Reasons For The Decline Of Salmon Populations

Salmon Population Restoration
Salmon populations are a species indicator for their ecosystem, meaning the health of their population also indicates the health of their ecosystems. Factors facilitating this notion include, that salmon are andromodus and inhabit the entire river ecosystem, from headwaters to the ocean. They are also extremely sensitive to changes in the ecosystem. Variables like water quality, trophic webs and upstream perturbations, turbidity and temperature all affect the salmon population. Usually, the more untouched and diverse their ecosystem is, the healthier the salmon population is. Thus, declines in the ability of salmon to reproduce and inhabit a watershed, indicate a decline in the ecosystems health. Salmon are also …show more content…
So, in their mind removing dams would be less beneficial for society. They believe dams support society in multiple ways, including fueling the economy and providing a magnitude of jobs. They also provide energy that would otherwise be created in an unclean and non-environmentally friendly way that would harm the environment more, including the salmon population. Thus, the removal would be more costly than the benefits it would provide. The way that the decision makers decide this is by using a cost benefit analysis, which they believe shows that salmon are just not worth as much as a dam is. Also instead of removing dams the government believes there are other ways to mitigate the situation. These can be referred to as alternatives to removing the dam. Alternatives to removing dams are evaluated the same way as choosing to remove the dam, using cost benefit analysis. Alternatives could cost only a fraction of the funds that would be needed to deconstruct the dam and could instead be put towards new technology that would help the salmon population while keeping dams in place. This way it is a win for both salmon and people. One example of an alternative would be to install fish ladders at all the dams so that salmon are able to migrate upstream and the population has …show more content…
The reason the benefits of dams and greatly outweigh the costs restoring the salmon population is because the salmon population restoration already receives a fraction of what is split between all the available revenue for managing environmental projects. The government can only provide so much revenue to support environmental conservation so it would be wrong to put more resources and effort towards this single environmental cause, when there are already actions taking place that will benefit the salmon population. Since governments have already put forth so much revenue towards other environmental restoring projects, it would be smarter to wait for current efforts to take course before choosing more drastic ways to save the population, such as dam removal. It would be a waste to have worked out other prior restoration efforts and then abandon them before they have shown any promise in order to support another population restoration effort. This promotes the notion that removing dams just isn’t a cost effective method to restore the salmon population. If it were, the decision would have presumably been chosen before others such as wetland