Fish and wildlife officials discuss the drought response actions being taken by federal, state, and local agencies to reduce the impacts to fish and wildlife resources
As the weather heats up for the summer months and the drought drags on, water supplies are being stretched to their breaking point. While agricultural and urban users have had to struggle with significant cutbacks and limited supplies, these dry times have also been tough on the state’s ecosystems and their inhabitants as well.
In this panel discussion from the spring conference of the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA), Kevin Shaffer with the Department of Fish and Wildlife; Dan Castleberry with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and Jose Setka with the East Bay Municipal Utilities District discuss the drought response actions their agencies are taking to reduce the effects of prolonged drought on fish and wildlife.
KEVIN SHAFFER, Program Manager for Anadromous and Fish Management Conservation in CDFW’s Fisheries branch
Kevin Shaffer began by saying that his comments would be focused more on salmon, although the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s drought response effort has been for fishes and wildlife in general.
The emergency proclamation that the Governor issued in January 2014 led to a lot of actions from state agencies, boards, and commissions, he said. “From the perspective of the drought, that was year 3 of the drought,” he said. “From a fish perspective, the fish really started feeling extreme effects of the drought the fall before. Our Department and my team worked with our coastal teams in huge steelhead rescues south of San Francisco Bay in the fall of 2013. We were already having to bring a lot of people together including volunteers to deal with the fact that a lot of our coastal rivers and the anadromous species that lived in them were already really struggling … Our office and all of our fisheries offices across the state had been working before the proclamation even came out.”
When the proclamation came out, the Department of Fish and Wildlife was officially directed to do fish rescues, take urgency actions in the Delta for anadromous and smelt species, and perform drought aquatic monitoring, as well as general wildlife support actions. “Most of them are water-related actions because from a wildlife perspective, aquatic systems, whether its estuaries, rivers, lakes, vernal pools – they are the first ones to respond to broad environmental change, so that’s where most of the focus was when things started,” he said.
Mr. Shaffer said they started the Environmental Stressor Monitoring. “The Department, along with the two federal fish agencies, DWR, and the SWRCB to start looking at all the creeks and rivers of the state and starting to prioritize which ones we really needed to track,” he said. “Our initial spreadsheet in January of 2014 had about 50 or 60 creeks that we started to monitor. By the end of the state fiscal year, we had 170 creeks and rivers on that spreadsheet.”
The Department’s initial response mostly concerned fishes, but that changed in July of 2014. “Besides the actions we were being told to take for salmon, steelhead, and sturgeon species, we were given a fairly large chunk of money to spend specifically on drought-related restoration grants. That solicitation to the public went out on July 1, 2014. We were given funds and direction to do some fairly huge restoration projects in wetland marshes in the Delta and up the Sacramento system.”
“We were given the opportunity to basically enhance our trout and salmon hatcheries to deal with the animals that are propagated there,” he said. “That’s something that we had to do, and we know we’re going to have to do more of.” He recalled how last year, in order to accomplish the massive trucking of fall-run salmon, they had to borrow fish transportation trailers from other Pacific states, so they spent some of the funds building fish transportation trailers for the state of California.
“Teams from across the entire state have been monitoring creeks and rivers for salmon, steelhead, and other fishes along the coast and the Central Valley, as well as the desert,” he said. “Some efforts started up in July and some are continuations of efforts that started up in January.”
From January to October, Mr. Shaffer said they did 200 fish rescues, wither within watershed translocations, or if necessary, out of watershed translocations. “The ultimate decision is to move animals into captivity,” he said. “We have moved listed steelhead into the Merced River hatchery; we have moved listed coho salmon into the Irongate and Warm Springs facilities; we have moved redband trout into Mount Shasta, and we have brought Western pond turtles into Southern California facilities.”
“Animals have come into captivity, and some of those animals are still there, because one of the conservation rules about aquaculture is there are a lot of issues you have to deal with in putting animals back in the wild, but you have to have habitat,” he said. “For the coho salmon at Irongate, we were able to put them back in their habitat. The steelhead on the Merced and the redband trout in the upper Sacramento basins, right now they don’t have any habitat to go back into.”
Mr. Shaffer noted that they were also given additional resources for the San Joaquin River Restoration Program to accelerate both the restoration program and the conservation facility that’s being constructed.
