The federal hatcheries mark and tag fish that are released into the river or bay using a combination of coded wire tags (CWT) and adipose fin clipping. The number of fish tagged and the identifiers are reported to the RMPC which is part of the RMIS. The Regional Mark Processing Center (RMPC) provides essential services to international, state, federal, and tribal fisheries organizations involved in marking anadromous salmonids throughout the Pacific region. These services include regional coordination of some tagging and fin marking programs, maintenance of databases for Coded Wire Tag Releases, Recoveries, and Locations, as well as the dissemination of reports of these data in electronic or printed form when requested. These databases are known collectively as the Regional Mark Information System (RMIS).
The San Joaquin County & Delta Water Quality Coalition was established to help irrigated agriculture meet the requirements of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board's (RWQCB) Irrigated Lands Regulatory Program (ILRP) in San Joaquin County, Calaveras County and Contra Costa County. The Coalitions is operated and governed by the San Joaquin County Resource Conservation District. Under the ILRP that was originally adopted in July of 2003, farmers and ranchers that irrigate their land and have runoff from that irrigation or rainfall must belong to a coalition or apply for an individual discharge permit from the Regional Board directly.
The Environmental Monitoring Program (EMP) began in 1975 to conduct baseline and compliance monitoring of water quality, phytoplankton, zooplankton, and benthic invertebrates in the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary. This monitoring program was designed to track the impact of water diversions to the State Water Project (SWP) and Central Valley Project (CVP) on the Bay-Delta. In the decades since, EMP scientists have monitored these constituents at fixed and floating stations throughout the estuary and ensured compliance with state and federal mandates such as Water Right Decision 1641 (D-1641). In the years and decades since its inception, EMP has become one of the cornerstones for scientists' and managers' understanding of the pace and pattern of change in this critical ecosystem. By sampling water quality and biological communities concurrently, EMP has created a dataset that is uniquely useful in better understanding causal connections between physical, biological, and biogeochemical processes.
The Environmental Monitoring Program (EMP) has conducted the Zooplankton Study since 1972 to better assess trends in the lower trophic food web in the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary. The study also detects and monitors zooplankton recently introduced to the estuary and determines their effects on native species. Under the auspices of the Interagency Ecological Program for the San Francisco Estuary and mandated by Water Right Decision D-1641, the EMP Zooplankton Study is part of the Environmental Monitoring Program and is conducted by the California Department of Fish and Game (CDFW), California Department of Water Resources (DWR), and the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR).
The Delta Juvenile Fish Monitoring Program (DJFMP) has monitored natural-origin and hatchery-origin juvenile Chinook Salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) and other fish species within the San Francisco Estuary (SFE) since 1976 using a combination of midwater trawls and beach seines. Since 2000, three trawl sites and at least 58 beach seine sites have been sampled weekly or biweekly within the SFE and lower Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. The main objectives of the DJFMP are: 1. Document the long-term abundance and distribution of juvenile Chinook Salmon in the Delta. 2. Comprehensively monitor throughout the year to document the presence of all races of juvenile Chinook Salmon. 3. Intensively monitor juvenile Chinook salmon during the fall and winter months for use in managing water project operations (Delta Cross Channel gates and water export levels) on a real-time basis. 4. Document the abundance and distribution of Steelhead. 5. Document the abundance and distribution of non-salmonid species.
Tradeoffs among objectives in natural resource management can be exacerbated in altered ecosystems and when there is uncertainty in predicted management outcomes. Multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) and value of information (VOI) are underutilized decision tools that can assist fisheries managers in handling tradeoffs and evaluating the importance of uncertainty. We demonstrate the use of these tools using a case study in the Sacramento River, California, U.S.A., where two imperiled species with different temperature requirements, winter-run Chinook Salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) and Green Sturgeon (Acipenser medirostris), spawn and rear in the artificially cold Shasta Dam tailwater. A temperature-control device installed on Shasta Dam maintains cool water for Chinook Salmon; however, uncertainties exist related to the effects of temperatures on the spawning and rearing of both species. We consider four alternative hypotheses in models of early life-stage dynamics to evaluate the effects of alternative temperature-management strategies on Chinook Salmon and Green Sturgeon management objectives. We used VOI to quantify the increase in management performance that can be expected by resolving hypothesis-based uncertainties as a function of the weight assigned to species-specific objectives. We found the decision was hindered by uncertainty; the best performing alternative depends on which hypothesis is true, with warmer or cooler alternative management strategies recommended when weights favor Green Sturgeon or Chinook Salmon objectives, respectively. The value of reducing uncertainty was highest when Green Sturgeon was slightly favored, highlighting the interaction between scientific uncertainty and decision makers' values. Our demonstration features MCDA and VOI as transparent, deliberative tools that can assist fisheries managers in confronting value conflicts, prioritizing resolution of uncertainty, and optimally managing aquatic ecosystems.
