated what used to take months of image processing into same-day results.

Meanwhile, Reshitnyk and colleagues at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute are working together to use Landsat satellite imagery—collected globally since 1984 at 30-metre resolution—to map kelp across the full complexity of the BC coastline, a distance which is Washington to California, 5 times over. Cloud cover, tides, coastal geometry—all of it had to be accounted for before those data are usable.

"It's like a pantry," Reshitnyk says. "In some cases we [Hakai] provide the recipe where you can go and run a thing for yourself, like with Habitat-Mapper. But in some cases, we are providing the cake—the end products, the insights, that you can be using directly."

Before this existed, working with kelp data meant specialized GIS software, powerful computers, and the technical fluency to reconcile datasets that came in different formats, resolutions, and spatial scales. Will McInnes, who coordinated the development process between Hakai's scientific and technical teams, describes the challenge as trying to take an enormous, messy pile of information and make it "snappy in a browser."

"There are folks who don't have any GIS experience," McInnes says, "but are able to go in and get access to this rich kelp data that they would not normally be able to use."

The platform's hexagonal aggregation system—one of its key design decisions—reflects both a technical and a scientific choice. Individual pixels of kelp shift with every tide and current, making direct year-to-year comparison noisy. Grouping data into hexagonal cells at the scale of a bay or a stretch of coastline smooths that variability into something meaningful. Users can also draw their own area of interest directly on the map and pull trend charts for that specific location across all available datasets.

Hakai engaged with a range of partners—including First Nations and Indigenous-led organizations, federal and provincial agencies, and MPA network members—whose feedback shaped what the platform prioritizes and how data are presented. The result is a platform that pulls 3 distinct data sources together in one place: Landsat for the long view coast-wide, aerial surveys from Hakai's Airborne Coastal Observatory for regional detail and species-level mapping, and drone data for fine-scale monitoring at long-term study sites.

The development of KelpExplorer continues through ongoing dialogue with partners and communities. Full BC Landsat coverage coast-wide is coming soon, with new drone surveys and Planet satellite imagery to be fed into the system as they are collected. Each dataset has different strengths, different resolutions, and different limitations—and KelpExplorer is designed to communicate those distinctions, not hide them.

The platform sits within CoastConnect alongside tools for community-based drone surveying and other nearshore habitat monitoring—a growing infrastructure for making open science accessible to the people who need it most: coastal First Nations, stewardship offices, government agencies, marine park managers, and harvesters making decisions about what's in the water.

The data already tell stories. On the Central Coast near Calvert Island, where Hakai has monitored kelp continuously since 2014, the arrival of a raft of roughly 100 sea otters in 2023—and their subsequent spread into the Northwest Calvert region—has produced what Reshitnyk describes as a 900 percent increase in kelp forest cover between 2024 and 2025. She can see it in the drone footage. She can see it in the satellite imagery.

But the more quietly compelling story is the one emerging from the contrast between the Central and North Coasts. When the 2015–16 marine heat wave swept through the northeast Pacific, kelp forests across much of BC and California declined sharply. On the Central Coast around Calvert, the decline was modest or in some cases, not seen at all. On the North Coast near Porcher Island—home to some of the largest kelp forests in the province—the drop was severe, and unlike elsewhere, the beds have not rebounded.

The difference, Reshitnyk suspects, comes down to sea otters. The Central Coast has them. The North Coast, largely, does not. Otters eat urchins; urchins eat kelp. In a healthy otter-urchin-kelp system, a marine heat wave causes a setback. Without otters holding the urchin population in check, the same event can push a kelp forest into a decline it struggles to recover from.

"There may be landscape-level implications," she says, "that we can see from space."

That kind of observation—made possible only by having 4 decades of coast-wide data in one place—is exactly what KelpExplorer was built for.

The platform is free to use and openly accessible at kelpexplorer.hakai.org.

The data already exist for that kind of reckoning. Old bush pilots who flew the inside of Vancouver Island decades ago once recalled there was a lot more kelp back then. Coastal families remember beds that aren't there anymore. First Nations stewards carry knowledge of these shorelines across generations.

KelpExplorer doesn't replace any of that knowledge. But for the first time, it gives those observations somewhere to land—a way to compare memory, lived experience, and local understanding against four decades of satellite record stretching across the coast.

KelpExplorer was developed by the Hakai Institute and is part of CoastConnect. Visit kelpexplorer.hakai.org to explore the platform.