There were a number of other things they did under the Governor’s and legislature’s direction, he said. “We manage millions of acres on our wildlife areas and ecological reserves, so one of the biggest things that we have been working on is improving water management and water efficiency across dozens of our wildlife areas and ecological reserves, primarily in the Central Valley but not explicit to the Central Valley.”
They are currently planning for what they will start doing in July when the new fiscal year starts. “Some of the actions are continuations,” he said. “A lot of the large restoration projects in the Delta and in the Sacramento River last year, but we don’t think there are any projects out there that are ‘shovel ready’, so that’s not something we’re going to be doing next year. We are being asked to expend more energy to specifically look at streamflow and understand streamflow and its relationship to fish. We are also being asked because of our current concerns about winter run and spring run, to continue and refocus even more on what’s going on in the upper Sacramento. This probably will include actually trying to understand better what’s happening to these fish when they hit the ocean.” He noted they would be focusing a new effort on the smelt as well.
There are other non-fish actions they are undertaking. “There are some large restoration projects on the terrestrial side that are being selected,” he said. “There are a lot of the terrestrial populations are really struggling and I think you’re going to see that even more this summer as those animals run out of water and are running out of food because of lack of water. We’re beginning to monitor mammal, bird populations, and terrestrial reptile populations and we’re having to explicitly focus enforcement and biologists on the interactions between humans and wildlife.”
“Probably most of you are more familiar with what happens with wildlife during flooding or a fire, and how those animals end up in your backyard or your garage or on your street,” he said. ”Last year we started seeing a lot of that with high profile animals like black bears, but you’re going to see that with all kinds of organisms starting this summer.”
Mr. Shaffer said that on the DFW website, he is posting case studies, monitoring, rescues, and restoration which gives information such as location, maps, photographs, and contact information. He presented a slide showing the work fisheries biologists did in the upper Sacramento. “Our fisheries biologists in the upper Sacramento were literally adjusting the tops of redds, knowing they were going to be dewatered from previous years and our work with DWR and the water board,” he said. “It’s not something anyone wants to do because you really don’t want to mess around with spawning area once the female’s done, but the only other option is to let it dry out, and anything that’s there dies anyway. This is something that happened a year ago. We wouldn’t be able to do that right now unless we had more water, so this is the kind of action that as the drought is prolonged, it’s taken away from you. This kind of work probably isn’t’ going to be possible a year from now.”
Another project was to have a fish and salmon trap at Keswick Dam that can grab fish, specifically winter-run, for the Livingston Stone Fish Hatchery operated by the federal government. “The trap is done, and is actually trapping winter run. We contracted out to get that trap done now; it was designed during Christmas break, and then they started construction that New Year’s so the trap is done and start grabbing fish. This was something we knew we could do if we could get the money and the contractor, we wouldn’t be going through the normal how long will it take.”
The creek monitoring is very important, he said. Michael Sparkman, one of their most talented field scientists, is monitoring Redwood Creek and the entire watershed as to how coho salmon are responding to different flows and different temperatures over time using juvenile sampling as well as dual sonar, a new technology that has a lot more resolution. “Redwood Creek is going to be one of those places that when we’re done and people are asking us, how did fish response over time, Redwood Creek will be one of those places we’ll be able to share with the scientific community, the public, other agencies as to how are fish dealing with droughts.”
“One of the things we were asked over a year ago was what did we learn from the 77-78 drought, and I can tell you that there wasn’t a lot on the ground in the 70s to be able to inform us what we might do,” he said. “We’re trying to prepare for the next drought by having a lot of reports, a lot of empirical data in a lot of people’s hands so when people say, what did we learn in the 20-teens, we can say, this is what we learned.”
Last year, the Department along with other partners, did a substantial rescue of over 100,000 coho salmon in the Scott River. “Some were taken to Irongate, some were taken to immediate water habitat, and when conditions got better, they were put back in the wild,” he said. “A portion of the animals were tagged with coded wire tags and a proportion were tagged with acoustic tags so that over time, we can see how these animals do.”
Mr. Shaffer said other projects include real-time 24-hour Sacramento River temperature monitoring within Redding at the airport bridge which is going to continue, and they are expanding a specific study on how winter-run are doing; they have also hired a contractor to write the reintroduction plan for winter run on Battle Creek, one of the foundations for that species recovery.
