18/08/2026
Project Deveron sonar records 6,147 returning adult salmon in 2025 🐟
Project Deveron, a partnership between the Deveron, Bogie & Isla Rivers Charitable Trust and the Atlantic Salmon Trust, has completed its third annual sonar count on the River Deveron, recording 6,147 returning adult Atlantic salmon in 2025.
Following 5,705 fish in 2023 and 8,796 in 2024, this year's count adds another important piece to the long-term picture. Individual years will always vary, but that's exactly why consistent monitoring matters.
The rod catch rate across these years has also fluctuated due to weather conditions and fishing effort, from 19% in 2024 to 6% in 2025. Again, this highlights the importance of looking beyond fishery records to gain a true understanding of how many adult salmon are returning.
The Deveron sits within the Atlantic Salmon Trust's Core Rivers programme, alongside Project Laxford in northwest Sutherland. Together, these rivers are helping build one of the country's most accurate long-term datasets on wild Atlantic salmon, providing the evidence needed to understand how populations are changing and whether habitat restoration is delivering measurable improvements over time.
Combined with sonar imaging, both rivers employ parr PIT tagging programmes to understand migration behaviour, juvenile habitat use and marine survival rates. They also monitor water temperatures, invertebrate populations and changes to wider biodiversity.
Despite exceptionally low river levels in 2025, the Deveron's sonar system successfully captured the data needed to complete the count, which will also contribute to the Scottish Government's wider assessment of the health of wild salmon populations across the country.
AI INTEGRATION 🧠
This year we also continued integrating AI-assisted analysis into our counting workflow. The technology is already reducing the time required to process thousands of hours of sonar footage, making long-term monitoring more efficient and scalable. We're also improving AI models to better distinguish salmon from trout and developing new tools to identify smolt shoals and eels.
In collaboration with the Scottish Fisheries Coordination Centre and Fisheries Management Scotland, we developed the ARIS SONAR Fish Monitoring System, supported by the Marine Fund Scotland. The project is an extension to the Scottish Salmon Counter Network, part of a package of measures to support salmon conservation using funding announced by the Cabinet Secretary in October 2021.
Every year of monitoring strengthens our understanding of wild salmon populations, helping us measure long-term trends and critically the impact of habitat restoration over time.
