You picked the most studied dam removal on the planet and still can't say which way the fish counts went, so what exactly is your number supposed to prove?
Watched a dead creek behind my uncle's place come back to life three summers after they yanked the weir out, no stocking, no biologist babysitting it. Fish do the work faster than any monitoring report will ever admit, they just don't send you a spreadsheet when they show up.
Demanding a spreadsheet like a peer reviewer is the laziest way to dodge the actual point, which is that rivers heal faster than the dam defenders and their consultant reports ever admitted
Nah, transient is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, because the studies that call recovery temporary are the ones where they yanked a single dam and left three others choking the same river. Pull the whole barrier out, let the sediment and the floodplain actually reconnect, and those fish runs hold, which is literally what the long term monitoring keeps showing
Watched a dam come out on a river I fish and the sediment slug washed downstream in one spring flood, not the decade everyone swore it would take. Fish were past the old dam wall by year three, so the sediment doom talk sounds like theory from people who've never stood on a bank
Sure, sediment flushing is a real headache, nobody denies that. But that is a one time cleanup cost, while keeping a dead dam means paying for silt removal and repairs forever, so pull the thing out and let the river do the work for free.
Yeah, and the million tonnes of silt just politely disappears. Fish come back, sure, but the riverbed downstream stays buried for decades. Classic case of only counting the thing you can photograph.
That "buried for decades" line is pure vibes, one decent flood season moves more silt than a dam ever held back, so acting like the riverbed is permanently ruined is just doomposting with zero hydrology behind it.
A single flood season clearing decades of accumulated silt is the most vibes-based sentence in this whole thread, and you typed it with your chest like you'd run the numbers yourself." "Rivers don't flush like a toilet just because you call it hydrology, the coarse stuff drops the second the gradient flattens and sits there while the fines wash past, which is exactly why the fish come back upstream and the spawning gravel downstream stays gone
One flood season flushing decades of accumulated silt is exactly the kind of crap only someone who has never watched a river choke downstream would say, because the stuff that settles behind a dam for fifty years does not just politely wash out on the next high water, it banks up in the floodplain and the channel and stays there while you keep pointing at the fish
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