Bringing Coho salmon back to the Mendocino Coast

About 30,000 adult coho salmon returned to the rivers of the Mendocino Coast in the 2024 to 2025 spawning season. NOAA Fisheries estimated the average for the previous decade was around 3,000.

The season before that brought 15,000, so this was the second largest year in a row. NOAA Fisheries published those figures on March 26, 2026.

What the count measured

Monitoring teams survey roughly 500 miles of habitat on the Mendocino Coast. The survey teams are led by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife,.

Crews visit randomly selected stream sections every 2 weeks through the spawning season. They count adult fish and redds, the gravel nests a female salmon digs, and at life cycle monitoring stations they track juveniles heading downstream and adults heading up stream.

Who put the wood back in the water

Trout Unlimited has run its North Coast Coho Project on these streams since 1999. The program installs large wood structures to give fish cover, removes barriers to fish passage and works to keep sediment out of the streams.

The Office of Habitat Conservation at NOAA currently funds Trout Unlimited to remove barriers in the Navarro, Big, Garcia and Noyo River watersheds. The partner list on the project’s own site runs to timber and gravel companies, wine industry leaders and private landowners.

Neefus Gulch, and the 70 year gap

In January 2026 Trout Unlimited biologists surveyed Neefus Gulch and counted 10 coho redds and 2 steelhead redds. Salmon had not been able to spawn in that stretch for more than 70 years.

Eight of those 10 redds were above where barriers used to stop fish, in 1,600 feet of stream channel that had barriors removed. This provides a strong  argument for barrier removal.

What Sarah Gallagher and Anna Halligan discovered

Sarah Gallagher, a senior environmental scientist with the state agency, stated “Finding Salmon in places where they have not previously been was really exciting!”.

Those places included Usal Creek, which produced the first coho seen there since 2014, and the Gualala River, where the first fish in about 20 years appeared. Anna Halligan directs the Trout Unlimited program.

Pudding Creek showed 8 percent marine survival in the 2024 to 2025 season, against 2 percent or lower in an ordinary year. That points to conditions in the ocean may be as much a factor as restoring the streams.

Central California Coast coho still have a long way to go. Two seasons measured against a decade is a start, but we are not yet at the finish line and these fish are still on the endangered species list so much work still nedds to be done.

Where to follow the Mendocino coho story

The Wildlife and Biodiversity guide collects the rest of this subject. Mendocino Land Trust works the same coast on land access and habitat.

Tara Lohan’s Undammed follows dam removal on the Klamath River and elsewhere. The Barbless Podcast Channel gave Anna Halligan an hour in December 2019 to explain the restoration work, five years before the fish came back in these numbers.