Day

August 19, 2021
Smelt cam photo
19
Aug

Monitoring Delta smelt with an underwater camera could be safer and more effective than with a traditional trawl.

Standard smelt surveys rely on the use of boat-driven nets, which trap fish by funneling them from the wide mouth of the net to the closed end (known as the cod end). To check their catch, researchers must pull the net and its contents from the water. But this additional handling can harm and even kill the same fish that wildlife agencies are trying to save with the support of robust, long-running monitoring efforts. There may be a better way: According to a new study in the June 2021 issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, the use of an underwater camera—the “SmeltCam,” developed about a decade ago by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) research fish biologist Frederick Feyrer—could provide...
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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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19
Aug

Leading with Science: DWR’s Ted Sommer To Retire

A few months before his retirement in October 2021, Ariel Rubissow Okamoto asked Ted Sommer, lead scientist for the California Department of Water Resources, to reflect on his accomplishments and hopes for the future. Sommer is a leading researcher on native fishes, and has published more than 60 research articles in peer-reviewed scientific publications since 2001. Sommer began his long career at DWR in 1991 under Dr. Randy Brown. Early on he founded the Feather River fish monitoring program, but his work moved progressively downstream to the Bay-Delta, where he has also helped manage the Interagency Ecological Program since the late 1990s. According to his longtime colleague Jim Cloern, an emeritus scientist with the United States Geological Survey: “Ted has a...
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