Sacramento River

American River Group (ARG) Annual Report of Activities

Delta Stewardship Council (Delta Council) | November 14th, 2018

American shad — the Delta’s most-abundant and least-considered anadromous fish

Center for California Water Resources Policy & Management | February 21st, 2022

American shad are the Chinook salmon of herring. Like Chinook salmon, adult American shad spend several years in the ocean before returning to rivers for spawning — the

American shad are the Chinook salmon of herring. Like Chinook salmon, adult American shad spend several years in the ocean before returning to rivers for spawning — they’re anadromous. Also, like salmon, anglers love shad because they’re fun to catch and good to eat. Well, okay, shad are not as good to eat as ocean caught salmon, but they are delicious when prepared well. American shad are native to the east coast of North American. They were introduced to the Sacramento River after repeated releases of shad fry — transported via the then newly completed transcontinental railroad — between 1871 and 1880. Shad quickly became abundant in the Sacramento River and proceeded to colonize many other rivers along the West Coast. In the Columbia River system, shad are now the most abundant anadromous fish species migrating upstream through impoundments on the lower Columbia River. At Bonneville Dam — 140 river miles upstream of the Columbia River mouth — an average of 2.2 million adult shad migrated upstream each year between 1992 and 2003. In contrast, an average of 940,000 adult salmonids migrated annually past Bonneville Dam during the same period.

Amoral Water Markets?

Georgetown University | June 15th, 2023

Severe water scarcity in the western United States is prompting legitimate questions about the best way to decide which places, people, industries, and species need it mo

Severe water scarcity in the western United States is prompting legitimate questions about the best way to decide which places, people, industries, and species need it most. Water markets, which allow for trading water like a commodity, are perennial proposals during times of scarcity. Water markets have an innate allure: promising to efficiently reallocate water to the highest value uses, minimize risk, and preserve the environment, while relying on the invisible hand to brush aside politically painful values-based questions. This view portrays markets as an amoral arbiter of the best use of water. But water markets are not amoral; they express the historic value judgments baked into the existing western water law system, and layering market approaches over the existing system will both exacerbate the negative impacts of those values and further entrench existing law. In this Article, we show that the West is not ready for water markets.

An Alternative Technique to Quantify the Incidental Take of Listed Anadromous Fishes at the Federal and State Water Export Facilities in the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary

National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) | July 1st, 2011

An Assessment of Urban Water Demand Forecasts in California

Pacific Institute | August 5th, 2020

In California, urban per capita water demand has declined dramatically over the past several decades, driven in part by greater uptake of water-efficient devices. These r

In California, urban per capita water demand has declined dramatically over the past several decades, driven in part by greater uptake of water-efficient devices. These reductions have important implications for estimating future water demand. However, failure to account for the long-term trend of declining per capita water demand has led to routine overestimation of future water demand. This can lead to unnecessary and costly investment in unneeded infrastructure and new sources of supply, higher costs, and adverse environmental impacts. This report examines the accuracy of long-range water demand forecasts for California’s 10 largest urban water suppliers. It finds that per capita water demand declined for all water suppliers between 2000 and 2015. In most cases, reductions in per capita water demand were so large that total water demand declined during this period. Additionally, all water suppliers overestimated demand, driven largely by inflated estimates of per capita water demand and, to a lesser extent, overestimates of population growth rates. The report offers recommendations on how to improve the accuracy of long-range water demand forecasts.

An Evaluation of Juvenile Salmonid Routing and Barrier Effectiveness, Predation, and Predatory Fishes at the Head of Old River, 2009–2012

California Department of Water Resources (DWR) | February 2nd, 2015

The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) manage the State Water Project (SWP) and Central Valley Project (CVP),

The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Reclamation) manage the State Water Project (SWP) and Central Valley Project (CVP), respectively, and are charged to do so in a manner that maintains the survival of anadromous salmonids subject to the terms of the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) 2009 Biological Opinion (BO) and 2011 amendments regarding the Long-Term Central Valley Project and State Water Project Operations Criteria and Plan (OCAP). Action IV.1.3 of the NMFS’s 2009 BO instructs these agencies to “consider engineering solutions to further reduce diversion of emigrating juvenile salmonids to the interior and southern Delta, and reduce exposure to CVP and SWP export facilities.” Specifically, one objective of Action IV.1.3 is to “prevent emigrating salmonids from entering channels in the south Delta (e.g., Old River, Turner Cut) that increase entrainment risk to Central Valley steelhead migrating from the San Joaquin River through the Delta.”

