Day

March 1, 2021
01
Mar

North America’s largest and most ancient freshwater fish species, white sturgeon, hang out in some kinds of Estuary waterways more than others, scientists find.

 Researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey found that adult and sub-adult white sturgeon occupy deep open-water channels and shallow open-water shoals in equal measure, but don’t use shallow wetland channels. As a group, white sturgeon are characterized as amphidromous, meaning they regularly migrate between freshwater and the sea, in both directions, but not for the purpose of breeding. According to the study, which appears in the December 2020 issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, adults in the local...
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01
Mar

As agencies wrangle over how best to protect the Delta’s dwindling native fish species, researchers want to see more consideration to the needs of the estuary’s birds.

 “If we want to restore the ecology of the Delta, we can’t just be looking in the water,” says Kristen E. Dybala of Point Blue Conservation Science. In a paper published in San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, Dybala and two co-authors make the case that “birds and their habitat needs are often not addressed in science syntheses, conservation planning, and large-scale restoration initiatives in the Delta.” While some birds use the same sloughs and channels that support such high-profile...
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01
Mar

Filling significant recently identified gaps in monitoring spring-run Chinook is critical to protecting these threatened Central Valley salmon.

“There’s no way we can manage them for recovery if we don’t understand the biological processes that govern their dynamics through time and space,” says UC Santa Cruz/NOAA salmon expert Flora Cordoleani, lead author of a study reported in the December 2020 issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science. Cordoleani and colleagues identified the monitoring gaps while building a model of the spring-run Chinook life cycle. The model accounts for three self-sustaining populations of these at-risk fish, assessing survival...
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01
Mar

Human activity could undermine the success of efforts to reintroduce sea otters to San Francisco Bay.

 Although past studies have found that the Bay could support 1.5 times the entire current southern sea otter population, a new study from the Estuary & Ocean Science Center at San Francisco State University and published by PeerJ last November indicates that anthropogenic risks like contaminants, vessel traffic, and oil spills may constrain the otter’s ability to gain a foothold. The study, led by Jane Rudebusch, at the time graduate student at SFSU, looked at the types of human stressors...
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01
Mar

The increasing flow of microplastics entering San Francisco Bay from trash, fleece clothing, car tires, and myriad other sources is likely being trapped by a surprising filter: native eelgrass (Zostera marina).

Miniscule polymer pieces the size of a sesame seed or tinier, microplastics pose a growing pollution threat to marine environments worldwide. To understand how microplastics accumulate in nearshore, urbanized environments, researchers quantified the prevalence of microplastics in and around the Zostera marina meadows of Deerness Sound, in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. Mark Hartl and colleagues at Heriot-Watt University found that microplastic flakes, fibers, and fragments were twice as concentrated in the water above eelgrass meadows as in adjacent control...
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About Us

The San Francisco Bay-Delta is named in the federal Clean Water Act as one of 28 “estuaries of national significance." For over 20 years, the San Francisco Estuary Partnership has worked together with local communities and federal and state agencies to improve the health of California’s most urbanized estuary.

San Francisco Estuary Partnership 1515 Clay Street, Suite 1400 Oakland, CA 94612 (510) 622-2304

Association of Bay Area Governments