Atlantic salmon face cascading welfare challenges from degraded river habitats, and restoration efforts targeting water quality, passage barriers, and spawning gravel quality benefit fish welfare across life stages.
Wild salmon welfare is inseparable from habitat quality. Fish attempting to migrate through degraded rivers face thermal stress, exhaustion from barriers, disease pressure, and ultimately reproductive failure that represents a welfare impact at the population scale. Removing unnecessary barriers, restoring riparian vegetation to cool rivers, reducing fine sediment inputs from agricultural land, and improving water quality all directly improve welfare outcomes. River restoration also benefits the full freshwater fish community and the many species dependent on salmon as prey.