Day

December 15, 2021
15
Dec

Scientists in the Central Valley are honing a novel way of giving young salmon the nourishing benefits of wintertime floodwaters without undertaking costly floodplain restoration work.

The method, being practiced along the Sacramento River, mimics the flood patterns of natural Sacramento Valley wetlands by diverting water onto floodplain farm fields, retaining it there for three weeks, and finally flushing the water—now rich with zooplankton and invertebrate protein—back into the river. Onsite studies have shown that salmon smolts grow faster when provided with this supplemental nutrition source, giving the method promise as a tool for boosting survival rates of outmigrating juveniles and, ultimately, helping sustain imperiled Chinook...
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15
Dec

Hot off the press, Sacramento County Breeding Birds: A Tale of Two Atlases and Three Decades of Change raises red flags for some of the county’s wetland species.

Breeding bird atlases use field observations to record possible, probable, or confirmed nesting in uniform-sized blocks within a county or state. Biologist/artist Tim Manolis led a Sacramento County atlas project in 1988-93, but the results were never published. When Edward Pandolfino of Western Field Ornithologists heard about it he suggested repeating the effort and packaging the two data sets together. The second Sacramento atlas, covering 2016-20, followed the lead of recent state atlases in the eastern US in using data...
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15
Dec

A new partnership is pushing to tally the “blue carbon” in marine and coastal ecosystems.

Seagrass meadows, kelp forests, and even the seabed can all lock away carbon—but exactly how much is still up in the air for these and other ocean ecosystems. The Seascape Carbon Initiative, a partnership formed in late 2021 between four environmental problem-solving organizations and one independent carbon verifier, is pushing the science forward so protecting and restoring these valuable ecosystems can join mangrove forests and terrestrial forests as certifiable nature-based carbon capture projects.   “Conceptually, the science is pretty good,”...
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15
Dec

A large pulse of water sent through the Yolo Bypass in summer 2016 boosted phytoplankton biomass and food web conditions in Cache Slough and the lower Sacramento River, a new report confirms.

 “Our goal was to improve estuarine habitat by increasing net flows through the Cache Slough Complex to enhance downstream transport of lower trophic-level resources, an important driver for fish such as the endangered Delta Smelt,” write the authors—including esteemed (and recently retired) California Department of Water Resources lead scientist Ted Sommer—in the latest issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science. The pulse occurred over three weeks in July, a time when flows in the region above Cache Slough are...
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15
Dec

New Way to Sleuth Out Fish IDs in the Field

The CRISPR technique used to edit DNA has been formulated into a tool that can distinguish between similar-looking California fish species for conservation research. Called SHERLOCK (Specific High-sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter unLOCKing), the tool can tell the difference between species with speed and accuracy. Better yet, it is both inexpensive and can be run while researchers are in the field. “It puts the power in the hands of the field biologist to make the most informed decision versus waiting sometimes days...
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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