Photo by Laurie Campbell
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Will you help us turn the tide for Wild Atlantic Salmon?
By Dylan Roberts, Head of Fisheries Research
Over the last 40 years, the number of Wild Atlantic Salmon in our rivers has declined by some 80%. If we do not act now, these magnificent creatures could disappear from our rivers forever.
Wild Atlantic Salmon are struggling.
Salmon transcend both the freshwater and marine environments, spawning and spending up to 3 years in our rivers as juveniles before migrating out to sea in spring. This wonderous 2,000 mile journey takes them to their feeding grounds in the North Atlantic, where they spend 1 to 3 years before returning to spawn in their natal river.
This is no easy journey. At sea, they face many challenges, and as I am sure you’ve seen on the news in recent times, our rivers and the life within them are facing further problems.
The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s Fisheries Department, based on the river Frome in Dorset, studies the health and lifecycle of Wild Atlantic Salmon - from when they hatch and migrate to sea as young smolts, to when they return to the river as adults. Our research identifies the causes of their decline and what can be done to reverse it.
Jim Murray, actor and advocate for Wild Atlantic Salmon explains that salmon are very important as they are a keystone species and can tell us much about the overall health of the ecosystem of our waterways: “They are an indicator species they can tell us so much about their dual environments of the ocean and of the rivers, as you know, they're anadromous. So the data that they can give us, if we keep them alive and God forbid, let them thrive, is invaluable.”
To save our Wild Atlantic Salmon we must boost our efforts. A key part of our salmon recovery plan is to monitor the success of conservation interventions in our rivers, such as clearing riverbed gravels of silt and removing barriers to spawning areas, so that we can do what works best.
We can utilise our current equipment and historical data, but we need your support to continue this crucial work to make a difference for salmon. Without the additional data more equipment will provide we cannot fully understand the problems they face and how to solve them.
We need your help to understand how to save our salmon.
We are now appealing for your help to raise funds for essential scientific equipment to collect high-quality data and maintain this vital monitoring work, and we are aiming higher than ever.
We fit 10,000 juvenile salmon with PIT tags each year to track their movements and survival in the river and at sea, but there is much more to be done and we need your help to do it. Our goal is to raise £20,000 so we can tag fish and fund other vital equipment. Only then can we better understand how these fish migrate up and downstream, the challenges they face, and how to help them.
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We can show what is really happening to our salmon.
Wild Atlantic salmon are in crisis in the UK and are now classified as Endangered on the internationally recognised IUCN Red List. The GWCT operates one of the best Wild Atlantic Salmon research programmes available, on the River Frome.
With 50 years of data on adult salmon and detailed data on more than 250,000 juvenile salmon throughout the catchment, our project aims to work with landowners and key stakeholders to reverse this decline, ensuring a future for this incredible species.
However, without PIT tags, it is very difficult to know how Wild Atlantic Salmon survive and respond to the conservation actions we are taking.
Our researchers on the River Frome are poised and ready to study this, but we need new equipment to make this happen.
With your donation, we can buy:
- PIT tags – to tag each fish so that they are detected every time they swim past our monitoring stations.
- A sturdy gazebo – to allow our researchers to set up a sheltered riverside station for collecting data.
- An electrofishing generator - to support our salmon and sea trout research programmes.
- Handheld PIT tag readers – to speed up the process of downloading data, meaning the fish are handled for less time and released back into the river sooner.
Your support is crucial to the success of this project. By donating to our appeal, you will be directly contributing to the conservation and future of the Wild Atlantic Salmon.
Please help us to save this iconic species. Every donation makes a difference.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. We appreciate your support.