“We’re doing a specific fairly large-scale restoration project in Battle Creek in preparation for winter-run, and there is a fairly substantial Deer Creek project that’s been on the table for awhile; we’ve used this opportunity to help Fish and Wildlife Service move it forward now,” he said. “We also are going to initiate something that we’ve had in the plans for almost a decade to finally have a steelhead monitoring program across the Central Valley, San Joaquin and Sacramento side, and Delta. We may initiate this next year trying to do the same thing on the plan we have for Chinook salmon. The steelhead plan is ready to go. It’s been an issue of funding and staffing, and so we will put this program on the ground in the Sacramento River in August.”
The drought has also brought to the forefront how our sturgeon species are doing in California, Mr. Shaffer said. “The ocean as well as Oregon and Washington are dependent upon what we do with sturgeon, so we are now focusing on the sturgeon,” he said. “The way that monitoring arrays are done is pretty complicated, but some very new technology was implemented in the Columbia Basin. We are going to work with the USGS science center here to do the feasibility study. I think that will probably start in August or September.”
Last year, 28 drought response or drought planning projects were funded across the Central Valley and the coast through a solicitation release in July. “Some of those projects have already commenced; they will all be on the ground by June 1 of this year. So there are lots of small projects adding up; it’s likely that we will release a smaller drought granting solicitation this July.”
“And that’s it … “
DAN CASTLEBERRY, Assistant Regional Director, Fish and Aquatic Conservation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Dan Castleberry began by saying the overall theme of his presentation will emphasize the level of cooperation and collaboration amongst all the agencies in addressing the drought situation, as well as that we’re all in this together. “It’s been a tremendous challenge, one we have not faced since 1970s and at this point, we’re beyond what we faced in the 1970s, so it’s a new standard of collaboration,” he said. He noted that the Department of Fish and Wildlife has a broader set of responsibilities, and much of the things that the previous presenter Kevin Shaffer said are actions that his agency, along with NMFS, worked with the Department of Fish and Wildlife on.
“One of the things that the drought has done for us is spawned a whole new set of meetings,” he said. “Every Friday, NMFS, DFW, and FWS get together for a drought meeting where we plan things statewide. We also have had a whole new set of meetings associated with our temporary urgency change petitions. The Real Time Drought Operations Team meets frequently, at least weekly and sometimes much more frequently. There are also meetings of directors, regional directors, and regional administrators so there is a lot of high-level activity associated with the drought.”
“The drought’s been tough all around, not just for agricultural communities, municipalities, and the water purveyors, but for fish listed under the Endangered Species Act,” he said. “Delta smelt set records for low rates of catch in all the surveys this year. Winter run and spring run Chinook salmon did not fare well. And suckers and salmon in the Klamath River system aren’t doing well either.”
Mr. Castleberry then discussed the role of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “We contribute to the science, monitoring, hatchery management, and provide technical advice on salmon, and NMFS and the DFW are the primary regulatory agencies regarding those species,” he said. “The Service does have a regulatory role for Delta smelt, but we also contribute to the science, monitoring, and technical advice concerning the smelt species. We also work with UC Davis and others to maintain the genetic refugia population of Delta smelt; there’s been more focus on that as Delta smelt population numbers drop.”
“We also have a role in managing habitat for migratory birds, including management of the National Wildlife Refuge System,” he said. “We have water for refuges and adjoining wetlands including rice fields as an area of focus for the Fish and Wildlife Service.”
Mr. Castleberry said that the Fish and Wildlife Service has engaged in activities over the past two years that are designed to improve management of listed species during the drought, and to maximize the effectiveness of limited water supplies.
The Service has been working to maximize the regulatory flexibility under their biological opinion, he said. “The biological opinion for operation of the state and federal water projects has tried to address all of the situations we thought might occur, but it also recognized there were situations that we didn’t foresee, or could foresee but didn’t know how to handle up front in the biological opinion, so there were exceptions in our opinion to deal with those issues, and one of those was drought. We’re outside of the range of situations that we had anticipated in the normal conduct of our biological opinion.”