An Evolutionary Theory of Administrative Law

Southern Methodist University | May 25th, 2018

Law evolves to accommodate change—this is axiomatic in most academic legal traditions. But in the era of the administrative state, with congressional gridlock and a jud

Law evolves to accommodate change—this is axiomatic in most academic legal traditions. But in the era of the administrative state, with congressional gridlock and a judiciary hesitant to address policy questions, evolution of statutory law has become much more difficult. This leads to pent up demand for change in legal regimes. If the legislature and the courts cannot provide an outlet for this pressure, where does it go? How does the law continue to change? Although other scholars have looked to agencies as engines of legal change, we lack a theoretical framework to understand how that change happens. I argue that an evolutionary framework provides an informative framework for understanding administrative legal change. I provide three case studies that demonstrate the administrative evolution of the Endangered Species Act. In spite of tremendous advances in conservation, fundamental changes in scientists’ understanding of human impacts on the natural world, and increasingly strident clashes over private property rights and endangered species, the Act has remained largely unchanged for the last 35 years. In a functioning legislative system, the Act would have been amended to accommodate many of these changes. Instead, the case studies show a mechanism of legal change through agency action analogous to the mechanisms underlying biological evolution. Other commentators have argued the administrative state stymies evolution of the law, but this research contradicts that view. Applying an evolutionary framework to administrative actions creates a new theory of administrative evolution of the law, placing administrative analysis within the long tradition of evolutionary approaches to legal change used by commentators from Aristotle to Holmes. In contrast to traditional normative theories of administrative law, an evolutionary approach focuses on how change progresses over time. This theory of administrative evolution of the law also casts new light on a host of normative questions, from the role of judicial review to improvements in agency decision-making. Considering administrative actions within the broader context of the legal evolution promises a fruitful new approach to analyzing administrative law.

An Index of Biotic Integrity (IBI) for Perennial Streams in California’s Central Valley

California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) | December 1st, 2008

Bioassessment is the science of using aquatic organisms as indicators of ecological condition in streams in rivers. Many types of organisms can be used as indicat

Bioassessment is the science of using aquatic organisms as indicators of ecological condition in streams in rivers. Many types of organisms can be used as indicators, for example fish or algae, but bioassessment is most frequently based on benthic macroinvertebrates (BMIs), which are small but visible bottom-dwelling organisms such as insects. BMI data sets typically consist of long lists of species (or taxa) found in a sample and their relative abundances. These data can be simplified into measures of biological condition such as indices of biotic integrity (IBIs) that are designed to be sensitive to human-caused alterations to the landscape, to stream channels and riparian zones, and to water chemistry. IBIs function much like economic indicators: high IBI scores reflect good ecological conditions while low IBI scores reflect poor ecological conditions. Bioassessment is increasingly used throughout California by water quality monitoring programs, but in the Central Valley bioassessment is more challenging than in other regions of the state because the entire landscape and most streams are highly altered by human activities such as urbanization, agriculture and water diversions. This makes it impossible to evaluate how BMIs respond across a complete gradient of human disturbance within the region, that is, from minimally disturbed reference sites where human activity is absent or minimal and which therefore set the benchmark for biological expectations, to the most altered sites with degraded biology. In the Central Valley, minimally disturbed reference sites are no longer available. Even the ‘least-disturbed’ sites, which represent the best-available chemical, physical and biological habitat conditions given the current state of the landscape, are markedly disturbed. Reference sites in other parts of California, such as the Sierra Nevada or the Sierra foothills, may be significantly less disturbed than Central Valley reference sites. In this study, BMI data sets from 11 studies conducted at various intervals over the last 14 years were compiled to build an IBI for Central Valley streams. Data were not collected consistently by the different studies, and many gaps were present in associated physical habitat and water chemistry data sets. This could be corrected for BMI samples by standardizing to a consistent level of taxonomic effort. Gaps in other data could not be addressed. Criteria for defining ‘best-available’ reference sites were established as data allowed and were based on local urban and agricultural intensity, stream channel and riparian condition, and stream substrate composition. Eighty BMI metrics were evaluated for inclusion in the IBI based on 4 criteria: 1) sufficient range for scoring; 2) responsiveness to land use and/or local disturbance variables measured at the 150-meter sampling reach (as data allowed); 3) good discrimination between reference and test sites; 4) lack of correlation with other responsive metrics. Five final metrics were selected and scored for inclusion in the IBI: collector richness (number of taxa that are collector- feeders), predator richness (number of taxa that are predators), percent EPT taxa (percent of taxa that are mayflies, stoneflies, or caddisflies), percent clinger taxa (percent of taxa that cling to vegetation) and Shannon diversity (a composite measure of taxonomic richness and evenness of abundance). The final IBI showed good discrimination between reference and test sites, and was validated with an independent data set. BMI metrics and the final IBI were more strongly related to reach-scale physical habitat variables than to water chemistry or land use variables, but detailed water chemistry was lacking for many sites, and some studies have shown that response to land use diminishes when more than 10% of a watershed is degraded by human activities. Despite data gaps that were less than ideal for indicator development, this study is the first to set expectations for Central Valley BMI assemblages based on best-available reference sites. The Central Valley IBI can be used as a general interpretive framework for benthic samples collected from perennial streams on the valley floor and provides an objective means for rating biological condition in a region with high urban and agricultural intensity. The ability to rank sampling sites relative to explicitly defined biological expectations is essential to any biological monitoring program. Therefore, this index may prove useful in several monitoring applications, including California’s non- point source CMAP program where sampling was stratified to assess and compare stream condition in urban, agricultural and forested watersheds, in stormwater monitoring programs, in point-source pollution investigations, and in stream restoration monitoring. Key recommendations include: 1) that all future bioassessment projects in the Central Valley should collect quantitative physical habitat and water chemistry with consistent protocols at all sites; in situ chemistry and rapid (qualitative) physical habitat are not sufficient for screening reference sites or evaluating BMI responses to stressor gradients; 2) that bioassessment should be added to NPS monitoring where programs are already collecting more intensive stressor data such as pesticides, nutrients and metals. This will provide California’s monitoring programs with better datasets to support future analyses.

