Yuba Salmon Now! Strategy
California’s Salmon Crisis: What’s at Stake?
In the Pacific Rim, all waterways lead to Salmon. “Coastal” Californians, including those in the Sierra Nevada foothills, are indeed living in Watersheds Built By Salmon, both in an ecological sense spanning hundreds of thousands of years and in a cultural sense with the arrival of humans many millennia ago.
Of all the great salmon rivers of the world, the pre-1849 Sacramento River runs of Chinook salmon were among the mightiest, with estimates of 1-2 million salmon returning to their natal streams to spawn. The collapse of Central Valley Chinook in this first decade of the 21st century (from estimates of 800,000 returning spawners as recently as 2002 to 39,500 in 2009) is a result of multiple and interacting impacts to the ecological health of our freshwater, estuarine and marine environments.
