In science news this week: Operation smelt recovery: Protecting endangered fish in the Delta; A New Atlas for Dealing With Rising Seas in the Bay Area; Where the Larval Things Are: Bodega Marine Lab Uses Robot Larvae to Help Solve Mysteries of Sea Creatures’ Life Cycles; Lengthy Study Shows Value of Soil Health and Forest Restoration after Damaging Events; Thinning Forests, Prescribed Fire Before Drought Reduced Tree Loss; Hot spots in rivers that nurture salmon ‘flicker on and off’ in Bristol Bay region; and more …
Operation smelt recovery: Protecting endangered fish in the Delta: “About seven miles north of Rio Vista in Yolo County, DWR’s Sentinel research vessel gently approaches the underwater cages. DWR researchers snap into action, lifting the large black steel enclosures from the muddy water and guiding them with a hydraulic crane onto the ship’s deck. Inside each metal cage is precious cargo: a school of Delta smelt, the region’s most delicate and endangered fish, gleaming in inches of water. Nicole Kwan, a DWR Environmental Scientist and field lead for the project, unlatched the first cage and peeked inside. “We definitely have survivors!” she announced. … ” Read more from DWR News here: Operation smelt recovery: Protecting endangered fish in the Delta
A New Atlas for Dealing With Rising Seas in the Bay Area: “Imagine watching the rise of a king tide. Now instead of the water ebbing out to the Bay as the tide turns, it stays. The high water level becomes the new normal high tide, splashing over roads and bike paths, and rising up through porous artificial fill on a twice-daily basis, and eventually threatening critical infrastructure, low-lying communities, and the ecosystems of the Bay. It’s a sobering vision of a new reality if we don’t act quickly. We see precursors of this future already: highway interchanges flooding for hours at a time; the months-long shutdown of State Route 37 this past winter. … ” Read more from Bay Nature here: A New Atlas for Dealing With Rising Seas in the Bay Area
Where the Larval Things Are: Bodega Marine Lab Uses Robot Larvae to Help Solve Mysteries of Sea Creatures’ Life Cycles: ““There’s a real contrast between life on land and life in the water in terms of tracking organisms,” says Steven Morgan, Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis, whose research is based at UC Davis’ Bodega Marine Lab. “We’re used to the idea of tracking our kids, or tracking mammals, but we can’t really do that with marine larvae. While we’re used to tracking adult creatures on land, in the water many adult creatures are sedentary. It’s their tiny larvae that do most of the traveling.” Marine larvae are very small…certainly not good subjects for implanted tracking devices or radio collars. “Given that we can’t track marine larvae like we would track creatures on land, how do we find out their fates? ... ” Read more from Environmental Monitor here: Where the Larval Things Are: Bodega Marine Lab Uses Robot Larvae to Help Solve Mysteries of Sea Creatures’ Life Cycles
Lake Tahoe clarity level bounces back: “A return to more normal weather and streamflow conditions in 2018 saw Lake Tahoe’s annual clarity value improve dramatically to 70.9 feet. This represents a 10.5-foot increase over the 2017 value. That is according to a report of Lake Tahoe clarity released by the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center. Lake clarity can swing widely from day to day and year to year. Long-term averages help to smooth the effects of variable weather and lake conditions. The five-year average lake clarity is currently 70.3 feet, an increase of almost a foot from the previous five-year running average. ... ” Read more from UC Davis here: Lake Tahoe clarity level bounces back
Plenty of fish in the stream: “Earth is a blue planet, with less than a third of its surface rising above the oceans that dominate the globe. However, of all the water bathing our world, only about 2% is free of salt. Flowing in streams, filling lakes, and locked away in ice, this minimal amount of freshwater represents a measly 0.01% of all the available aquatic habitat. In spite of this, a remarkable 40% of all fish species live in freshwater. Scientists have spent more than a century puzzling over the mystery of high freshwater fish diversity — in fact, fish were the first group of animals for which patterns of past biodiversity were systematically documented (see Louis Agassiz’s 1843 book Reserches sur les Poissons fossils) Now, the relatively recent advent of genetic tools has provided new insights into these patterns. … ” Read more from FishBio here: Plenty of fish in the stream
Lengthy Study Shows Value of Soil Health and Forest Restoration after Damaging Events: “A nine-year experiment by a UC Merced Department of Life and Environmental Sciences professor and his colleagues is illuminating the importance of soil carbon in maintaining healthy and functioning ecosystems because of its influence on the microbial communities that live in soil. These communities’ health can help researchers understand the effects of climate change. Professor Stephen C. Hart and graduate student Nicholas Dove published a new paper entitled “ Carbon Control on Terrestrial Ecosystem Function across Contrasting Site Productivities: The Carbon Connection Revisited ” in the prestigious journal Ecology this week, showing that reducing the carbon plants input into soil drastically affects microbial life. That can lead to many downstream consequences, including the leaching of nitrogen and other nutrients from the soil — where they are beneficial — to aquatic ecosystems — where they are harmful. Carbon reductions are often the result of “disturbance events” such as wildfires and deforestation. ... ” Read more from UC Merced here: Lengthy Study Shows Value of Soil Health and Forest Restoration after Damaging Events
