If we could get started, please. Perhaps I'll just start with a few housekeeping points. First of all, can you hear me at the back? I don't have this longest voice. But please wave if the sound for any of the speakers drops and we'll bring it forward a microphone. Just on housekeeping, there's name tags at the back. So for speakers, folks, please feel free to pick up your name tag. For emergency exits in this building, should we have to leave the building quickly? There's two exits on either side of the room leading out of the patio, as well as two doors on this side that lead back through the hotel. And I think we're ready to go. Also for the speakers, you'll probably find it easier to walk down this side of the aisle if you're speaking. I'm thinking that there's a lot of cables and other hidden obstacles on the other side. So welcome, everyone. I'm Peter Goodwin. I have the honor of serving as chair of this National Academy's ad hoc committee that's looking at the long-term operations of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project. I'm going to give a very brief introduction. I would also invite the National Academy senior staff to join us today and on Zoom. If I miss anything, please feel free to jump in. We would like to start with a land acknowledgement for this area. And we should take a moment to acknowledge the land on which we are gathered. For thousands of years, the land has been the home of the Patwin people. Today, there are three federally recognized Patwin tribes, the Kakeel Dehe tribe of Winton Indians of the Kalusa Indian community. The Kalusa Dehe Winton Nation and the Yoka Dehe Winton Nation. The Patwin people have remained committed to the stewardship of this land over many centuries. It has been cherished and protected as elders have instructed the young through generations. We are honored and grateful to be here today on their traditional lands. So this committee has been asked to look at the Old and Middle River management, the Shester cold water pooled summerfall delta smelt habitat. And in the first session, we'll be getting some elaboration and further discussion on the charge. And the second part of our charge is to provide recommendations on how modeling and monitoring strategies and decision making can be changed improved for the future of CVP operations. Our goal in this meeting, for those of you who were able to participate in meeting one, we're still very much in the exploratory phase, gaining background information, hearing from the various agencies and interested parties on how this committee can be most useful and effective to the entire science enterprise. We'll be hearing from the action agencies giving presentations, but we will welcome throughout the meeting comments from other participants that are with us today. And really our goal here is to try and elicit discussion on where this committee can provide the most value and guidance to enhance the long-term operations of water management here. And this meeting will also be used to inform the structure of our future committee meetings. So very briefly, we're going to be starting with an elaboration of the statement of task giving reclamation in the Department of Water Resources the opportunity to expand on the written charge. This morning, we'll be looking at the long-term operations monitoring and modeling. And then following that with the summer fall habitat actions monitoring and biological modeling. And there'll also be an opportunity this afternoon for interested party input. Tomorrow we'll be looking at the regulatory framework for the Old and Middle River management, flow management. And that will be followed by the management, what's actually being done in the monitoring and the modeling. And it's with all of our meetings, we will conclude with an open mic session. So who we are, the committee members, we don't have too much time. I just wanted to remind everyone, please go to the webpage to see who we are and the breadth of expertise, which we collectively cover. I'd also like to acknowledge Dr. Ellis and Dr. Thomas, who are the members of the National Academies that are working closely with reclamation and other agencies to put this study together. And in this meeting, we're also joined by Susan Roberts, who heads the Ocean Studies Board of the National Academies, one of the most major programs within the entire Academy. So thank you, Susan, for being with us over the next few days. And on behalf of the committee, we welcome input during the breaks and the sessions. And we also want to thank our committee members and the state to reach out to us. So it's daunting to try and pull together a recap of meeting one. This was the topics which we covered in meeting one. I know many of you are here. I won't go through that, but we learned just how complex the Delta Ecology is, the emerging role and important role of climate change, as well as an overview of background of both the Central and the Central. And we also really appreciated the open mic session. And based on this meeting, you'll see there's a lot more time and opportunity for interaction questions from the committee, as well as opportunities to engage with the speakers and people that have taken the effort to participate in the meeting. So what did we learn? In that first meeting, it was the first of the three meetings which we're using for what we're going to undertake. We're very appreciative of the more than 20 presenters and panelists that informed the committee's work last time. And there were also 18 comments in the open mic session. We also received extensive post-meeting written comments to the National Academies. And we'd like to thank you for that. And we'd also like to thank everyone for following the rules which were outlined of how the National Academy has done this, putting it through the staff people with the information that ensures that your information goes into the record. And we'll get full consideration by the committee. We also learned just how dynamic and complex this system is. And this is truly a socio-environmental system from my university NSF and a whole system on this. And this has to be the poster child. There's also a distributed science community working on the knowledge base. And there's pros and cons to that. One of the challenges, of course, is it's very open for innovation compared with the other systems around the US. But the challenge is, is how do you coalesce that science into a common knowledge base upon which decisions can be made? We also learned that much is now understood by the system, but there's still some important gaps to inform the decision-making that occurs. We've also learned, and we appreciate the feedback that there's considerable scientific research completed, and many documents were added to our bibliography. But there's also some significant efforts in progress and under review by various entities. And we also heard that traditional knowledge has much to offer in this state, and that tribal input is just beginning to be integrated in decision-making processes. So on behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank everyone for their engagement and to emphasize that we welcome all input through our public meetings. If you wish to present to the committee in the open mic, if you could please sign up either through contacting Maya or filling out the form at the back of the room, it would help us allocate a time to the various speakers so everyone gets a chance to talk. So if we know by 10 o'clock, we can get back to the speakers to say what time window they'll have. Please remember, if you're here in person, please sign in as well as a second sign-in sheet at the back just so we can have a record of the various contributors. And so with that, I'll stop there. I don't know if Laura or Susan or Stacey has, did I miss anything? No, no, it's wonderful here. So Susan, you okay? I'll just mention that there are copies of tasks on the table in the back. If you would like to refer to it as we go through the presentations today, there are no copies of the public agenda because it was just in so much flux. So if you need that, you can get it off of the committee's website. There is an updated version on the website. Right. And so when I'll go into the first session, and we appreciate both Dr. Mooney and Dr. Grimaldo coming to