In the highlands of northern Guatemala, the math of health care is unforgiving. Villages cling to mountainsides hours from the nearest hospital. Roads wash out. Spanish is a second language, sometimes a distant one—the first languages here are Pocomchí, Q'eqchi', Ixil, K'iche', and more than a dozen others. A mother in labour, a feverish child, a chronic condition going untreated: these are not abstract problems but daily realities in communities where the formal health system thins out long before it reaches the people who need it.

This is the gap TulaSalud has been working to close since 2004—starting always from the same observation: that the most effective frontline health worker in a Mayan-language community is someone from that community. Trained to a professional standard, speaking with a patient in her own language, and staying long after any visiting team has gone home.

Auxiliary nurses fan out into the communities they came from and take on the everyday tasks that hold a primary health system together. Prenatal and postnatal care for mothers in villages where the nearest hospital may be hours away. Vaccines. Nutrition education. Growth monitoring for children under three. Primary care for the conditions that, untreated, become the leading causes of preventable death in the Guatemalan highlands.

From the beginning, the program has run in close collaboration with Guatemala's Ministry of Health. The curriculum aligns with national standards; graduates are credentialed within the official health system, not alongside it. A TulaSalud-trained nurse is not a temporary fixture of a foreign project. She is a recognized professional in her country's health workforce.

The delivery model follows from that same commitment to community. Rather than concentrating students at a single campus—the standard model, and one that tends to drain talent away from rural communities—TulaSalud uses distance education to deliver each course at regional sites closer to where students actually live. Most students never have to leave their communities for long stretches. Because they train near home, they stay near home to work. The model is built to keep nurses where they are needed.

Much of the foundational support has come from Canada. Global Affairs Canada has been a long-running partner, and that sustained backing is a significant part of why the program has grown from a small initiative into a national-scale training pipeline. 2 years ago, TulaQuarterly readers saw a milestone: 1,170 new graduates in December 2023—a cohort supported by the World Bank's Crecer Sano initiative, and what program director Christy Gombay called a watershed moment.

This year, in a foreign aid environment that has grown dramatically more difficult, another piece of funding has caught up to the ongoing need. A US State Department contract—with JHPiego as the primary contractor—will support the training of an additional 240 auxiliary nurses, with TulaSalud delivering the training on the ground. The contract is welcome, and in this climate not at all guaranteed. But the reason 240 students are now learning the work is not that money appeared. It's that the highlands still need them.

At 5:00 a.m., while most of the world is still asleep, Ingrid Yésica Cal Coy is already on her feet. She slips out of her family's home in the aldea of El Rancho, in San Cristóbal Verapaz, and begins walking—thirty minutes through mountain paths in the dark—toward the first of 3 buses she'll board that morning. Her destination is a classroom. Her goal is to become an Auxiliar de Enfermería.

The round trip takes more than 6 hours every day. Ingrid's commute is the exception—most of her classmates live much closer to their training site. But for students in the most remote corners, even a regional model asks a great deal.

Ingrid is 23. She comes from a family of subsistence farmers in a community where running water and reliable health services are aspirations, not guarantees. Her first language is Pocomchí. When she enrolled, she was studying technical medical concepts in Spanish—her second language—while trying to access the Moodle learning platform from a place where basic services are scarce. The obstacles between Ingrid and a nursing credential were stacked high.

What changed wasn't the obstacles. What changed was that she was no longer facing them alone.

When her instructors recognized her determination, they built a support plan around her. Her docente offered tutoring and close attention to where she was struggling. A bilingual classmate—fluent in both Pocomchí and Spanish—stepped in as a puente lingüístico, a linguistic bridge, translating the technical vocabulary of nursing so the concepts could land. The course also provided materials, equipment, and a study stipend that lifted some of the financial weight from her family, letting her focus on learning.

Ingrid brought what no one else could: a refusal to give up. Today she calls the course a blessing in her life. But her progress is not luck. It is the predictable result of a young woman's conviction meeting the right tools at the right time—and of a program built on the belief that her community deserved its own nurse.

Ingrid is one student out of 240 in the current cohort. One among more than 2,250 auxiliary nurses TulaSalud has helped train since the program began.

There are still mothers without prenatal care. Still children whose growth no one is tracking. Still villages where speaking your own language to a health worker is the difference between being understood and being guessed at. Funders come and go. The highlands remain. The partnership with Guatemala's Ministry of Health endures.

That is the work. It started long before the current contract, and it will continue long after.

What TulaSalud has built over more than 20 years is a way of meeting the need that doesn't depend on any single source of support—rooted in Indigenous communities, trained close to home, embedded in a national health system, and carried forward by people who get up before dawn because the work is theirs to do.

There are 240 more reasons to get up before dawn.

