milldam

“To say channel morphology is dependent on historic milldams is incorrect,” says Martin Doyle, a river ecologist at Duke University.

In the spring the shad ran upriver to breed, but they couldn’t get past the milldam, and the pool was just swarming with them.

The scientists hope that identifying similar fossil tree-leaf sites will help the massive milldam restoration projects underway throughout the Northeast.

In the American States, very numerous watermills have been erected within a few years, and there is scarcely a stream in the settled portion of the country which has not several milldams upon it.

Rather than tear down the whole milldam and radically change the surrounding ecosystem, the researchers recommend river restorers only remove part of it.