Brandywine Shad 2020
Date
2024
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Abstract
Formed in 2017, Brandywine Shad 2020 is a cross-section of educational organizations, non-profits, governmental agencies, and private citizens whose shared goal is to restore the region’s most historic fish, the American Shad, to the Brandywine River by the year 2020 by returning the river to its free-flowing, pre-colonial state.
The future of the once-abundant shad – often described as “the fish that fed the nation’s founders” – is in peril along the Brandywine primarily due to 11 old, industrial dams along the river’s 12-mile course in Delaware, but also due to lack of habitat, increasing water temperatures, and over-fishing of the remaining members of the species by commercial operations in the Atlantic Ocean.