talk and elaborating a little on the written charge. And so I'll introduce both speakers together. Dr. Mooney is really the architect of this whole initiative. So we're very appreciative of that. He currently serves as the area manager of the Bay Delta office in the California Great Basin region of the reclamation. Prior to being appointed as the area manager, he served as the deputy area manager. He's also served as the chief of program management branch, the administrator of CVPA that we've had so much about in meeting one. And going back to our time, he also served as the lead engineer for the San Joaquin River Restoration Program. He received his PhD from Colorado State University in engineering. Lenny Grimaldo serves as the state water project environmental director for the Department of Water Resources. Lenny oversees environmental planning, permitting compliance activities associated with the long-term operations of the state water project. He currently leads DWR's endangered species consultation on both the state water project and the Central Valley project operations. Prior to his policy position, Lenny has spent more than 25 years as a researcher in the San Francisco estuary, where his research is highly regarded in food web dynamics, fish entrainment, ecology of listed species with reclamation department of water resources and ICF. Lenny received his PhD in ecology from UC Davis. So welcome and thank you for being here this morning. Thank you. Watch your step as you guys go around. I'm not sure this is your courts. Do you like this at the table? If you could sit at the table, that would be wonderful. And we're going to, if it's okay with you, we're going to have a table of all of the LTO core activities behind you as a reference for people to kind of put the three things that are in the statement of task into the larger perspective. Great. Thanks for reminding me that I was a researcher once. That's being on the boat. I'll say a lot of my doctorate program was doing surveys of many streams in North Central Mississippi. So I'll also share that it's nice to be out in the field every now and then and see real water. Do you want me to start? I don't know that we need to do a table. Yeah. And our impetus here is to better understand because this is planned to be a multi-cycle activity. Why these three particular actions rose to the surface and are the subject of cycle one. Excellent. So well, first of all, thank you all for agreeing to serve on this panel and to help us out with the operation of the Central Valley project and the state water project. I'm also excited for the opportunity for my staff to get a chance to talk to you all, both today and on the tours. I think I've had a handful of opportunities that just meet with experts from different areas in my career. Each one has been super valuable in sharing different perspectives and helping me see and understand how different folks think about problems and problem-solve and each one has been just a wonderful experience. So I'm super grateful for your time and expertise and interactions with my folks. So I think when we started this panel, my overarching interest is to learn how we can use these panels to better our operation. So as Laura mentioned, we're planning on doing it at least two. So we have an opportunity for some feedback on what went well for us sharing information with you, what went well for you sharing information with us and where we can do better in the future to get the most out of it. I think we've worked pretty closely with the Delta Science Program on how to structure reviews and they've been just super instrumental in helping us formulate our thoughts on how to proceed forward. So maybe getting into the three topics. We have our Old and Middle River reverse flow management, our summer and fall Delta smelt habitat action, and then our activities up in Shasta. Now we pick these three topics because we think that there's so much going on. There's a need to make the scope manageable. But we also think that these topics are ones that have high value, both for species and for water supply. And then each one of these is in a slightly different state of development in terms of the state of the science. And so we'll have the opportunity to look at how we interact with a different state of the research going forward. So it should be fun. So if we dive more into Old and Middle River for reverse flow management, from my perspective, that's an area that just has a tremendous body of literature, data sets and models. There's just an awful lot of information out there. That's not true for the other topics. I think there are certain actions like first flush and some of the basic protections of no more negative than minus 5,000 CFS. Hopefully that number will be very familiar to folks, if not today, then soon, that I think have a whole lot of support. And over time, shifting through the new biological opinions for us in 2008 and 2009, my impression is it's been super effective in limiting entrainment. So it's an action that we think worked. So now we're in a state of refinement. We're looking at how do we speak those different numbers? Where is the right level of actions? What information do we have? What tools do we have? And from my perspective, we're perfecting it. You can all tell me I'm wrong and I'm on the wrong track and we go a different path and that would be helpful input. Well, I'm just giving you my impression there. So I think within OMR, it's important for water supply. The water costs are substantial. So as we look at our models, we can take a conservative approach and be protective. That comes at a cost. And so it's reasonable for a water supply agency to try to refine that to fully understand that water costs. And then as I step back, I think we as agencies dedicate a whole lot of people to managing that in any given year. So from reclamation, there's like five to 10 staff people who spend about half a year real-time managing old and middle river flow management. That's roughly mirrored within our federal fish agencies and the combined federal effort is probably about the same for the state. So I think of 20 to 40 people for half a year working on OMR flow management in real-time. That seems like a ripe area to help us develop science and make that an easier action to take place. And if I start to get philosophical, at a certain point, I think the operation of the projects will longer be the driving force behind species and populations. I don't know that we're there yet, probably not. But having a panel help us pull this information together, understand where have we done enough for the operation of the projects and where can we take our 20 to 40 people and focus their efforts elsewhere. I think we have very high value. But that's perhaps more of a decadal viewpoint. So then shifting over to the summerfall delta-smelt habitat. From my perspective, and you'll hear from the scientists, that's on the other end of the spectrum. We don't have a huge body of literature that really ties to the mechanistic behavior of delta-smelt and how we get them from one year to the next. We do know that we have the delta-smelt don't make it over the summer. I think we have a pretty extensive monitoring data set. We have some great statistical models that help us correlate with various environmental parameters. But I don't know that we have specific mechanisms and actions that we've dialed into a high degree of detail. And so I think that having the panel help us think through that would be very helpful. And then I have the operation of Shasta as something that's kind of in the middle. We have some great tools for estimating the effects of temperature and doing some predictions there. I think we understand the uncertainty of those fairly well. But at the same time, the other thing that we have to do with the knob that we turn in order to achieve those temperatures is to reduce flows. And in most watersheds, most systems, we know that flows are a big driver for fish populations. And I don't think we have good tools for integrating that temperature management in the consequences of reducing flows. I think we have some great literature that we're starting to work into the mix and how to guide our research, how to guide our integration and our investments I think could be very, very helpful. So