Fish Rescue wins the new publishers of scientists at Earth Photo 2025

Restoring a lifestyle is at the heart of this photograph of Vivian Wan, which is part of a series that won the New Scientist Editors Award in the Earth Photo 2025 competition.

It shows the members of the Yurok community working with biologists and technicians to install rotary visible traps on the Trinity river, an important tributary of the Klamath river, in Willow Creek, California. The team uses fish traps to check animal health and study their migration models.

The Klamath basin is at the heart of Yurok’s life, with its rich waters offering a large quinnat salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), which contain a deep cultural and spiritual meaning for the community. But two centuries of colonization in the region have moved the Yurok and exhausted local resources by mining, forest farm and the construction of dams.

The climate change and the embezzled river water further pushed the salmon population to the edge. In 2002, new irrigation policies resulted in tens of thousands of quinnat salmon in the dying Klamath river. This momentum added to a fight of several decades to eliminate the dams of the river. Last year, the last dam on the river was dismantled.

For Wan, the objective was to explore how Aboriginal communities waged the battle for environmental justice. “I hope that viewers will leave with a deeper feeling of respect for Yurok’s strength, culture and struggle of the people to protect the Klamath basin,” she said.

Below, Hunter Mattz, a technician with Yurok peaches, studies an instructor showing enlarged salmon scales to obtain more indices on the mortality rates of fishing causes and natural causes. The data help to set the capture limits and the objectives of Frai, as well as the forecasting of the size of the cycle – the number of salmon which enters a river or a stream during a specific period, generally in an annual migration, which is a key indicator of the health and abundance of a salmon population.

Here, Mattz holds a thin label at the needle, which contributes to data to the research program on fish surveillance.

Mattz oversees the net harvest project. Its role was to sail in a trip over 70 kilometers from the mouth of the Pacific Ocean through the estuary, the midfielder of the Klamath basin and on the Blue Creek past in California. This work was crucial to collect data on the species of fish captured in the nets and lines by local residents. The registered data has contributed to ensuring subsidies for marine conservation efforts in the Klamath region.

All the winners of the earth photo competition were chosen by a panel comprising New scientistImage editor, Tim Boddy, and editorial video chief, David Stock. See the Earth Photo 2025 exhibition at the Royal Geographical Society in London until August 20, before it turned to the United Kingdom.