Bridging Science and Community: Engaging Youth in Delta Conservation through the Spinning Salmon Program is designed to enhance scientific understanding and engagement among underrepresented youth in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Leveraging the Youth-Focused Community and Citizen Science (YCCS) framework, the program connects youth to local ecosystems while addressing ecological challenges such as the Thiamine Deficiency Complex affecting Central Valley Chinook Salmon. The objectives focus on enhancing students' understanding of scientific concepts and processes, fostering science identity, self-efficacy, and environmental science agency, and cultivating a sense of environmental stewardship. Additionally, the program emphasizes the active involvement of community members in co-creating and refining educational strategies, ensuring these approaches are tailored to the diverse cultural and educational needs of the Delta community. This aligns with Science Action C under Management Need 4 in the 2022-2026 Science Action Agenda (SAA), contributing to a broader understanding of community-engaged research methodologies.
Assessing the success of tidal marsh restoration is a top priority for coastal managers across the US. Estuarine habitat restoration has been prioritized due to the importance of the ecosystem functions (Callaway et al. 2012) and services (Costanza et al. 2014) they provide and the threats to them by climate driven sea-level rise (hereafter SLR; Craft et al. 2009, Donnelly & Bertness 2001, Schile et al. 2014) and other stressors (Mariotti & Fagharazzi 2013). Given the importance of management for estuarine habitats to survive SLR (Kirwan & Megonigal 2013) and the importance of public responses to approve and fund restoration projects, it is critical to understand how to broadly assess the success of restoration from the perspectives of both ecological performance and public perceptions. However, the San Francisco Estuary (SF Estuary), stretching from the Lower San Francisco Bay through Suisun Marsh to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, encapsulates diverse social and environmental dynamics (Moyle et al. 2014) and varying perceptions by sociodemographic group (Rudnick et al 2022). Our project is focused on the Suisun Marsh and Delta and seeks to understand these complexities by integrating social, environmental, and management perspectives.
Chinook Salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) populations in California are in decline due to the combined effects of habitat degradation, water diversions, and shifting climate regimes. This project uses archival tissues (otoliths, vertebrae) from modern and ancient spring-run Chinook Salmon to understand how shifts in migration timing and habitat use allowed salmon to cope with highly variable environmental conditions. We will learn how salmon responded to the recent drought and flood periods (2012-2020 CE), the California Gold Rush Period (~1835-1870 CE), the Little Ice Age (~1560-1780 CE), and the Megadrought Period (~1200-1410 CE). This effort will provide the insights needed for developing climate-adapted conservation actions to support salmon into the future.