kind of stepping back overall, I think I see the CVP as unique and special in the sophistication of our water customers, our NGOs, our tribes. And so we're, I may not always feel like it's a great advantage, but I love the engagement of folks and the expertise. And so when we have a panel, there's an opportunity for folks to share me out with just getting that type of engagement and support for the types of actions going forward. And so I think this panel could play a critical role there. My other perspective is I think we have an incredible number of talented staff within the agencies who've done great work pulling together information. They don't have infinite time. They don't have infinite budgets. They don't have a completely free hand. And they're really just navigating all of the constraints and challenges in just a phenomenal way and they're coming up with great results. So my ask for the panel is I think as we look at that, we look at the work that they're doing. There's a recognition of just the expertise in the room from the agencies. And I'd really like your all viewpoint on how do I empower them and equip them and help us invest to take it for the next level and really a forward-looking viewpoint to keep the science progressing. I think with that I'm going to go over to Lenny. Thanks, Dave. And I knew I couldn't be prepared comments from Dave here. He's really good at those. But I just want a second thank you to the panel for diving into this very complex system. I know some of you have been working in this system for a long time and there's a lot being thrown at you. So hopefully we could provide some ideas on the scope that we want you to focus on and I'll cover a couple of those topics. Big picture for us at DWR, we're looking at climate change and where we're at with tools for both looking at weather forecasting, species responses, not just management for today but management over the next 20, 30, 40 years. So any insight, thoughts, comments that you could help provide to just not narrow in on those three topics but expand out and think about how we could use different tools, different approaches for dealing with climate change will be very important and that's a driving force for what the Department of Water Resources is focused in on now. We have something called weather whiplash.  We just don't we just we're in climate change and right now we're responding to what we're seeing and we need to stop responding. We need a better way of approaching climate change and our management actions. This year is a great example where out of the blue we're seeing steelhead coming down in big numbers. We've never had a steelhead action. This year we exceeded our 100% threshold on steelhead and folks don't know what's going on. And you know, honestly, we have no idea but I think these are the things where we need to think about how weather and hydrology and how the changing climate may be affecting some of the patterns that we're already seeing different over the last few years. Hopefully you all could provide some comments on the climate change aspect. For Olden River Management, I think last time I pleaded to this group please take a look at the last report that the NASP panel did. A lot of work has been done over the last 15 years and I know I have an assignment, Laura, to provide some additional information there. I think what we want to do is sort of tailor that into a narrative that helps you all focus on this is what we did this is the scope but now we need some additional items looked at. So one good example and I'm hoping that the panel picks up on this is we need a better understanding of population impacts that we have through our Olden Middle River management and not be as focused on salvage, just the numbers of salvage. We want to be able to put that in context as what does this mean for cohort replacement? What does this mean for impacting population growth rates? I'm not saying that we haven't done that we've actually done quite a bit of work there including for Delta Smelt and we can send you some of those references but I don't know if we have a complete package for all the species there so if you all could focus in on providing some feedback there I think that would be extremely helpful. And I think Dave sort of touched on this so thinking about the salmon life cycle their exposure to the projects is pretty small in terms of direct entrainment. I'm not talking about there's other exposures from the dams all the way but in terms of how we operate for OMR management that's a limited window for their lifespan right so then they got to go to the bay how are they using restoration then you know they got to go to the ocean how are they surviving in the ocean then they need to come back how are they dealing with thiamine deficiencies there's a whole life cycle here so trying to understand the importance of that life stage and that loss of that life stage the full life cycle is really important and that's not to say that we don't need to provide those protections right through a regulatory framework because the fish agencies as our partners you know they're on the hook for the protection of these species in some cases the recovery outside the permits I think that's all we're all straddling for recovery of these populations so putting your thoughts on paper about how we could do that better would be extremely helpful including looking at the existing life cycle models and maybe there's something in there that we missed or maybe we need some additional modeling there so I would appreciate some feedback into the salmon component of this longfin smelt's new to the federal government they're petitioned for listing on the horizon the decision the state we've been dealing with longfin for since 2009 so I think there's a lot of work to be done there I think we're a little bit behind on the longfin smelt side of things compared to Delta Smelt as you know from the 2009 or maybe you don't know I should say going back to the 2009 2008 opinions that were highly controversial played out in federal court that really drove a lot of the science for Delta Smelt so for longfin smelt I think we're a little bit behind there and I think there's new tools that we're developing we're developing a life cycle model with the health of the fish and wildlife service but I think any insights that you can provide on longfin smelt while we still have good numbers could be helpful there because we definitely see them at our project facilities probably in higher abundance than any other fish that we salvage by the listed species at the moment now there has been new science that talks about the population effects of those early life histories but I think we just need some additional work there to close the loop on what we need to be doing next finally I don't want us to be so focused on the old mar management that we're just looking at the losses at the facilities I think Louise Conrad touched on this last time there's a lot and Matt and Steve Lindley there are a lot of other actions that we're doing that help bolster abundance of the fish and the estuary and I think we have to think about that in context of our old mar management if we're doing restoration and that's improving fish numbers that's great so now how do we respond and how we dial in the response to those increasing numbers things like that could be helpful or where we restore habitat or how we restore habitat it's not entirely out of scope to think about how these pieces all may be connected so I encourage some investigation into these other activities that we're doing including things like our non-physical barrier that prevent salmon from we hope prevent salmon from entering the interior delta and then lastly for the summerfall habitat action I think Dave covered a lot of that that's going to be talked about a lot today so I think I'll defer a lot of that to the great technical folks that have been working on this a long time for me the main uncertainty there is that action was developed for a wild delta smelt and now we're moving to a phase where it looks like we're relying on supplemental culture releases of delta smelt and I think for me I want to understand what sort of tools what sort of information should we be looking at to help inform whether those cultured delta smelt respond the same way as wild