British Columbia’s coastline stretches for more than 25,000 kilometres—one of the longest and most ecologically complex in the world. Kelp forests, eelgrass meadows, salmon-bearing rivers, and deep fjords support an extraordinary diversity of life and sustain communities that have stewarded these waters since time immemorial.

But monitoring and understanding such a vast coastline is no simple task.

Across BC, First Nations, Guardian programs, researchers, conservation groups, and coastal communities are collecting enormous amounts of valuable environmental data. Yet much of that work happens in isolation. Monitoring methods vary between organizations, data systems are often incompatible, and access to tools and technical expertise can be uneven—particularly for communities working in remote areas closest to the resource itself.

At a time when coastal ecosystems are facing increasing pressure from climate change, habitat loss, and shifting ocean conditions, the need for coordinated and usable monitoring information has never been greater.

CoastConnect—a new Hakai Institute initiative—was built to address exactly this challenge.

One Platform, from Field to Decision

Launched at coastconnect.ca, CoastConnect is a free, open-access platform that brings together the tools, workflows, resources, and real-world examples that coastal stewards need—all in one place. The goal is straightforward: help monitoring programs move from collecting data in the field to making informed conservation and management decisions.

At the heart of CoastConnect is the idea of data mobilization: transforming field observations into accessible, usable information that can support stewardship, management, research, and policy. In practice, that means helping organizations not only collect data, but organize it, understand it, share it, and ultimately apply it in meaningful ways.

The platform is organized around 4 interconnected resources:

Monitoring Methods: provides step-by-step guidance for common techniques. To start, we are highlighting methods used for kelp monitoring, including kelp drone mapping and biodiversity assessments, including environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling.

The Resource Library brings together protocols, templates, field guides, and data-processing tools in a freely searchable format.

Case Studies highlight real-world examples from organizations across BC where monitoring has informed stewardship and management decisions.

Monitoring Networks offers a regional view of existing monitoring activity along the coast, helping identify opportunities for collaboration and shared learning.

Whether an organization is designing a new monitoring program, improving existing workflows, or looking to connect with others doing similar work, CoastConnect is designed as a practical tool built around real needs.

Built With the Communities It Serves

CoastConnect’s initial version was developed through the MCT CoastConnect project, co-funded by Fisheries and Oceans Canada. From the beginning, the platform was shaped in close partnership with First Nations, Guardian Watchmen programs, regional planning bodies, and conservation organizations—the very communities who need it most.

That collaborative approach is central to CoastConnect’s philosophy. Coastal monitoring works best when knowledge flows in multiple directions: scientific tools support local stewardship, and place-based experience sharpens scientific understanding. The platform reflects that, grounding its methods and resources in practical realities identified by the partners who helped build it.

Spotlight: KelpExplorer

Among CoastConnect’s most compelling tools is KelpExplorer (kelpexplorer.hakai.org), an interactive mapping application that makes years of Hakai kelp monitoring data freely accessible.

Kelp forests are among BC’s most ecologically significant—and vulnerable—habitats. They provide food and shelter for fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals; they support Indigenous food systems and commercial fisheries; and they are sensitive early indicators of environmental change, including ocean warming and shifting sea urchin populations. Monitoring them consistently, at scale, has historically been difficult and expensive.

KelpExplorer allows users to visualize changes in kelp canopy extent over time along the BC coast, transforming years of aerial surveys and careful fieldwork into an accessible resource for researchers, stewardship organizations, and coastal communities alike. It is a strong example of data mobilization in action: hard-won field data made usable and meaningful for a much wider audience.

Local Data, Global Reach

CoastConnect does not operate in isolation. It sits within a broader ecosystem of ocean data infrastructure—and is designed to work with it.

At the national level, the platform complements the Canadian Integrated Ocean Observing System (CIOOS), which aggregates and publishes ocean data from across Canada to support research and policy. While CIOOS focuses on large-scale data accessibility, CoastConnect supports the organizations generating that data on the ground—helping build consistent workflows, improve data management, and strengthen long-term monitoring capacity.

The two are complementary. CoastConnect helps mobilize coastal monitoring data at the local and regional level, strengthening the quality and breadth of what flows into systems like CIOOS, which in turn amplifies the reach and impact of locally collected data.

That relationship extends internationally through the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), a global network integrating marine biodiversity data from around the world. Monitoring data collected through CoastConnect-supported workflows—gathered in consistent, interoperable formats—is well-positioned to contribute to OBIS, connecting local stewardship to a planetary picture of ocean health.

