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 Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is a highly altered and impaired ecosystem that is critical to the freshwater infrastructure of the State of California. Salt intrusion from San Francisco Bay into the Delta, however, threatens freshwater delivery to the southern portions of the state and so management and restoration actions within the Bay-Delta must continuously balance both ecosystem and operational needs. While previous numerical modeling studies have sought to examine changes in the estuarine physics of the system, these tools are costly to develop and run. Thus there is a need to develop alternate methods for monitoring the movement of water through the Bay-Delta, as proposed here. The proposed research project approaches tracking the mixing between the Bay and Delta waters through the novel use of daily satellite color imagery. These findings will be linked to in situ measurements throughout the system and used to inform relevant agencies of flow characteristics within the waterways. This work is motivated by a need for high frequency monitoring of finescale features within the dynamic Bay-Delta ecosystem and to take advantage of new advanced remote sensing technology to inform on long-term trends within the Delta.
The primary objectives of this research are to: 1. Enhance monitoring programs to inform management in the presence of climate change and additional stressors, 2. Inform on ecosystem resilience to interannual hydrologic variations and climate change impacts, and 3. Evaluate how climate change and flow regime changes will impact water quality in the Delta.