delta smelt for this action in the summer and fall so I'll leave it at that for the summerfall habitat action and I won't comment on Shasta because DWR it's not our project so thank you everybody well thank you very much thanks for those clarifying remarks and I'll just open it to the committee as any follow up from what you've heard and I think well it's worth spending an extra five minutes or so while we have both Dave and Lenny here hang on one second we're going to get the mic to you we're going to be walking around with the mic can you turn it off oh this whole point is moving during Q&A please turn your cameras on on zoom thank you the host has stopped it so anyway my question is I've been thinking about the modeling elements and we hear a lot about life cycle models for example so I'm curious how the models are being used in particular how the life cycle model is being used which species any species well I think we could start with Delta Smell so for Delta Smell and Matt Nobrigo who's here speak to this and I'll put them on the hook for that but we use it I think in two different ways one for planning thinking about how when we're for example going through the consultation these different effects that these physical and biological conditions may have on Delta Smell and then thinking about how our project may affect those different physical and biological factors I think that's a very important aspect of the life cycle model but two I think for me what the life cycle model did was contextualize the importance of different factors that we argued about for years including OMR management and maybe fall X2 management maybe there's something new I think Matt said last time summer management may be important so I think it's providing a good framework for how we should be thinking about things in the future especially under climate change and I think that's where because we get so focused on the consultation and what we're doing now we don't think about that big picture piece as well and I'm guilty of that right because I'm we got to manage what's in front of us now but I think about that quite a bit for like for Longfin Smell there's been a couple life cycle models that have been developed we're working on another one I think ultimately we want to use that life cycle model to better understand the direct project effects on Longfin but we also want to use that maybe for habitat planning I think there might be some useful information that come out of that model that informs habitat which I don't think the previous two life cycle models did a a really good job at no indictment on those papers that just I don't think we thought about it in the same way because at the time that those life cycles were developed we didn't know that Longfin Smell were using all these restored habitats and where they were using them so now we have new papers that show that Longfin are spawning in areas outside the upper estuary South Bay they're in Napa River Petaluma River they can occupy salinities much higher than we thought so there's a lot of new information and they occupy actual Martians like Tully Red I don't know if that's still on the field trip within three months of that area being breached it was full of Longfin and I was out there you know we were collecting them it was amazing we had one of those woohoo moments we're seeing Longfin within three months of that being breached so I think as that science is coming along and we can build that into the life cycle model I think that could be quite helpful for some of our restoration planning as well very good thank you I would add to that I think everything Lenny said and then we also have some very specific tools for very specific mechanisms very specific stressors and so having our life cycle models help us stitch that all together into a bigger picture is one of the big uses that we have for reclamation I think we'll go to Steve and we'll probably have to cut this discussion off it's me that died into the weeds a little bit but when you talk about the life cycle models what are the performance measures you're looking at success for these critters and represent the life cycle model is it a on this level density growth reproduction success and I know this could be all of us clearly trying to find out what is happening which one's part of the life cycle model needs to be tested but I won't so I'm going to do the easy thing and punt that to the technical folks they're going to come since we only have a couple minutes but they could probably spend a lot more time answering that question and now that it's been teed up for them they should have a really good response I like Lenny's answer maybe the part I'd add to it is we have multiple hats that we wear within reclamation so one of it is consultation on the operation of the projects and we have this whole suite of other authorities and directives to do good things for fish and so I think it depends on how it's being applied so for operations we're looking at what is the effect of the project on these species and can we parse that out and then from the broader goal we're looking at the best investment of resources to help protect and support the environment and our listed species I understand that you're trying to protect a species or perhaps aid us in recovery but is that delta wide population number is that your team factor or is it how many are trained to do this operation today I think the summerfall habitat is one of those talks that provides a really good example where there's certain metrics from that life cycle model that they're measuring and it ties into the monitoring you're going to hear about that in just a bit but I think there's big picture and narrow scope and today you're going to hear a little bit about the narrow scope pieces related to OMR management and the summerfall habitat action for sure I should have done this earlier if you do have a question if you can just turn your name card on and it helps us manage the time just a little bit better so with that seeing no more immediate questions just one thing I might add both Dave and Nanny thanks for being here and both of you just touched on the emerging technologies and ideas and I know you've got a whole group of PhDs in your shops that are probably tracking these to but please let us know because we've got ideas but I know a lot of things have been tried already and we don't want to reinvent the wheel or make recommendations that you simply have not worked in the system so with that perhaps we'll give a quick round of applause to both Lenny and Nanny and that elucidation was very helpful please be careful okay you've got a prize for managing the obstacle course so our first technical session this morning is an introduction or a preamble to the monitoring of the long term operations and the actions and we have two speakers I'll introduce them both welcome back to Dr. Josh Israel from Reclamation Josh serves as the Science Division Manager in Reclamation's Play Delta office he's also worked on drought impacts of winter run Chinook salmon the yellow bypass fish habitat and fish passage modeling more recently Josh has focused on leading staff to incorporate decision analysis tools into Central Valley project real-time and long-term planning exercises designing a comprehensive acoustic telemetry program in the Central Valley in Bay Delta and establishing biological objectives to inform the effectiveness of monitoring Josh for those of you who don't know him received his PhD in ecology from UC Davis also we have Dr. Louise Conrad from Department of Water Resources she serves as the California Department of Water Resources lead scientist Louise works within the DWR executive team to guide the applied scientists to inform water resources management and facilities the application of best practices for conducting and communicating sciences at DWR and again I think it's indicative of the system that directors have the scientists deeply embedded with their leadership teams prior to taking on the lead scientist roles Louise served as the Deputy Executive Officer for the Delta Stewardship Council for the development processes public workshops and served on the editorial board for the 2022 issue of the state of Bay Delta science she also received her PhD from UC Davis in animal behavior so welcome Josh and welcome