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.
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.
