Scientists have analyzed more than 650 dam removal projects over 55 years in the United States totaling $1.52 billion inflation-adjusted dollars to develop a tool to better estimate the cost of future dam removals.

The analysis arrives at a time of increasing awareness of the disruptive impact dams can have on ecosystems, while thousands of dams are increasingly being removed because they are aging, unsafe, no longer serving their original purpose or in need of costly repairs and maintenance.

“We are transitioning from a period of building dams to one that includes removing dams,” said Jeffrey Duda, a research ecologist with U.S.

Geological Survey’s Western Fisheries Research Center. “But estimating costs of removing dams is a challenge, which makes it difficult to weigh when dam removal may be a viable alternative.”

Duda and scientists from the USGS, Oregon State University, the Bureau of Reclamation, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the University of Georgia, begin to unravel those challenges in a paper just published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

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