Louise I don't know if it's going to go first I'm going to go first Thank you Thank you Thank you finish for me. All right, good morning. Good to see you all again. Thank you for your service on this panel. I am going to cover a few slides by way of introduction and then hand it over to Josh. So we're going to be tag teaming a little bit here. So this again is intended to be an overview of our monitoring enterprise in the Delta or for the projects generally. Good context, I think, for some of the questions you're already asking about how we use the data and our models for informing decisions. And I think the next item on the agenda is about the models specifically. So this is really the data collection aspect. Okay, there we go. Okay, so first before diving into any of the more the specifics, we wanted to cover what we see the general purposes of our monitoring to be. And so this breaks those purposes down into three general categories. The first being real-time operations. And for reclamation and DWR, we need information to inform our day-to-day operations decisions that are required. For example, for the State Water Board's decision 1641, our biological opinions and the incidental take permits require that we meet certain conditions. And OMR is an example of that. We need real-time information in order to determine whether we're meeting specific conditions or encountering a number of fish that meets at the salvage facilities, which you got to see firsthand at your last month's field trip. See if we're getting to a level at which our permits indicate we need to change our operations. The next category here is the status and trends. So these are surveys and they cover everything from primary production to abundance indices for fishes. And in the case of Delta Smelt, there's a survey enhanced Delta Smelt monitoring survey that provides population estimates. These are really important for just understanding. I'm going to show you a slide in a second on the longevity of some of these surveys. But they are important for us to be able to just have baseline knowledge of the system and then use that in many different ways. Those data can be purposed for many different types of applications and analyses to understand generally how actions we're taking may or may not have any impact on the long-term metrics that we have, which again may not be population estimates in all cases, but abundance estimates and species assemblages, the composition of our communities, and in general abundances. Then we're putting as a third category here special studies. This isn't the same thing as status and trend monitoring. This is more of a targeted study to address a very specific hypothesis-based question, often based on conceptual models and might be targeted around the efficacy of certain management actions. So you're going to hear more this afternoon about the summer fall habitat action. Some of our staff are going to speak to that and learn more about some of the special studies that may that inform these specific actions. So I am going to move on here. I'm going to skip this next slide. Sorry, I wanted to go to this one first just to give you an idea of how long term these some of these monitoring programs are. So this is a slide from a presentation that Dr. Rosemary Hartman and I gave at an annual workshop in 2020. This was a fun sort of voluntary exercise that we did just out of curiosity, which was to look at the San Francisco Estuary, our system, alongside the monitoring enterprises of different other systems within the US. So we looked at Chesapeake Bay, Massachusetts Bay, Galveston Bay, and Puget Sound. Again, this was just out of curiosity and we were really interested in the longevity of our monitoring enterprise compared to some others. And so we looked at all these different parameters that we collect in our system, zooplankton, water quality fish, contaminants, phytoplankton, and benthix, and then looked at those same categories across other systems. And so you have here on the x-axis the decades and you can see those very thin lines. Those are really just zeros for no sampling. But Chesapeake is standing out here as the longest running programs going back to the 50s and our estuary is not far behind starting up mostly in the 60s and that thickness of the line indicates the intensity of sampling. So this was just a fun thing that we wanted to show you that many of these are very long-standing and comparable to some of the longer standing ecological monitoring programs in the country. So going back to this slide, I also wanted to note before handing it over to Josh that you're probably not going to be surprised to hear that there's been a lot of attention on the monitoring enterprise and reviews of it. And one of the ones that I want to point out is a pretty recent one from the Delta Independent Science Board and two of the panel members here are authors of this report where this was a really ambitious monitoring review that took on a huge task of inventorying and examining the full monitoring enterprise. This is not a technical review but recommended, among other things, the need for more routine monitoring program evaluations to identify gaps, redundancies, and ensure relevance. And I think the other examples here are other ones that are either ongoing or past monitoring review exercises. This middle one is science advancements for increasing management value of life-stage monitoring networks for winter run. That is really examined the full network of monitoring for winter run and made several recommendations, many of which have been implemented. And over the years there's just been a number of reviews including one of the Delta Juvenile Fish Monitoring Program, the Environmental Monitoring Program, among other efforts including one current one that is looking at the five Department of Fish and Wildlife Monitoring Surveys that are listed here. I won't, just in the interest of time, not going to go into detail, but are really looking at the spatial balance of these five surveys and how they can be better balanced and really represent the system for the species they're intended to monitor. So I wanted to mention and with respect to the this independent science board review that we are still in the process of standing up a real specific program for regular review, which was one of the recommendations of the ISB report. And I think that is in the works, it's happening. And I think that it's going to be really helpful from this panel to hear how the monitoring efforts that really specifically support the actions that are in your charge, how those might be helpful to enhance in order to serve the objectives of those actions, those management actions that we have. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Josh to finish the presentation and then maybe there's time for questions after. So I think that's your first slide, Josh. Okay, thanks, Louise. Thanks to the committee for joining us for another few days. So I'm going to quickly walk through sort of the different types of monitoring that are happening in the system related to sort of long term operations. We could spend a couple of weeks talking about this. So please let Laura know if any of these things pique your interest, we can get you study plans, annual reports, links to websites. And of course, I'm sure people would love to come in and talk with you about specifics. So, you know, to start to start with the environmental drivers thinking about flow and water quality. You know, there is a lot of gauges and water quality songs around the Bay Delta continuously monitoring flow and water quality constituents. A lot of this goes on to our CDEC and USGS's NWIS pages. There also is discrete sampling that happens on a monthly basis by the Environmental Monitoring Program, which is a compliance program for D1641. And then many of the FISH surveys also collect flow and water quality data associated with their discrete samples. So, primary productivity is sort of the next level, right? Trying to understand the algal communities, you know, and trying to characterize what's going on with desirable, less desirable or even harmful algal blooms. You know, our interest here really and what we aspire to have is a monitoring program that will help us measure the biomass and composition across what we say regions and