Little is known about sturgeon mortality sources outside management of the White Sturgeon recreational fishery. Mortality has been observed throughout the SFBDE with increased reporting over the past several years. Much of which is concentrated (but not exclusively) in the Carquinez Strait; a narrow strait linking known sturgeon feeding grounds and vital corridor which all SFBDE sturgeon must pass to access spawning grounds. Adult sturgeon populations in the SFBDE are difficult to estimate in part due to unknown rates of mortality, outside the recreational fishery. Specific, non-angling mortality data and sources are needed to develop management strategies that that lead to robust abundance estimates ensuring persistence of these public resources. This project aims to dentify and enumerate non-fisheries sturgeon mortality in the San Francisco Bay Delta Estuary (SFBDE), specifically the Carquinez Strait. We plan to determine population characteristics of observed mortality, age structure and migration patterns/habitat use of collected sturgeon. We will also engage the local community through outreach efforts to investigate the public perception of sturgeon mortality in SFBDE and increase participation in our study.
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.