This year, the three fish agencies together with the Bureau of Reclamation and Department of Water Resources, developed the ‘Interagency 2015 Drought Strategy’ for January through April 2015. “The real focus was to sit down with the project agencies and figure out what additional monitoring and other information was needed in addition to what is called for in the biological opinion under normal circumstances, as well as to look at what they projected in terms of water operations to maximize the flexibility to meet project demands while at the same time providing adequate protections for listed species, our focus being on Delta smelt,” he said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service worked cooperatively with those agencies and the State Water Resources Control Board on multiple Temporary Urgency Change Petitions, Mr. Castleberry said. “The actions that were considered included changes to Delta outflow standards, modifying D1641 requirements for human health and safety, and altering Delta cross channel gate operations,” he said.
“One of the things we recognized in those Temporary Urgency Change Petitions was the increased monitoring to provide additional real time information available to inform water management in the Delta,” he said. “Monitoring included early morning surveys for smelt and salmon at Jersey and Prisoner’s points, and they just really were designed to detect smelt or salmon as they moved into areas where we felt they could become vulnerable to entrainment at the south Delta pumping facilities. We also recognized efforts by DWR to initiate new and innovative daily turbidity transects in the Old and Middle River corridors to provide real time information on the movement of turbidity into the south Delta; those two surveys together as well as the standard information that we considered through the Delta conditions team … in late 2014 and early 2015, the regional directors had calls as often as daily for weeks at a time to consider that information and manage conditions in the south Delta to avoid entrainment situations. They focused on not creating conditions that would result in Delta smelt taking up residence in the south Delta where they would spawn because if they spawned there, we would have situation where the facilities would need to deal with the presence of eggs, larvae, and juvenile Delta smelt in the vicinity of the south Delta pumping plants.”
[pullquote]Related content:
More on efforts to monitor turbidity to protect Delta smelt here: Managing turbidity for Delta smelt
[/pullquote]“That effort overall seemed successful; we avoided large take events of adults at the south Delta facilities, and to date, we’ve had very little take of juvenile Delta smelt at the south Delta facilities,” he said. “The effort there was to minimize risk to Delta smelt, while at the same time, maximizing opportunities to export water south of the Delta.”
He then turned to their efforts to extend the Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery winter-run production. “This is something we initiated in 2014 and are continuing in 2015,” he said. “We did that along with the other fish agencies because given the low storage in Shasta, we expected that there would likely be high in-river mortality of incubating eggs on the mainstem Sacramento River. As part of that process, we installed new water tillers and other infrastructure at Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery.”
“We increased three-fold the release of juveniles from Livingston Stone NFH,” he said. “Normally we release about 200,000 juvenile winter-run from the facility, but in 2015, we release 600,000 juvenile winter run. We timed that release with a moderate storm event in February. We prefer to time them with larger storm events but we took what we could get. Monitoring so far this year indicates their survival was the best that we’ve seen in the last three years. So far in 2015, we collected about 55% of the fish targeting about 175 total winter run brood stock for Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery.”
Another action the Service took were pulse flow manipulations on Clear Creek. “In 2014, it appears that Clear Creek was one of the better areas for spring-run Chinook salmon and juvenile survival so we’re continuing that effort in now in 2015,” he said. “We initiated the trucking at Coleman National Fish Hatchery for fall-run in part due to concerns about poor river conditions and especially to address concerns coming to us from the ocean salmon fisheries. In 2014, we trucked based on triggers we developed that year; we trucked about 7.3 million juvenile fall-run Chinook salmon from Coleman NFH. The triggers allowed us to release about 4.5 million fish at the hatchery.”
Mr. Castleberry explained that the concern for releasing fish at Coleman hatchery is that it is the most distant facility from the ocean. “If we release fish downstream, their likelihood of returning to the Sacramento and Coleman is very low, but given the river conditions, their likelihood of surviving migration from Coleman National Fish Hatchery through the Delta was especially low that year.”
This year they are following the same set of triggers, he said. “Unfortunately, conditions are poorer this year than they were last year; so far we’ve trucked 11 million fish from Coleman. We have another million fish on station but it’s very likely we’ll be trucking that remaining million fish from Coleman NFH.”
This highlights the question of how long can we continue this kind of management if this drought continues, he said. “If what we’re looking at is the new normal, we need to sit down and talk amongst ourselves how we will manage going forward if these kinds of conditions persist.”