seasons. So, we have quite a bit of this data collected again through continuous programs, as well as discrete programs, grab samples. And then what's not on this slide is a USGS project, which I think was included in your handouts in the first meeting, where they're also looking at primary productivity in different regions of the Delta. So, then we're interested in the bugs, right? What eats the algae? So, the secondary productivity and the Environmental Monitoring Program goes out on a monthly basis and samples various regions of the Delta. And also, many of the FISH surveys in the mid-2000s started to collect data on what the diet was and basically collecting zoocomite and information to try to look at the diet of FISH. And you can see we have a pretty broad array of sites that get sampled. All the different color dots that you see are sort of different monitoring programs that happen in sort of different months, depending on seasonality. Obviously, happen in different regions. So, then the FISH monitoring, we've got a lot of FISH monitoring that happens. I believe the red dots here are what's called the Enhanced Delta Smelt Monitoring Program, which is a randomized sampling. So, they're not doing all those sites every week. But you can also see that there are some studies that go all the way down into the South Bay and go as well. There's beach saining that goes up into the lower Sacramento there and into the lower San Joaquin River. And then the salvage sites, of course, would be on the very end of the Delta as well. So, quite a lot of FISH monitoring that's occurred. And then finally, we can talk more about tributary monitoring when we go up to Redding. This just wanted to give you an idea for sort of the status and trend monitoring that occurs across the tributaries. So, we do a lot of, when I say we, I mean the Science Enterprise, a lot of it's Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife and Pacific States Marine Fisheries Committee or Council folks. So, we do a lot of red surveys. There's also weirs and fishways that are using passives, sonar and video cameras to collect adult escapement data on these tributaries. There are also a lot of rotary screw traps along the main stem, the main site being downstream of the, if you can't see my cursor, the sort of at the top of the Sacramento River, Red Left Diversion Dam, we may go visit there. And then as you move downstream, we have a Delta entry riverry screw trap site and then a number of trawl sites that help us with operating the Delta cross channel gates and also helping us try to estimate production entering and exiting the Delta. There's a lot of new monitoring going on as well. Special studies associated with trying to estimate juvenile production of steelhead and spring bunch of salmon that isn't on this map. And then you can see like in that science advancements for salmon, we actually have a couple acoustic telemetry sites that we now are using regularly. We have about 10 years worth of pretty regular acoustic telemetry survival information now on the Sacramento River and for through Delta survival. So, you know, monitoring is really happening very broadly across many regions in the Bay Delts and the tributaries being supported by many different agencies. It happens really at different scales depending on the objective, whether it's real time monitoring or a status and trend monitoring. It can focus on many different performance measures. And I think Steven asked a really good question about, you know, are we, for instance, using life cycle models to measure specific things, which maybe then our predictions to compare to some of our observations. And it's a great question. I think we'll get into that over the next two days, hopefully. We're working to really document when we take actions in our seasonal and annual reports in our knowledge base papers. So we have a series of seasonal and annual reports focused topically on things like old and middle river management or cold water pool management, summerfall habitat action. And then like I said, we're really aiming to try to focus our monitoring to be able to test model predictions and support doing decision analysis on our activities. So I think that that is it. And I just really appreciate all of the folks who are constantly in the field collecting data for us. You can see it's a really large network. I love the word distributed. I heard earlier a group of folks. So really appreciative of the effort of hundreds of folks out there. Well, thank you, Josh, into the front. And we'll go around with the questions. Perhaps Joe, we'll start with you. I haven't really been in the cell, so I don't know if you can see it yet. Oh, sorry to hear you say this. It's okay. Go ahead. I'm going to wait for the microphone. Yes, please do. I love the button to cross the line. And it says through the middle of the button. Just take a chance. Thank you. Finally, not a mystery. So I had a couple of questions. Kind of reflecting on what I heard might not have been exactly what you said. Let me talk about earlier was to try to think about OMR, for instance, in the context of all the other things that are happening to the fish, right? That this potential loss could be in the context of the overall population. You said, and so one way of thinking about that is to think about that stressor in the context of other stressors. And for years, we've been talking about contaminants and pathogens and and plastics and things like that. And your presentations were silent on that today, even though that might not be something that you pay for, it may be information that you use. And so or should be using could be supplementing or whatever. So I would like to hear something about that. The other thing is that a lot of the other things that you talked about were kind of grab sampling or sometimes time series of what was going on at a point in terms of tracking or quality parameter. We might be going out and catching fish or taking a zooplankton sample. But do we actually understand what's going on? Are we measuring any process biological processes as opposed to just what is you know, I'm not biologist, as you know, stands stock apart, right? Or how many fish do we know? How much are they growing in this environment versus the environment? Do we know something about productivity as opposed to biomass, those kinds of things? So could you talk about one of both of those questions? Yeah, you're talking a lot about vital rates. So that's the word. And I think that falls in the category of those special studies that we talked about. So I couldn't add that to my talking points for that slide, that the special studies would be the ones that would take on those vital rates, because that's not captured in our monitoring programs per se. Should it be? Could it be? So, Kenjombe, are you on time? Yeah, well, just I think getting to say reproduction rates of zooplankton might be hard in a monitoring program that goes out every month or so. And so that's where, and there are examples. Once you catch it, what you can tell about where you've had recent been or whatever. So yeah, we have, we can send you studies that have been funded by DWR, Reclamation, others that... We're talking about monitoring here, Louise. We're not talking about special studies. I do understand the difference from that categorization. I'm saying, should you be advancing your routine monitoring to be capturing some vital rate measurements on a routine basis, as opposed to we'll do a study here then and then we'll do a study there? I think that whether it's part of monitoring or special studies, we have to be clear about what question we're, what are we trying to evaluate? What question are you trying to evaluate with the data that you showed us? If it wasn't exactly clear what questions we were answering with those data, you were collecting a lot of information. I'm not going to be argumentative, but I mean, I think that if you're saying you need to have a question to measure a vital rate in the field, then you need to have questions. I mean, you did say that ENP was compliance monitoring for 1641, right? A get compliance monitoring. If any of that other monitoring that you showed us is not required compliance monitoring, then what is the question that you're trying to consider? So, I think your point is a