Wednesday September 16, 2026
Active NorCal —
Two years after the last Klamath dam came down, federal money is now flowing toward the part of the recovery that gets far less drone footage: the side channels and floodplains where young coho actually survive their first year.
NOAA Fisheries has awarded $103 million to 16 habitat restoration projects nationwide, and two of them land in California. California Trout gets $5.4 million to reconnect floodplain habitat for coho salmon along the Klamath River. The California Department of Water Resources gets $8 million to restore fish passage for salmon and sturgeon, the second-largest single award in the round.
The Klamath grant matters because dam removal solved the access problem, not the habitat problem. Adult Chinook have already pushed upstream past the old dam sites, but coho, listed as threatened, depend on slow, cold, off-channel water to rear before heading to sea. Much of that habitat was cut off by levees, roads and channelization long before the dams. Reconnecting it is the unglamorous work that decides whether a river merely reopens or actually rebounds.