JOSE SETKA, Manager of the Fisheries and Wildlife Division, East Bay Municipal Utility District
Jose Setka then talked about the challenges he faces managing for fish on the Mokelumne River. He began with a review of East Bay MUD’s water supply system. “We get our water from the Mokelumne watershed,” he said. “Water is drawn from Pardee Reservoir and gets sent down to our service area and terminal reservoirs. We also have an alternate supply from the Freeport project that came online for the first time last year. It’s a dry year supply, and that’s water taken from the Sacramento and shunts over and goes into our aqueducts just downstream of Camanche Reservoir. That water is a Central Valley Project supply.”
He then presented a slide showing drought sequences, noting that it’s the second driest two-period, but it’s the driest three-year and four-year periods. “It’s the driest group of years we’ve had ever, so it kind of highlights that we’re not in good shape at all,” he said. “However, operations on the river have changed since 1987-90, so even though we’re drier than we were in that set of years, the conditions are much better than they were back then.”
Mr. Setka explained that in 1998, EBMUD entered into a Joint Settlement Agreement (JSA) with the Department of Fish and Wildlife and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The agreement required many different actions, both flow and non-flow, the most significant being an increase in the releases from Comanche Reservoir. “Prior to the JSA, there was essentially no requirement to release water, so with the implementation of the JSA, there’s a set flow schedule that is based on water year type and salmon life stage; we also have conditions dealing with ramping rates so we don’t end up stranding redds or having juveniles that are stranded during flow decreases.”
This year, EBMUD is expecting to move approximately 65,000 acre-feet through the Freeport Project. “What that does from a fisheries perspective on the Mokelumne is that it is 65,000 acre-feet less that’s going to get pulled from the Mokelumne watershed to go to the service area for EBMUD,” he said. “The JSA has what we refer to as a gainshare provision, so we get basically a 20% credit for that water that we get to pull from the Mokelumne watershed, up to 20,000 acre-feet of the drought cycle. It’s not actual water, but we get the credit for 20%, we can use that supply to manage cold water pool for pulse flows. This is all done in partnership with the key agencies, US FWS, DFW, and NMFS, we all work to manage this system together.”
“Cold water pool is incredibly important in all systems that deal with anadromous fish but on the Mokelumne in particular,” he said. “So as part of the JSA we have a requirement to try to maintain 28,000 acre-feet of cold water in Comanche over the summer but particularly in the fall when the fall-run salmon come up. We define cold water as 16.4 degrees Celsius. We’re required to make those releases to the river and make sure that they meet that temperature requirement, and it also goes into the hatchery to provide the hatchery water supply.”
Camanche Reservoir is a difficult reservoir to maintain cold water pool in as it’s very broad and shallow, Mr. Setka said. He presented a graphic showing how water is released from the reservoir, along with a temperature graph. “Ideally we’d like to release from the upper level of the reservoirs, particularly once the juvenile salmonids have moved out of the system, but we can’t do that because we basically have two options – really high and really low and there’s no in between,” he said. “So in order to manage cold water in the system, we have to rely on our Pardee Reservoir to really do the leg work on that.”
He presented a graph of Pardee reservoir, noting that it is fairly narrow, deep reservoir. “Most of the water is below 12 degrees in Pardee Reservoir, and we can release from multiple levels on the dam, so that’s how we supply the aqueduct; from there we can also choose from different levels and supply the East Bay with water,” he said. “However it’s a balancing act. Go too high, you get a lot of material in the water, next thing you know, you’re getting taste and odor complaints from customers, so it’s a balancing act and in this case it’s a blending act … these are the kinds of things that go on in our operations meetings to discuss how are we going to maximize and maintain our cold water pool.”
Through the years, the operations team has refined the release schedule so they can pulse the water from the reservoir to maximize the amount that goes through that plunge point and gets down into the hypolimnion to support the temperature, he explained. “We’ve been doing this for a decade or more so we’ve got it dialed in so we can get that cold water from Pardee to Camanche and out through the river as long as we have enough water to do that with and that’s key,” he said.