In practical terms: a kelp survey conducted by a Guardian Watchmen program on the North Coast can inform local stewardship decisions and, through these larger systems, contribute to conservation understanding at regional, national, and global scales. Local knowledge, amplified.

What’s Next

The successful launch of CoastConnect’s first phase has confirmed both the need for the platform and the appetite for it. Hakai and its partners will continue expanding CoastConnect over time—adding new monitoring methods, growing the resource library, strengthening regional monitoring networks, and deepening partnerships across the coast.

The platform is free, open-source, and built for the long term.

If you work on the BC coast—as a researcher, a resource manager, a Guardian, or a community steward—CoastConnect is built for you. Explore the platform, dig into the methods, browse the case studies, and reach out if you’d like to work together.

Visit coastconnect.ca to get started.

CoastConnect is a Hakai Institute initiative, supported by the Tula Foundation.

Ice Age Squirrel Droppings Yield a Genomic Goldmine

The most widely covered Hakai-associated research story of the year so far took the media by storm this quarter. An international research team led by Tyler Murchie, a paleogenomics researcher at the Hakai Institute, analyzed frozen Arctic ground squirrel droppings (coprolites) dating back 30,000 to 700,000 years in the Yukon permafrost.

The study, published in Nature Communications, revealed a genomic treasure trove of Ice Age ecosystems—including the DNA of plants, woolly mammoths, bison, and horses—showing that these ancient squirrels even scavenged on large animal carcasses. The "time capsule" feces generated massive national and international media coverage:

• Mainstream Media: The story was syndicated by The Canadian Press and featured by The New York Times, CBC News, and The Globe and Mail. You can read local pickups on CityNews Vancouver, NanaimoNewsNOW, and CKOM.

• Science & Research Outlets: Deep-dive features on the discovery were published in Discover Magazine, Live Science, Smithsonian Magazine, Phys.org, and bioGraphic.

• Institutional Announcements: Read the official research breakdowns from the Hakai Institute and McMaster University.

Unlocking the Mystery of Sea Star Wasting Disease

Scientists—including researchers from the Hakai Institute, Cornell University, and the University of British Columbia—have made a major breakthrough in tracking the uneven recovery of sea stars. Investigators have successfully linked the devastating mass die-offs along the Pacific coast to a specific bacterial strain (Vibrio pectenicida).

• The breakthrough was featured broadly across networks, including coverage on WDEF News and MSN.

• The wider tracking efforts were highlighted by the MARINE Network. Additionally, Hakai biologist Alyssa Gehman’s critical work with sunflower stars was featured as part of KUOW’s award-winning regional journalism coverage.

Hakai & Tula in the Public Eye

Beyond the headlines, our scientists, tools, and collaborations continued to make waves in public research and media:

• Glacier Outburst Risks: Hakai’s Airborne Coastal Observatory (ACO) team has been conducting near-monthly mapping of Place Glacier in partnership with NRCan/GSC. Brian Menounos was featured on CBC News discussing a rapidly draining sub-glacial lake that poses an outburst risk to downslope trails in Poole Creek. Brian also appeared in a year-in-review feature by The Globe and Mail on how accelerating glacier loss is reshaping Canadian landscapes.

• Fjord Landslide Threats: Dan Shugar was quoted by The Globe and Mail addressing the future dangers that giant tsunamis triggered by landslides pose to cruise ships navigating Alaskan fjords.

• Cooperative Orca Hunting: Keith Holmes was involved in a fascinating marine study covered by CityNews Vancouver detailing how orcas and dolphins team up to cooperatively hunt salmon.

• Philanthropy & Conservation: Tula Foundation co-founder Eric Peterson participated in a featured podcast discussion with Carleton University's MPNL program, focusing on philanthropy, environmental research, and the value of long-term conservation investments. You can listen to the interview on the Carleton University MPNL website.

New Publications & Research Updates

• Snowpack Water Supply: A new study led by Rosie Bisset and Bill Floyd utilizes ACO data to measure snowpack and snow water equivalent. This research serves as the backbone for Vancouver Island University's operational snow surveys, directly helping regional districts (including Metro Vancouver, Nanaimo, and Comox Valley) plan for local water supply needs. Read the paper via the Water Resources Research journal portal.

• Salish Sea Kelp Shifts: UVic PhD candidate and Hakai collaborator Brian Timmer published a new paper examining the loss and ecological shifts within kelp forest communities in the northern Salish Sea. Read the findings via the University of Victoria.

• Breaking Research Silos: The Sentinels Alliance, an interdisciplinary collaboration involving Hakai, was featured for its innovative efforts in bridging the gaps between different scientific fields to better understand ecosystem change. Read the feature story on UBC News.