The Delta is a critical area for sustainable water management, facing significant challenges due to climate change. One of these challenges is in understanding and mitigating maladaptation – climate-aligned actions that may increase vulnerabilities or reduce adaptive capacity. Given the uncertainties surrounding climate change, management actions that seek to achieve high-level goals of climate change adaptation while accounting for maladaptation must be robust, ensuring adequate, multicriteria performance across all climate futures. This work responds to two gaps: (1) the absence of tools for assessing the performance of management actions in the Delta under hydroclimatic uncertainty and (2) a lack of research that explores how stakeholders can account for maladaptation in water governance. Among Delta stakeholders and researchers alike, the discourse and science surrounding ecological flow guidelines, the social complexities of water governance, and the use of integrated climate models to inform robust and adaptive decisions is active and rapidly advancing. This positions the Delta not only as an ideal case study for the academic study of maladaptation, but also as one that is of immediate relevance to stakeholders, responding to several Delta Management Needs (Science Actions 3B, 6E, and 1A) as they concern open science and the exploration of the Delta as a socioecological system and the facilitation of decision-making under climate change and its associated uncertainties.
Decisions over how water is allocated consider a limited range of climate and operational scenarios, privilege Western knowledge, and are generally inaccessible to the public, including communities most affected by water decision-making. We will follow a participatory and iterative co-production process to understand and integrate the diverse values and uses of Delta waterways and floodplains in an accessible knowledge platform designed to promote public engagement, learning, and equitable stewardship.
The overarching goal of the proposed project is to build and integrate knowledge of the social-ecological uses of Delta waterways and floodplains to inform equitable solutions to Delta management challenges. Specific objectives are to (1) understand the diverse public beneficial uses Delta waterways and floodplains; (2) incorporate functional flows and riparian floodplain processes in Delta water operations models; (3) share diverse community knowledge through a web-based platform; and (4) critically evaluate our collaborative research approach to assess its efficacy in building trust, enhancing public engagement, and guiding equitable stewardship actions.
As source areas of snowmelt, Sierra Nevada headwater streams are the origin of water that feeds the Delta, but their response to climate change is not well understood. By utilizing long-term data and modeling future responses, we build a tool to reduce scientific uncertainty about Delta water supply and water quality in a changing climate. By incorporating indigenous cultural values, we create a fully integrated shared vison of the future of the Delta in a changing climate, including mapping which areas are most vulnerable and in need of conservation or restoration.
The project objectives are: 1. Utilize and expand on existing water quality and biological monitoring networks in Sierra Nevada headwaters streams to construct models of ecosystem dynamics with respect to climate induced stress impacts on benthic communities, water quality, and nutrients. 2. Construct an oral-history-derived framework of indigenous cultural values of Delta headwaters systems and how science and indigenous values can interact to improve management outcomes. 3. Utilize and expand on existing platforms for dissemination of forecasting tools and model outputs to water managers as well as both scientific and non-scientific communities in the Delta headwaters.
SacPAS serves to provide information integration services to the Central Valley Project Improvement Act and practitioners working on matters related to ESA-listed fishes. The web-based services relate fish passage to environmental conditions and provide resources for evaluating the effects of river management and environmental conditions on salmon passage and survival.