“Right now we’re sitting at about, the 100,000 acre-feet in Camanche Reservoir,” he said. “Back then, under the old operating scheme, we were sitting at about 9,000 acre-feet, so personally I can’t even imagine how I would have managed with just 9000 acre-feet in the reservoir, so that in itself has been a humungous change and it’s helped us weather this dry period.”
Mr. Setka then turned to the specific actions they’ve taken for fisheries. He presented a map of the area, pointing out the spawning area 10 miles below Camanche Dam. He noted there is a video set up at Woodbridge Dam so they are able to count every salmon that comes into the system, and a screw trap to count the juveniles going out. The Delta Cross Channel is a decision point in the fall outmigration; if it’s open, the salmon have the potential to go the wrong way. They have a release site on Sherman Island near Antioch for their hatchery fish, and down at the bottom of the map are the project pumps.
“Ideally our salmon will go down the Mokelumne, choose one of the forks, and then head out to the Golden Gate,” he said. “What we don’t want to see is our fish going down towards the pumps, and even throughout the Delta there is significant predation issues. On the Sacramento side, they do everything they can to manage to keep their fish on the Sacramento side and not to go through the cross channel and into the central Delta where those blue forks are; we don’t’ have that option because the Mokelumne feeds those forks, so that’s something we have to deal with.”
Mr. Setka presented a chart showing pulse flows and fish movement and explaining that the red lines are the Woodbridge flows, the blue lines are the Camanche flows, and the red lines are the daily salmon returns. “Basically for every pulse, there is a big increase in movement of salmon past Woodbridge Dam, so these have been incredibly effective,” he said. “One thing to highlight is we’re talking about working within the constraints that we have and the amount of water we have. This does not require any extra water. What this requires is deferring some flows from earlier in the year, and shifting that block of water to a later part to be released as part of these pulse flows. This is also using some of the gainshare water that we gain from the Freeport operation that we’re able to use for these pulse flows, so our goal is to work with what we have, especially in these dry years where there are no other options.”
This is the first critically dry year they will be operating under the JSA, so they will have to start implementing the part of the JSA that calls for trapping and trucking fish, he said. At Woodbridge Dam, there is a fishery facility and the bypass pipe where they can trap the outmigrating fish and put them in the trucks. “In a typical year, we’d just truck them around to the Delta at some further point downstream,” he said. “This year with the Delta conditions being so poor, we’re working with the Department of Fish and Wildlife and we’re doing basically an experiment where we’re moving those fish back up to the hatchery, holding them for one to six days and tagging all of the fish. Then we’ll release those fish into net pens near that Sherman Island site on outgoing tides.”
“What we’re trying to do is maximize the survival of those fish, given that we’re in extremely poor conditions,” he said. “It’s the first time we’ve done this component of this … We’ll see how that turns out. We won’t get the answer for two and a half years from now when these fish come back as adults.”
The Pacific Fisheries Management Council has forecasted that it’s going to be a replay of last year in terms of what’s available out there in the ocean, Mr. Setka said. “What conditions they’re going to see when they come back into the Delta and into the rivers at this point is unknown, but in terms of supply, it’s out there.”
“If you start looking further out, you can see a trend developing in terms of ocean conditions,” he said, presenting a slide with numerous indices that are used to judge ocean conditions. “You can see in 2011-2012 a lot of green, but as you start moving into 2013 and 2014, there’s a lot of red, and if you’ve been listening to the news in terms of the sea lion pups and all that, you’ll know that conditions are still red. We can do a lot inland but there’s going to be some issues to deal with in the ocean when these fish move out.”
He then discussed specific projects they are undertaking to improve survival of salmon on the Mokelumne.
One of those projects is a barging study with Department of Fish and Wildlife where they take fish from the hatchery, and put them in a barge at the top forks of the Mokelumne and barge them out to the bay. “The whole idea is that if you take fish from the hatchery and plant them out in the bay, they may survive out in the ocean, but stray when they come back,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to barge 4 million fish, but when you have years when things are tough, it might be an option for some fish. So we’ve been doing this experiment, basically sticking them in the barge, pumping water through the tank so they are kind of imprinting to some degree, and taking them all the way out to the gate and planting them.” He noted that they weren’t able to do it this year due to bridge repairs in the Delta that prevents their boat from going through, but they will resume next year.
