Day

January 22, 2020
22
Jan

A new system for treating agricultural drainage water in the Delta could also help rebuild subsided islands.

The approach—known as a Chemically Enhanced Treatment Wetland—combines chemical treatment with natural wetland processes; researchers tested it on Twitchell Island, which features corn and rice crops, as well as wetlands. They dosed agricultural ditch water with dissolved organic material (DOM), then treated it with a coagulant to precipitate the DOM, forming flocculant. The resulting water then passed though treatment wetlands, where the flocculant settled and blended with plant detritus in the sediment. The study, reported in the September 2019 San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, found that the combined system removed drinking water contaminants including dissolved organic carbon, disinfection byproduct precursors, and methylmercury. Another possible benefit is subsidence reversal: the researchers found that sediment and carbon accreted about four times...
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22
Jan

Manmade features in the Delta, including riprap-armored banks, water diversion pipes, pilings, and woody debris, may be sending juvenile native fishes into the jaws of finned invaders.

“We know from a decade of doing survival studies that migrating juvenile salmon are dropping out of the system pretty much everywhere in the Delta,” says UC Santa Cruz fisheries biologist Brendan Lehman. “Physical habitat features are potentially aggregating predators and prey in ways detrimental to salmon smolts and steelhead.” The scientists report in the December 2019 San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science that artificial light and submerged aquatic vegetation pose the most severe and widespread risks to native fishes. Plants like Brazilian waterweed form dense underwater mats across vast reaches of the Delta. These mats have nurtured a rise in predatory bass populations and force prey fish into exposed channel centers. The artificial lighting pervasive along docks and buildings...
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22
Jan

Levels of pyrethroid insecticides spike sharply in the North Delta’s Cache Slough during winter rainstorms, rendering the water so toxic that it decimates laboratory populations of a half-inch crustacean called Hyalella azteca.

However, according to a study reported in the September 2019 San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, Hyalella collected in the wild from Cache Slough are resistant to pyrethroids. Genetic analysis revealed that, collectively, Hyalella in the slough have four mutations for pyrethroid resistance. They also have a fifth mutation for resistance to organophosphates and likely carbamates, two additional major classes of pesticides that are applied extensively on agricultural and urban lands. “Hyalella are special,” explains co-author Helen Poynton, a molecular ecotoxicologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They reproduce quickly and have a short life span, which makes them highly adaptable.” Pesticide interests have seized on findings of pyrethroid resistance in Hyalella elsewhere in the wild to argue that...
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22
Jan

Researchers hope new computer models will help clarify the effects of entrainment on the population of endangered Delta smelt.

Entrainment at the South Delta pumps of the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project has been a concern for years, but disentangling its impact on the dwindling smelt population from those of other environmental and water management factors isn’t easy, and operational differences between the SWP and CVP facilities complicate analysis. Now, US Fish and Wildlife Service statistician Will Smith has developed computer models for entrainment effects on different smelt life stages, part of a larger Delta Smelt Life Cycle project being rolled out this month; his model of adult smelt entrainment was published in the December issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science (a separate model for postlarval smelt will appear in another journal). “Adults exhibit...
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22
Jan

While the acreage of wetland restoration projects is growing throughout the Delta, scientists are still working to understand how best to help these areas become fully functioning, complex habitat as quickly and successfully as possible.

A study published in September’s San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science shed light on some essential questions about what triggers seed generation in wetland habitat. “Wetland restoration practices can be enhanced by a solid understanding of basic plant life history and species ecology,” says co-author Taylor Sloey of Yale-NUS College in Singapore. The researchers looked at three questions: what seeds are present in the seed bank (the viable seeds that accumulate naturally in the soil), and how exposure to cold and flood affects their germination. The study was based on seed bank samples taken from wetlands on the Delta’s Liberty Island. Though the island was drained and farmed throughout most of the 20th century, it has been naturally recolonized by...
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22
Jan

An emergency barrier installed to protect the state’s water supply from saltwater intrusion during the recent record-setting drought had little effect on the ecosystem.

In spring 2015 the California Department of Water Resources dropped 150,000 tons of rock into False River in the Central Delta to halt encroaching tides that had little freshwater to hold them back. A few months later, it was clear the barrier worked, as salinity rose on one side and fell on the other. But what were the effects on local plants and animals? Through six overlapping yet distinct projects funded by the state Delta Science Program and NASA, and described in the September 2019 issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, researchers studied impacts on water quality and movement, zooplankton and phytoplankton, submerged aquatic vegetation, nutrients, and two species of clam. What they found, says Wim Kimmerer of...
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22
Jan

A recent test found more than 250 chemicals in the Delta’s Cache Slough, but “Dr Doom” says figuring out what they all are, and their concentrations, is beside the point in our efforts to understand stressors on native fish resilience.

“Knowing the effect on the fish is more informative than knowing which chemicals may be causing it,” says UC Davis’ Richard Connon (whose colleagues gave him his sinister title), referring to taking an ecological rather than regulatory perspective on fish health, and also to the less obvious sublethal effects of contaminants on fish behavior and reproduction. Connon is the lead author of a wide-ranging journal article in the December 2019 issue of SFEWS on how to better focus contaminants research in the Delta, and how to use more advanced tools to get at the synergistic and additive effects of multiple contaminants and stressors. Despite decades of monitoring, gigabytes of available data, and significant regulatory oversight, there remains “major uncertainty” on...
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