An Introduction to High-Frequency Nutrient and Biogeochemical Monitoring for the Sacramento– San Joaquin Delta, Northern California

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) | July 11th, 2017

This report is the first in a series of three reports that provide information about high-frequency (HF) nutrient and biogeochemical monitoring in the Sacramento–San Jo

This report is the first in a series of three reports that provide information about high-frequency (HF) nutrient and biogeochemical monitoring in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta of northern California (Delta). This first report provides an introduction to the reasons for and fundamental concepts behind collecting HF measurements, and describes the benefits associated with a real-time, continuous, HF, multi-parameter water quality monitoring station network that is co-located with flow stations. It then provides examples of how HF nutrient measurements have improved our understating of nutrient sources and cycling in aquatic systems worldwide, followed by specific examples from the Delta. These examples describe the ways in which HF instrumentation may be used for both fixed-station and spatial assessments. The overall intent of this document is to describe how HF measurements currently (2017) are being used in the Delta to examine the relationship between nutrient concentrations, nutrient cycling, and aquatic habitat conditions.

An overview of multi-dimensional models of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta

University of California, Davis (UC Davis) | December 1st, 2016

Over the past fifteen years, the development and application of models in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has transformed our ability to analyze an

Over the past fifteen years, the development and application of models in San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has transformed our ability to analyze and understand the underlying physics of the system. Initial applications of three-dimensional models focused primarily on salt intrusion, and provided a valuable resource for investigating how sea level rise and levee failures in the Delta could influence water quality in the Delta in the future. However, multi-dimensional models have also provided significant insights into some of the fundamental biological relationships that have shaped our thinking about the system by exploring the relationship between X2, flow, fish abundance, and the low salinity zone. Through modeling, it has been possible to move beyond salinity to understand how large-scale changes to the system are likely to affect sediment dynamics, and to assess the potential effects on species that rely on turbidity for habitat. Lastly, the coupling of multi-dimensional hydrodynamic models with particle tracking models has led to advances in our thinking about residence time, the retention of food organisms, the effect of south Delta exports on larval entrainment, and the pathways and behaviors of salmonids that travel through the Delta. This chapter provides an overview of these recent advances and how they have increased our understanding of the distribution and movement of fish and food organisms. The applications presented serve as a guide to the current state of the science of Delta modeling and provide examples of how we can use multidimensional models to predict how future Delta conditions will affect both fish and water supply.