Thinning Forests, Prescribed Fire Before Drought Reduced Tree Loss: “Thinning forests and conducting prescribed burns may help preserve trees in future droughts and bark beetle epidemics expected under climate change, suggests a study from the University of California, Davis. The study, published in the journal Ecological Applications, found that thinning and prescribed fire treatments reduced the number of trees that died during the bark beetle epidemic and drought that killed more than 129 million trees across the Sierra Nevada between 2012-2016. ... ” Read more from UC Davis here: Thinning Forests, Prescribed Fire Before Drought Reduced Tree Loss
Hot spots in rivers that nurture salmon ‘flicker on and off’ in Bristol Bay region: “Chemical signatures imprinted on tiny stones that form inside the ears of fish show that two of Alaska’s most productive salmon populations, and the fisheries they support, depend on the entire watershed. Sockeye and Chinook salmon born in the Nushagak River and its network of streams and lakes in southwest Alaska use the whole basin as youngsters when searching for the best places to find prey, shelter and safety from predators. From birth until the fish migrate to the ocean a year later is a critical period for young salmon to eat and grow. By analyzing each fish’s ear stone—called an otolith—scientists have found that different parts of the watershed are hot spots for salmon production and growth, and these favorable locations change year to year depending on how climate conditions interact with local landscape features like topography to affect the value of habitats. … ” Continue reading at PhysOrg here: Hot spots in rivers that nurture salmon ‘flicker on and off’ in Bristol Bay region
Are we accidentally treating fish with anti-depressants? Pharmaceuticals in our surface waters: “Pharmaceutical pollution is a growing environmental problem, with traces of drugs (including antibiotics) being found in surface and ground waters all over the globe. Most pharmaceutical pollutants enter the environment through wastewater discharge from sewage treatment plants. These plants, designed to remove more traditional contaminants (like oils, solids, and bacteria), have a hard time removing pharmaceuticals. The burden on these treatment plants is only going to increase, due to human population growth and the continuous development of new drugs. The resulting release of active pharmaceuticals into the environment has the potential to adversely impact wildlife, and determining if and how specific species are affected is an open area of research. ... ” Read more from the EnviroBites here: Are we accidentally treating fish with anti-depressants? Pharmaceuticals in our surface waters
GRACE data contributes to understanding of climate change: “The University of Texas at Austin team that led a twin satellite system launched in 2002 to take detailed measurements of the Earth, called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), reports in the most recent issue of the journal Nature Climate Change on the contributions that their nearly two decades of data have made to our understanding of global climate patterns. Among the many contributions that GRACE has made ... ” Read more from Science Daily here: GRACE data contributes to understanding of climate change
New Studies Increase Confidence in NASA’s Measure of Earth’s Temperature: “A new assessment of NASA’s record of global temperatures revealed that the agency’s estimate of Earth’s long-term temperature rise in recent decades is accurate to within less than a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, providing confidence that past and future research is correctly capturing rising surface temperatures. The most complete assessment ever of statistical uncertainty within the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) data product shows that the annual values are likely accurate to within 0.09 degrees Fahrenheit (0.05 degrees Celsius) in recent decades, and 0.27 degrees Fahrenheit (0.15 degrees C) at the beginning of the nearly 140-year record. ... ” Read more from NASA here: New Studies Increase Confidence in NASA’s Measure of Earth’s Temperature
Maven’s XKCD Comic Pick of the Week …
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About Science News and Reports: This weekly feature, posted every Thursday, is a collection of the latest scientific research and reports with a focus on relevant issues to the Delta and to California water, although other issues such as climate change are sometimes included. Do you have an item to be included here? Submissions of relevant research and other materials is welcome. Email Maven
