One of the world's largest dam removal efforts restored 420 miles of salmon and steelhead trout habitat in the Klamath River watershed of Northern California and Southern Oregon. Four dams were removed from the Klamath River between 2023 and 2024, restoring the river that had been dammed for over 100 years.
The image comparison above shows Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) true-color corrected reflectance images from the Operational Land Imager (OLI) instrument aboard the Landsat 8 and 9 platforms. The left "A" side is an image from August 1, 2023, where the reservoirs behind two of the dams are visible in the imagery, which include the Iron Gate Dam/Reservoir and the Copco No. 1 Dam/Copco Lake. The right "B" side shows the restored river without the presence of the dams and reservoirs.
The Klamath River now runs directly from the headwaters at Klamath Falls/Lake Ewauna to the Pacific Ocean.
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