California Trout and The Conservation Angler announced a partnership this week to study salmon and steelhead recovery on the Klamath River, and it gives anglers and guides a defined job in the science: collecting the samples and observations the research depends on.
The work follows the removal of the four lower Klamath dams, which reopened more than 400 miles of habitat to salmon and steelhead for the first time in over a century. The dams came down in 2024 in the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history. Both organizations describe the river as a rare chance to watch a large watershed reconnect from the start, and to learn how steelhead respond once the barriers are gone.
Much of the partnership rests on a new report, Steelhead Recovery After Large-Scale Dam Removal: A Biology-Driven Monitoring Framework for the Klamath River, co-authored by scientists from CalTrout, The Conservation Angler, Tribal partners, state agencies, and regional universities. Its central argument cuts against the obvious way to measure success, which is counting the adult fish that return upstream. Recovery, the report says, can show up through several routes that precede any jump in abundance: resident rainbow trout re-expressing anadromy, shifts in life-history diversity, and changes in genetic structure. Reading those signals means tracking how fish move through the watershed, where they spawn, how they grow, and which life-history strategies hold over time.
Research Depends on Anglers, Guides
That’s where anglers come in. Gathering steelhead data across a watershed this size strains traditional field crews, and the report leans on trained anglers and guides to extend the reach, collecting scale samples, tissue samples, and on-the-water observations from places and seasons crews struggle to cover. The work pairs that place-based knowledge with formal scientific method.
George Pess, COO and Director of Science at The Conservation Angler, said anglers are “among the first people to notice when something changes on a river.” He joined TCA in 2026 after 26 years at NOAA, where he became a recognized authority on how fish respond to dam removal.
Damon Goodman, CalTrout Regional Director, said the dam removals opened a chance to improve how steelhead recovery is understood, with lessons the authors expect to carry to other Western rivers.
CalTrout has worked on California cold-water restoration for more than 50 years. The Conservation Angler focuses on wild steelhead across the Pacific Rim, turning angler effort into data through a network of sentinel rivers it calls the Northern Crown. The full report is available through both organizations.