The work performed as part of this agreement includes developing, maintaining, and making accessible query tools and decision support tools to access: historical, real-time and forecasted data; data summaries and visualizations; and hindcasts, forecasts, and scenario-derived predictions from statistical and mechanistic models. More specifically, the objectives are to:
1) Maintain and extend a secondary data repository of historical, real-time, and forecasted fish, environmental, and operational data from the Sacramento River and other river systems in the Central Valley, integrated from primary, public databases.
2) Maintain and improve the data query and visualization tools and services provided through the SacPAS website (https://www.cbr.washington.edu/sacramento/) for historical, real-time, and forecasted environmental and fish data.
3) Conduct research and provide access to modeling tools for fish survival and migration, through the SacPAS website, in support of Reclamation-funded and ESA-mandated activities, especially in efforts to predict, track, and evaluate the efficacy of proposed or actual actions.
Managing California’s water supply is complex, requiring careful coordination to ensure sustainability, water quality, and the protection of public and environmental health. In the Sacramento–San Joaquin Bay-Delta, hundreds of datasets from studies and monitoring programs are used to assess conditions and inform key operational decisions. However, these datasets are often fragmented across agencies and stored in inconsistent formats, making it time-consuming for analysts and researchers to locate and use the data effectively.
This project aims to enhance the Bay-Delta Live (BDL) data management platform (www.baydeltalive.com) by integrating datasets from the California Department of Water Resources’ Water Data Library (WDL). The primary focus is on water quality and environmental monitoring data. By streamlining access to these resources, the project will improve the discovery, retrieval, and analysis of water-related datasets across multiple sources.
Key outcomes include:
This work will support more informed decision-making and help ensure the long-term safety, reliability, and ecological integrity of California’s water resources.
Invasive aquatic vegetation (IAV) is a threat to aquatic ecosystems worldwide, leading to a major loss of biodiversity and extensive damages and costs to human uses of those ecosystems. The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta (the “Delta”) is the hub of California’s water system, supporting over 35 million water users and a $54 billion agricultural industry. The Delta reform act mandates management decisions meet both water supply needs while maintaining the ecological function of the system. The Delta is a global biodiversity hotspot, and the focal point of $750-$950 million in restoration. It has also been called one of the most invaded estuaries in the world. Over the past 15 years, submerged and floating IAV have more than doubled in extent, threatening water supply and ecosystem health of the Delta. There is mounting evidence that herbicide treatments are not effective, and that water management actions, and wetland restoration may be having huge impacts on IAV. This presents both a risk to increasing IAV, but also an opportunity to prevent and even effectively combat IAV through considered water management actions and better restoration planning, meeting the state’s co-equal goals of water security and Delta ecosystem conservation.
This project will meet the needs of multiple state agencies by advancing operational Earth observation-based monitoring program for community-level submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) and genus-level floating aquatic vegetation (FAV) and modeling tools to enable the Delta management community to assess the effect of previous management actions on IAV and forecast the effects of future actions to inform multi-agency decision making. Specifically, this work will 1) Operationalize IAV class mapping using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, 2) Finalize and validate species distribution Models (SDM) for SAV community and FAV at genus-level to assess the impacts of previous water actions on IAV and predict IAV distribution in future scenarios, 3) Co-design IAV-based performance metrics to inform future actions.
The proposed project fills a critical data gap in monitoring for state and federal agencies and stakeholders by implementing the first sustainable mapping effort for IAV. Monthly and seasonal estimates of SAV and FAV coverage will enable the Delta Stewardship Council to improve their performance metrics for evaluation of the Delta Plan and will help the Interagency Ecological Program assess whether management is meeting the co-equal goals for the Delta. Species distribution models will enable Department of Water Resources to evaluate how previous restoration flow actions have affected the spread and persistence of IAV and incorporate what they learn into future Structured Decision Making to better account for negative consequences of IAV when setting future restoration targets and implementing actions.
High-frequency monitoring for hydrodynamic (stage, velocity, flow), water quality (including chlorophyll, nutrients), sediment, and phytoplankton at key locations in the Delta. The physical properties monitored by the fixed-station network are the primary drivers of the habitat conditions and biological responses that management actions are designed for. Combined, these data establish the spatially and temporally rich data set needed for real-time operation of water export facilities, understanding Delta ecosystem responses to hydrological conditions, and evaluating restoration actions.