good one. And I think it is potentially important for us to be measuring vital rates. However, I don't think we've necessarily developed the models to say that vital rates are still important. And so I think these things go hand in hand is as we're moving more towards using this idea of having models that make predictions, where there's an equation that has a vital rate in it that's somehow linked to hydrodynamics or temperatures or environmental drivers around biogeochemical constituent. And then we start to say, well, how do those look in nature? And how are those impacted by our actions? Then it becomes more important to monitor it. And so I think it's a little for me, it's a little bit of a chicken or the egg. Do we do the model first or do we do the monitoring first? And I think places like measuring vital rates, good place to start is in the laboratory. And I think there have been studies over the last few years looking over your shoulder at Brian Bergamosky, who's going to join the summer ball habitat action monitoring and modeling discussion. And I know USGS and DWR and reclamation have worked on some of these questions, but we have not incorporated them into our models for things like habitat actions surrounding how to create a better food web to grow fish better. And I think that's something that perhaps would then require some modification or redesign to a monitoring program to see what's going on with those things in nature. So perhaps we'll go to Joe. I don't think we're going to get to all of the questions in here, but we'll get to as many as we can before the break. Thanks for the nice summary. So the real-time monitoring. Joe, can you hit the switch on the other side? Thank you. So the real-time monitoring is quite useful for your monitoring and all these things, but the second and third items you add because status monitoring, as well as the trans monitoring, particular trans monitoring, that's kind of tied into these adaptive management issue. And that's a really a recipe for adaptive management, because you use some of my models. This is how much adaptive management you bring in in this part of monitoring and practice. Adaptive management of the monitoring enterprise? Yes. So that's what I was getting at with the reviews slide, that there have been a number of reviews that are on that slide, and even other ones, and the winter run science advancements paper, and that made a couple of recommendations. Those have been largely implemented. I would say that's adaptive management of a monitoring enterprise. The larger Delta Independent Science Board review has a whole recommendation for how you can approach this in adaptive management, as you know. And that's where I think we still have some work to do to advance that, getting that into a more routinized look at our monitoring programs, evaluating whether they're achieving what is needed for their purpose, the metrics that they're trying to assess, and then change them as would be appropriate for management relevance. And I think the monitoring review also points to there's sometimes a gap between what the monitoring program has been doing that has been set up and in place for many decades, and what the current questions are. There, you know, the Sassoon Marsalinity Control Gate Action didn't exist until 2018. So, you know, we, and I think that's an example where we plugged in a lot of existing monitoring and put it to good use so that, and Rosie will talk about this. Sorry, Rosemary Hartman, you don't all know her. But she'll talk about that and how then we plugged in additional monitoring, additional work to specifically look at that action. So I would say that's an example of real-time adaptive management of monitoring programs where you can use what's there, but enhance if needed. So to address specific hypotheses, which is a hypothesis-based monitoring program, but in terms of status and trends, how we are evaluating our monitoring programs, that is what needs some work. And that report from the Independent Science Board, I would say already does a good job of making that recommendation. And I think what's helpful for this panel is more specific looks at the programs that are going to be informing those management actions that are in your charge. And what are tweaks that, that's a high-level review. What are technical advancements that might be achievable for those specific actions? And obviously, as we consider our part of the improvement. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Joel. Can I add one thing, please? Oh, please do. So, thank you. So just on this issue of adaptive management suggests that you're measuring performance of something. And I think a lot of times that's changed through time. And I think our aspiration to be able to look across regions and seasons and use status and trend monitoring to measure the biomass and the composition of these different trophic levels is not fully implemented at this point. And I don't know if that vision of trying to measure across regions and seasons, the biomass and composition of phytoplankton up to the fish community, are the right performance measures. And I think by identifying performance measures for status and trend monitoring, I think it can lead to port and redesigns and modifications. Because what's important to status and trends or what you're measuring, not the methods that you're using. And too often we get caught in methods being what we're trying to maintain. And that can be a problem when you're trying to use the most science-based approach because innovation and technology is always advancing. Counting methods and classification methods and enumeration methods that are important for getting to vital rates or better fish production estimates or better estimates of biomass. So. And that is a quick question. I think so. Okay, and then Steve, if you don't mind, we'll take the break and you could follow up in the answer to my question. Oh, he did. Good anticipation, Josh. So, Pat. Thank you. Thanks for your presentation. Thanks for all the work you're doing and your team to do. So we're all sort of dancing around the same. Even I think Joe was asking about adaptive relative to the monitoring program. I'm thinking about using the monitoring program to adapt to other things. And so it would help me if you could give a couple of concrete examples as to how the monitoring might have affected an action. So I think obviously how we estimate salvage has been historically important for understanding losses at the facilities. But one of the examples I would look to is, you know, as less and less wild smelt were available, we moved to thinking about using turbidity as an environmental surrogate. And we've continually refined sort of our environmental monitoring around turbidity in the south central and north delta to better understand what's going on with the turbidity fields. And now we continue to refine our operations for old and middle river management around the stations that we use for measuring turbidity. The, you know, we haven't really played much with like the value of that turbidity being high or moderate or the magnitude of turbidity. But where that turbidity is matters to fish migration and delta smelt migration. And that's been an advancement that sort of happened since 2009 because of a lot of efforts of the folks in the back of the room. It's more in context as opposed to trigger or something. Well, it's used as a trigger. So if we see turbidity outside of the south delta, like further north and then at the salvage facilities starting to be high, we actually will take preemptive actions to try to reduce and train at risk for that season. And we'll go to instead of having reversing flows of minus 5,000. Or if it happens early in the season, you may actually have reversing flows that are even greater than minus 5,000. We'll step down to have reversing flows of minus 3,500 or minus 2,000, depending on the duration and the specific timing and life stages that we're trying to avoid and train at risk of. Okay. Great. Thank you very much for that. That was a lot. Rich, did you have anything to add? Yeah, I think those are all great examples. The other point I just, at a broad scale, some of the flood plain monitoring work that started up in the 2000s really led to flood plain actions and the requirement for