The Complexities of Monitoring Steelhead

Restoration



15
Feb

The Complexities of Monitoring Steelhead

For more than two decades, steelhead — listed as federally threatened in 1997 — have been monitored throughout the state. However, until recently that monitoring has been a haphazard affair. Each local jurisdiction has established a different system, using different methods with different degrees of intensity, according to a 2018 study examining monitoring within the Central Valley and its environs. In some areas, primarily the Sacramento River watershed, which drains the vast northern part of the valley, data has been collected more comprehensively. In other areas, such as the San Joaquin River system to the south, more gaps remain. And in general, monitoring tended to focus solely on migrating numbers and not more detailed life history demographics. “We need to...
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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 runs.     Jacob Katz, a California Trout biologist helping lead the project, explains that flushing river water over dry land and then back into the river effectively “reenergizes the food web,” allowing terrestrial carbon to flow into the water where...
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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 uploaded to the birding app eBird to supplement targeted observations. “It’s a lot more efficient, and lets everybody get involved,” says Pandolfino, lead author of the publication.   Overall avian species richness didn’t change significantly, but distributions did for many...
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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 often negative (meaning they go “upstream”) due to agricultural diversions and low freshwater inflow. Producing the pulse, which increased downstream flows from about negative-two cubic meters per second to a peak of 15 cubic meters per second in the Toe Drain...
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25
Oct

Reconnecting Mill Creek to its Watershed

For thousands of years, Coho salmon and steelhead returned to spawn in the cold waters of Mill Creek, part of the San Vicente watershed in the mountains above Santa Cruz. This ended when a mining and logging company dammed the creek in the early 20th century. Now, an ambitious conservation initiative has succeeded in removing the dam, bringing people together across local land trusts, Native American groups, regional agencies, and researchers from multiple universities. Valentin Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, spoke about the dam removal in his session of the Estuary Summit. Mill Creek Dam removal. Photo: Ian Bornarth, courtesy Sempervirens Fund. The San Vicente Redwoods is a large stretch of forest sitting above the coastal town...
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25
Oct

Habitat Tramplers Run Amuck – Cows Versus Creeks

The water of a small stream in western Sonoma County flows slowly under a highway bridge, coursing its way through private ranchland to the ocean about seven miles away. Ducks paddle among floating vegetation, and an egret tiptoes slowly through the shallows. At the edge of the waterway, called Americano Creek, a cluster of cattle huddles under the willows. They frequent this spot and have trampled the banks to mud. Hoofprints can be seen leading into the water, and cakes of manure fester beside the stream, which meets the Pacific Ocean a few miles south of Bodega Bay. “With the federal Clean Water Act, the state Clean Water Act, and all the other regulations, you would think this would be...
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25
Oct

Breaching Season for Hill & Dutch Sloughs, Pacheco Marsh

In the life of a tidal wetland restoration project, the first levee breach is a major milestone, a kind of graduation. After years of securing funding, navigating the permit process, completing baseline biological surveys, filing endless reports, grading and sculpting the marsh plain, setting out plants—after all that comes the day when the earthen barrier crumbles, the water makes its move, and another marsh can start to regenerate. This fall, that’s happening around the Bay Area as three significant projects—Dutch Slough and Lower Walnut Creek in Contra Costa County and Hill Slough in Solano County—renew long-severed connections between water and land. The three projects involve two state agencies, a county district, and a nonprofit. Dutch Slough is a California Department...
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25
Oct

Fog Cool for Oysters

On bright hot days, standing in the shade can feel a lot better than standing in the sun. The same goes for oysters living in the inter-tidal shallows of San Francisco Bay. When the tide is low, the oysters bake in the sun. During extreme heat events they can even die. But in this coastal region there is one factor that could help mediate the heat: fog. Indeed, over the past year, San Francisco State graduate student Alexandra (Allie) Margulies has been examining fog data and monitoring oyster density at five sites around the Bay, and recruitment at 10 sites, building on a long-term monitoring dataset collected by the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.  “Fog can help scatter...
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20
Aug

Loss of wetland habitat in the Delta has reduced net primary productivity by 94%, but achieving current restoration goals could restore 12% of this loss.

