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.
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.
The Wetland Regional Monitoring Program (WRMP) Fish and Fish Habitat Monitoring project is a collaborative effort to track biological responses to tidal wetland restoration in the San Francisco Estuary. Monthly sampling is conducted across a network of benchmark, reference, and project restoration sites in the South Bay and North Bay, with the goal of evaluating how wetland restoration influences fish assemblages, habitat use, and ecological condition.
The study uses primarily otter trawls to monitor fish and macroinvertebrate communities. Standardized field methods align with those used in long-term monitoring programs to ensure comparability and data integration across regions. Environmental data, including water temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen, are collected in tandem with biological sampling to assess habitat quality and seasonal dynamics.
The program addresses WRMP Guiding Question #4: How do policies, programs, and projects to protect and restore tidal marshes affect the distribution, abundance, and health of fish and wildlife? The data support adaptive management, regulatory compliance, and science-based restoration planning by identifying key habitats, tracking restoration performance, and detecting regional patterns in species composition and abundance over time.
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 macrophytes (aquatic weeds) cover increased dramatically in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta during the 2013-2015 drought and the 2021-2023 drought. This trend toward increasing dominance of these invasive aquatic weeds has profound implications for delta/marsh habitat, as aquatic weeds are known to significantly alter the physical environment by slowing water velocities, increasing water clarity, providing habitat for invasive fishes, and reducing open water habitat. These habitat effects are thought to negatively impact the endangered Delta Smelt and other pelagic species that rely on turbid, open water habitat.
Different state and federal agencies have funded the acquisition of airborne spectroscopy data over the legal Delta since 2004. However, this long dataset has a critical 5-year gap in data acquisition during one of the most severe droughts that California has seen. This project is focused on inventorying any high spatial resolution satellite imagery that may have been taken over the legal delta, processing and analyzing it and mapping it to fill this 5-year gap in the only existing large-scale monitoring and mapping effort focused on aquatic macrophytes in the Delta.
The main objective of the study is map the satellite "gap-fill" imagery using the same methods used for the spectroscopy airborne data and creating and publishing a time series of those maps that could then potentially be used as a 21-year continuous dataset of floating and submerged aquatic macrophytes distribution in the Delta. Further, these maps will be used to study the effect of nutrients and management activities on the distribution of these invasive species.
