Partner for Purpose: This story is the first in a five-part series highlighting how faculty and staff partnerships create meaningful change, both within the university and beyond.

On a low-tide morning off the coast of the Salish Sea, a small team moves with practiced precision: boots gripping slick rock and eyes scanning tidepools for movement, balancing sampling kits between hands. What looks like just another research crew in the field is, in fact, a special scientific collaboration that is redefining how coastal ecosystems are studied.  

The Sentinels of Change Alliance, a partnership between UBC and the Hakai Institute, brings together 26 researchers spanning zoology, botany, forestry, microbiology and oceanography. Their mission is ambitious: investigate patterns of biodiversity, ecological change and resilience across the Salish Sea at a scale never attempted before. To understand and anticipate the complex challenges facing this region—both now and as climate change accelerates—they are also pursuing something equally transformative: a new model for interdisciplinary science.  

“We realized that no single discipline, or even institution, could answer the questions coming at us,” said Dr. Alyssa Gehman, an adjunct professor with UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and Hakai research scientist, and one of the project’s principal investigators. “If we want to understand how climate change is shaping the Salish Sea, we need integrated data from across the coast—and we need to build it together, from Day 1.”

A partnership built on shared purpose—and shared funding  

A unique co-funding model brought this collaboration to fruition, the kind of cross-sector scientific expertise the Salish Sea urgently requires. The project is partly supported by an NSERC Alliance Grant aimed at strengthening partnerships between universities and non-profit, public-sector, or private-sector organizations. The Tula Foundation, as the Alliance Grant co-funding partner, also provides extra research funds, in-kind equipment, and personnel to the project through the Hakai Institute.  

“That’s what’s really neat about this,” said Heather Earle, a coastal ecologist with Hakai and one of the project’s technical leads. “NSERC Alliance grants aren’t for academic-to-academic collaborations; they’re for projects where universities work with non-profit, academic, and government partners. Seeing the collective power of this network has been incredible.”   

Bridging disciplines by design  

Large interdisciplinary collaborations often begin in silos and converge only near the end, stitching together data that was produced independently—but not this one.  

“We needed to flip that model entirely,” said Dr. Gehman. “If you wait until after the research is done to integrate results, you inevitably face gaps, data-translation challenges, or missed opportunities. Instead, we co-created our questions, protocols, and projects from the outset.”  

The result is a structured research approach and team that is both scientifically rigorous and socially intentional. Planning, research activities, analysis, and publishing happen in coordination, and every step aligns the principal investigators, technicians, postdoctoral researchers, and community collaborators.

Redefining what collaboration looks like in practice  

The full Sentinels research group meets twice a year, bringing together 12 principal investigators from UBC and Hakai, seven project-specific technicians focused on long-term monitoring and biodiversity surveys, seven postdoctoral researchers, and several allied research specialists from Hakai Institute’s Nearshore and Wetlab mesocosm teams.  

These meetings enable the group to shape research questions, determine responsibilities, share preliminary findings and discuss feedback. Collaboration is reinforced through the Alliance’s open-data policy, which provides access to six core biodiversity monitoring datasets—from intertidal invertebrates to algal species—creating a shared resource not only for all Sentinels partners now, but also to anyone else interested in using the quality-controlled public dataset at the five year mark.

Team members also join each other’s fieldwork that transcends beyond their expertise, learning new methods and strengthening collective knowledge.

Mentorship is another cornerstone driving this initiative. “Our postdocs aren’t just working with one supervisor anymore,” said Dr. Gehman. “They’re plugged into a wide network of specialists. That openness accelerates their science and supports their training in ways we didn’t anticipate.”   

Access to facilities and technical support at Hakai’s two coastal research stations has allowed postdocs to collaborate with field and lab specialists to rapidly plan and undertake focused experiments to dig into details behind some of the trends that the core monitoring reveals. 

Dr. Gehman describes this as a ‘loose network’ model: “We come together to make decisions, then move apart to take action—then return again to refine and adjust. And this extends beyond our day-to-day work. Sometimes, we need to have difficult conversations to ensure we remain committed to our shared vision.”   

“Working collaboratively requires intentionality, putting in the time, listening openly and trusting that even when challenges come up—as they inevitably do—we’ll work through them together. It’s not always easy, but it’s the key to our success.” 

Engaging communities beyond academia 

​​​The Sentinels Alliance team believes it is imperative to look beyond academic partners, and they proactively engage with local community groups committed to this cause.  

​​​​​​​​​​​This commitment to community collaboration is best exemplified by the Light Trap Network, a core monitoring program within the Alliance. First Nations, stewardship groups, educators, and volunteers check light traps weekly at 23 sites across the Salish Sea, tracking the timing and abundance of larval Dungeness crabs. These partnerships expand spatial coverage while fostering shared responsibility for understanding and protecting the Salish Sea.​​ 

​​​“The Salish Sea is facing complex pressures: warming, acidification, habitat shifts, declining species,” said Dr. Kevin Ma, a postdoctoral research fellow focused on intertidal biodiversity. “To understand change or resilience on a regional scale, you need integrated, highly resolved​​ data linked by time and location. That can’t be done in isolation.” 

Working with community and non-profit groups—and in some cases, high school students—expands the project’s geographic reach and strengthens monitoring protocols​ by increasing the frequency of sampling in rural and remote areas​. These ​community science ​contributions allow researchers to capture variation ​around the Salish Sea​ and observe regions that would otherwise remain unmonitored.

What’s next for the network 

Now halfway through the project’s five-year funding window, the Sentinels of Change Alliance is moving through its most active phase: sampling, analyses and synthesis. Much of the monitoring builds on long-term datasets at UBC and Hakai, giving researchers a deeper historical baseline, and context for understanding emerging patterns.   

Reflecting on how far they’ve come, the team unanimously agrees that unlike a traditional research landscape where expertise is often siloed, this Alliance demonstrates what becomes possible when collaboration is a foundation, not an add-on. 

“We’re trying to understand a deeply interconnected system,” said Earle. “Our team needs to be interconnected as well. When partnering with others, it’s not just about aligning goals, but building trust, curiosity, and shared ownership. The science gets better—but so does the experience of doing it.” 

“And we’re not stopping when the grant ends,” said Dr. Gehman. “We want to build protocols and relationships that have a lasting impact. The team is already talking about how to sustain the core monitoring into the future.” 

As the tide rises and the field day concludes, the team’s work is far from over. Researchers pack their equipment, exchange notes, prepare samples for transport, and the shoreline returns to the rhythm of the sea. Each specimen, each data​ point​, each conversation adds to a growing picture of the Salish Sea—and to a partnership poised to address climate change today, and in the years to come.

Learn more about the Sentinels of Change Alliance.