In a new study published in the September 2021 issue of Science of The Total Environment, researchers modeled net primary production of the Delta under historical and contemporary conditions in order to project the potential benefits of restoration. The loss of net primary productivity—the amount of energy available to pass up the food chain—associated with human modification of the Delta since the early 19th century has reduced the energy available to support biodiversity and ecosystem services. Using the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s Historical Ecology Project, which modeled the early Delta based on archival photos, maps, and texts from the early 1800s, researchers estimated the total area for five specific habitat types: open water, tidal marsh, non-tidal marsh, riparian forest/scrub, and seasonal floodplains. The...
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photograph of beautiful tree overhangin a river
19
Aug

Modern water management practices damp down natural river patterns and produce streamside forests that “live fast and die young.”

Such practices also hasten the destruction of an important and dwindling habitat. Melissa Rohde of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) and colleagues analyzed five years of high-resolution satellite and water resource data showing vegetation greenness along California rivers. Trees growing alongside the 30 percent of state rivers with natural flows decreased in greenness from the wet spring through the dry summer months, the scientists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrating they rely on groundwater to make it through the dry season. By contrast, woodlands along the 70% of streams receiving water from dams, wastewater treatment plants, and other human sources kept up the same vigorous levels of...
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17
Jun

Trail to a Fire-Safe Watershed

Long insulated from severe risk by mild temperatures and the fog that regularly swaddles the Santa Cruz Mountains, San Mateo County now finds itself — like the rest of the Bay Area — facing the climate-driven prospect of catastrophic wildfire. The threat is leading one of the county’s largest landowners to devote unprecedented resources to fire-prevention efforts in the Peninsula Watershed — efforts that will also restore parts of the landscape to an approximation of their historical condition. “In the last few years, the weather has changed in regards to the relative humidity,” says Fire Safe San Mateo County’s Denise Enea. “Normally you would go up to [the redwood-forested ridgeline at the edge of the watershed] and it would be...
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17
Jun

Thinking Like Beaver to Aid Yellow Creek

Last fall, the Maidu Summit Consortium, a nonprofit composed of nine Mountain Maidu tribal member groups, installed 73 BDAs—beaver dam analogs—in Yellow Creek, a tributary to the North Fork Feather River and a state-listed heritage trout stream. Swift Water Design and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designed the structures, and Mountain Maidu tribal youth worked with Swift Water to build them. The idea behind the structures, which mimic beaver dams, is to slow erosion, catch sediment, and build up the river bottom to reverse the incised channel—without importing soil and other materials or emitting carbon from heavy, diesel-powered equipment. “Before this project, PG&E had done some pond and plug projects to restore the meadow,” says Trina Cunningham, executive director of...
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17
Jun

Moonrise over Giant Marsh: New Monitoring Data from Two-Year-Old Supershore Project

Kathy Boyer is used to getting up in the dark so she can slide across the mudflats into the Bay at first light. But this past May, she got a once-in-a-decade treat. As the professor from SF State’s Estuary & Ocean Science Center aimed her boogie board at some two-year-old eelgrass beds growing off the Richmond shoreline, the Super Flower Blood Moon rose in the blue field of the western sky. “It’s hard to get up at 4 a.m. but if I wasn’t doing this work, I would have missed the eclipse,” said Devon Wallace, a student of Boyer’s and a recent SF State graduate, who was enjoying the chance to get in some field experience after a year grounded...
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17
Jun

Three Ways to Feed the Marsh

Seal Beach is drowning. As a result of sea-level rise, subsidence, and limited sediment supply, much of the 920-acre National Wildlife Refuge in Orange County can no longer keep its head above water. Pacific cordgrass, normally exposed at low tides, is being completely inundated. Rare nesting habitat for the endangered light-footed clapper rail is disappearing at high tides. It’s a marsh manager’s worst nightmare, and a potential harbinger of things to come later this century for tidal wetlands up and down the state, including those in San Francisco Bay. The problem at Seal Beach has been building for decades, and by 2016 managers knew they had to act—fast. But options for saving the existing marsh were limited. So on an...
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17
Jun

