GoKawiilMan-made beaver dams lift coho salmon survival to 60% in Scott River, California
Researchers with the Scott River Watershed Council built artificial beaver dams on Sugar Creek and French Creek in northern California starting in 2015, using wooden posts, branches, gravel and mud to mimic structures once built by beavers before fur trappers wiped them out in the 1830s. The dams created roughly 9,000 square metres of cooler, slower-moving wetland habitat capable of supporting more than 8,500 juvenile coho salmon, and survival rates in these restored areas jumped from about 8% to 60% compared to untreated stretches, according to findings published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.