10/09/2026
We’re not monitoring decline - we’re measuring recovery. 🐟 🌱
This year's parr tagging has completed on Project Laxford, as the team moves across the country to Project Deveron. Each year on these Core Rivers we aim to tag up to 2,000 wild salmon parr with tiny Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) tags.
Why?
Across our catchment partnerships, habitat restoration is happening at an increasingly ambitious scale - restoring riverside woodland, removing barriers to migration, re-wiggling straightened channels, reconnecting floodplains, and creating healthier, more resilient river systems. But how do we know if it’s working? That’s where long-term monitoring comes in.
Our PIT tagging work not only allows us to follow individual wild salmon from freshwater to sea and back again, but also enables us to build a population-level view of freshwater survival, habitat use, migration behaviour, marine survival rates, and how fish respond to changes within their environment.
Crucially, this science doesn’t sit in isolation. It is directly linked to the habitat restoration on the ground. By monitoring salmon populations alongside the work being done to restore their rivers, we can begin to understand which interventions are delivering results, where we need to adapt, and how we can make future restoration more effective.
If we are serious about restoring wild Atlantic salmon, we need to do more than take action. We need to know that our actions are working.