Little Mud, Lotta Work

For decades, patches of Creekside Marsh at Hal Brown Park in Corte Madera lay barren. “There wasn’t a single thing growing,” says Sandy Guldman, 80, a recently retired environmental consultant who is also president of the nonprofit group Friends of Corte Madera Creek Watershed. “The soil was all old fill.” Many of the bare patches are now covered with planted and volunteer pickleweed, saltgrass, marsh baccharis, and more. The remainder is at least partially vegetated, thanks to a recently completed restoration project that was — largely singlehandedly — managed and maintained by Guldman. “[This is an example] of the difference that one person can make,” says Darcie Luce of the San Francisco Estuary Partnership, describing Guldman’s efforts, which included writing...
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23
Mar

Opinion: Bayshore Breathing Space for All

I live just a couple miles from Berkeley Aquatic Park, but it took a shelter-in-place order to get me to go back there after a 20-year hiatus. I had visited the park a couple years after I moved to the Bay Area and found it deserted and a bit gloomy. This time, it was vibrant and full of life, from the bright yellow gumplants blooming along the shoreline to the great blue heron feeding in the shallows and shiny-black cormorants diving deep underwater, then returning to the surface to dry their wings in the sun. And the people! There were kids playing on the playground, cyclists zipping along the Bay Trail, and frisbee golfers politely asking me to move out...
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23
Mar

York Creek Uncorked

York Creek free flowing at last. Video: Daniel McGlynn. Over the summer, while most of the Bay Area was figuring out how to navigate the COVID-induced shelter-in-place orders, 1,933 heavy truckloads laden with 22,000 yards of material wound their way away from Napa County’s York Creek, and were dumped into two nearby landfills. Extracting these spoils was the last step in the York Creek Dam removal project, the culmination of decades of effort by the city of St. Helena to take down a small earthen dam with a big ecological impact. The dam blocked fish from spawning in the creek’s 4.4-square-mile-watershed. Though the project seemed straightforward, no one involved in its conception could have imagined the convoluted path to its...
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23
Mar

Dutch Slough Laboratory

For a hawk’s-eye view of one of the Estuary’s most ambitious restoration efforts, visit the Dutch Slough Tidal Marsh Habitat Restoration Project’s YouTube channel. Drone-shot footage shows what the Department of Water Resources has been doing on 1,200 acres of former wetland, converted to pasture and subsided up to 15 feet, in the West Delta between Big Break and Jersey Island. After moving millions of cubic yards of soil to elevate the marsh plain, a team of engineers, scientists, and contractors led by project managers Katherine Bandy of DWR and Mark Lindley of Environmental Science Associates has carved channels and created a basin-and-range landscape on the Emerson and Gilbert parcels, the western two-thirds of the project site. “We spent a...
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23
Mar

Fixing a Dysfunctional Marsh on Sonoma Creek

Restoration projects, like species, evolve. The Sonoma Creek Enhancement Project, originally about mosquito control, has shown itself to be a boon to special-status tidal marsh wildlife as well. More than a decade of adaptive management actions made that happen.  The existing marsh, formed rapidly beginning in the 1960s by deposited sediment, lacked the dendritic channels of a mature marsh. High tides brought in water that pooled in a central basin and didn’t drain out, providing breeding habitat for mosquitos. The disadvantages of chemical treatment prompted land managers to look for alternatives.  So in the 2000s, the Marin-Sonoma Mosquito and Vector Control District teamed up with the US Fish & Wildlife Service (the land manager), Audubon California, and environmental scientists Daniel...
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23
Mar

Nourishing Encinal Beach

Before the East Bay Regional Park District completed the Encinal Dune Restoration and Shoreline Stabilization Project in December 2020, this tucked-away beach frequented by locals and harbor seal enthusiasts needed some love. The ice plant that dominated the low-flung dune offered little sustenance to fauna; the beach required more sand; the washed-up creosote-treated timber was strewn about like a giant game of pick-up sticks; and the large, rusty barge that buttressed a short section of the San Francisco Bay Trail had become dangerous. The nearly two-acre project site in the shape of an arrowhead includes Encinal Beach, the dune behind it, and a short section of the Bay Trail. Encinal Beach and its adjacent dune formed after the U.S. Navy...
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