They are looking to improve floodplain habitat, as there isn’t a lot of habitat downstream of Camanche Dam or Woodbridge Dam. “The Nature Conservancy, they have a project design in place for McCormack-Williamson tract to convert that tract of land into a floodplain and tidal wetlands,” he said. “From our perspective, it would provide excellent opportunities for better juvenile salmonid survival … if we have a pit stop for them where they can stop, feed, get bigger, it’s always going to be an improvement, because bottom line, the bigger the fish, the more likely they are to survive.”
They are also participating in a pilot program to assess the feasibility of a pilot study to see if they can move fish up above the dams. “We’re looking at what it would take in terms of to get the agencies and everybody on the same table to see if it’s even worthwhile conducting, and what some of the constraints might be, but ultimately if everybody can buy into it, we’ll see if we can’t move some fish up there and see where they go … “
He then summarized his main points. “Number one, reservoir management is the key,” he said. “If we can’t manage the reservoirs together in the correct way, it doesn’t matter what else we do, because it will just be bath water and the salmon won’t survive. We can do things to maximize survival, the trucking of juvenile fish natural production is one of those things we’re working on. We’re looking at improving downstream habitat – I mentioned the one project but within the river from Camanche down to Woodbridge, we have different projects we’re working on. And hopefully it’s not, but if it turns out to be a new normal, we may have to look to other places where we put this fish in order for these species to survive.”
Finally, I just want to say that this is all a partnership and collaboration, he said. “It’s a collaborative team involving primarily DFW, US FWS, Anadromous Fish Restoration Program, NMFS and Woodbridge Irrigation. But 25 years ago, this slide would be blank because we wouldn’t have had any partners or collaborators and there probably would have been a few of them who were suing us back in the late 80s, so we’ve come a long ways since those days. I’m happy to see it. Working with our colleagues and their agencies is just phenomenal in terms of what we’ve been able to accomplish on the Mokelumne.”
“And so with that … “
Question: So with this record hot year in 2014 and the continued drought, is temperature a limiting factor that’s really effecting populations of both salmonids and smelt?
Dan Castleberry: “I’ll speak to Delta smelt. Back in 2011, we had a perfect set of conditions. It was wet and cool all spring and we went into that summer with more smelt in the system than we had seen in quite some time. We’re on the other end of that spectrum now. With the warm temperatures, the smelt spawning season is contracted. With cool temperatures, smelt are capable of spawning more than once in the spawning season so they produce a lot more young, even though you have similar numbers of adults … “
Questioner: So if climate change contines the way it’s going now, it doesn’t look good population wise for smelt.
Mr. Castleberry: “It’s a real concern.”
Kevin Shaffer: “For salmon and sturgeon in the eastern Pacific, we’re the southern extent of all the species. For changing environments, it’s the peripheries of the populations are always first to react and usually contract. For other species in California, from a biodiversity standpoint, you live in a state that has unbelievable diversity because of the geology and hydrology we have. We also are looking at our amphibian species, our desert fish species and our trout species, most of those are much more isolated than salmon. There are places you can still go in California where you’ve got relatively cool water and some salmon populations doing okay. Spring run in the Central Valley is a really good example. Three of our populations did fairly well this year, but the other three did not. And one of those is the largest population. I put up a slide of coho salmon rescue on Scott River last year; it doesn’t look like we’re going to have to do a coho salmon resuce on Scott River this year, but we already did Redwood Creek rescue in Sonoma County for coho salmon; we’ve been doing it for about 7 days.”
Mr. Shaffer continues: “There’s a lot of diversity, and for anadromous species, this is one reason they are the way they are. I’ve worked a lot on fires and one of the things on fires is across the West, fires have never cause extirpation. Why? Because there have always been enough animals that come back and repopulate an area. So for what will hold true hopefully is for fall run, spring run, steelhead, and sturgeon is that there will be populations to repopulate. We see this in Washington, we see this in Oregon, we’ve seen this in Arizona. This is why I think all of us are concerned about winter-run, which is a single population. We focus on spring run because there are few, and in the valley, with fall run is that we’ve got a really significant industry and we’ve got two other states and another country wondering what are you going to do about those animals coming out, but temperature is an issue somewhere. I think I’m really more concerned about just the amount of water.” 
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