flood plain restoration. So that just just zoomed out another example of that. Yep. Great. Thank you. Great. Well, perhaps if we could thank Dr. Conrad and Dr. Ismail. And we will come back at 10.35, so a 15-minute break. Well, welcome back, everyone. This session, we are going to go through a preamble on the modeling for the LTO operations and actions. And we have two speakers, Dr. Israel is going to come back. And also Daria Summer, thanks for being with us. She's the modeling division manager for US Bureau of Reclamation. She oversees the water resources modeling program. And her responsibilities include, and this is quite a list, the development and application of system operations, hydrologic models, climate change models, groundwater, surface water interactions, temperature, and water generation, many of the things we're looking at. Prior to becoming the division manager, she was the branch chief for water supply and operations, and also headed the operations analysis of reclamation. She received her PhD and master's from the University of Arizona. So Dr. Summer, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you. Thanks for the introduction. It's way better than the one that the AI wrote for me today. I really appreciate it. All right. Well, thanks everyone for having me today. I believe I'm the only presenter on this one, Josh, if you weren't. Okay, cool. So I am told, and I have 15 minutes to talk about, oops. Anything and everything about modeling on that view. And so this is going to be a really high level overview of what do we do? How do we do things? I'm really trying to trigger questions from you all. So if you're having questions, please ask away. This is by no means not even going to scratch the surface of what kind of modeling we do. But I'll try to give you kind of the overview, the processes and everything, hopefully, hopefully we can have a discussion, further discussion in other presentations. So model, model, everywhere. What do we do? Models are imperfect reflections of real life. And depending on what purpose you're using the model for, you pick different models. Even if you run the same model, you interpret it differently. It gets quite complex quite quickly. I'm going to kind of talk through these common purposes at least. My it's a general list. It also applies to LTO. So the first box is the most fun part of it. This is the high point of my career. I love to be in that box, because that's where you explore what is. So you know, where you can get creative. We look at newer modified facilities. If we're doing a project, let's say storage program or a domains program, you change things around and see how you operate them. Or you could be looking at operational strategies or regulations, which is the case in LTO. We're looking at, you know, how should we be operating this whole system? Incorporate climate change and sea level rise. How do you do that? Everything that happens in this box depends on, you know, what the question is, you know, if it's a question coming from, from my higher management, it may be confidential, but for LTO, this is the part that we did a lot of outreach for all the interested parties. We had monthly meetings where we were developing actions. And just to give a couple of examples, Shasta action, for example. Okay, how should the Shasta action be is a total of different. There's a different suite of modeling that went on we did what we call a position analysis. What you would know is more, more like a monocardotype analysis under various conditions. If I operate it this way, you'll get this result of temperature and, you know, the biology for the fix and so on and so on. And we kind of kept everybody up in the same loop and tried to form an action that was acceptable for all the participating agencies. Last one on the OMAR, we used that, you know, Delta Hydrodynamics Model, we used some two article tracking models about the effects of different levels of OMAR and how that, you know, they've been relate, right. So that is a plain box. Once we went through those individual actions, then we came up with initial alternatives. Then you start putting pieces together. Okay, for any IS, any plain analysis, you have to have a wide range of those actions, alternatives. Again, we continue to work with all the interested parties. We work with NGOs, we work with the water users, with the agencies, and we developed these alternatives based on the data, model data that we generated, come up with those alternatives that we're going to analyze. Okay, now we have a number of alternatives. We kind of step outside of our toolbox and toolbox, and now we're running alternatives and looking at effects, looking at impacts on all of the resource areas, which means operated. Now I'm looking at what are the effects, you know, of operating in that scenario. On species, groundwater, economics, whatever else you may be analyzing. That is a totally different suite of models. Then this process, when it ends, let's say we have the biological assessment, then we get the biological opinion, we put our NEPA out, we get record of decision, we have a decision on how we're going to move forward operating the system. And everybody goes home except for modelers and the scientists, because now we're going to start implementing those actions, right? Now we're talking about data collection, monitoring, and real-time operations and modeling related to that. Now we're looking at specific things, salinity, entrainment, red dewatering. You may be using the same model that you used in the planning phase, but in a different way. I know this may get confusing, but for example, I'm going to give the DSM-2 as an example. The DSM-2 that we use for planning is different than the DSM-2 that we use for operations. Why? Because the one that used for operations gets real-time data. The DSM-2 is physically-based, one the hydrodynamic model, and gives you effects for the next three days, for the next week. The one that I use for planning is totally different. It gets model data from the operations model and looks at over 100 years, what the change is making. So that's sort of different ways of modeling, the different kinds of modeling that goes into this process. As I said, it gets too confusing too quickly. I kind of wanted to talk about how we go about this between the agencies and specifically between DWR and Reclamation, because we're the more, at least on the operational side and the physical side, I'm going to say, we're more or less kind of the keepers of these models, developers and keepers. So we continuously work together. I kind of put a timeline over there. They have their delivery capability report published every two years, which is focused on their water supply liability. We have our consultation, which we don't want to be doing every other year, but it happens to be so. And so they look at more on the development of the model, and they look at the they look at more on the water supply reliability in those studies, at least ITP is different. And then we do more on the, how are we going to operate the system? Every big project goes through this little cycle of improving models. There's a continuous improvement in models. And if a third project, let's say the orange one of those orange arrows is starting anytime, somebody says, I'm going to investigate the storage program. They go and pick the latest set of models, and then they modify it for their needs. That's sort of just the lay of the land, how we go about this, you know, in general. And the circle. So the model development and maintenance is a continuous process. It's never perfect. It'll always change. It's going to have to change for the purpose that you're modeling. Okay. Let's say we started with the latest and greatest for the LTO. We were told that there was a desire to extend the simulation period to full 100 years. So we did that. We took calcium. And which was a 96 year simulation period. We extended it by the last five years. And that whole in theirs is model development. A lot of like hydrology demands. Then you come to analytical tool selection selection. That is the answer in question of what models should I be using? And it depends on what question you're trying to answer. This is where we work with Josh and team and others, depending on what effects they're trying to analyze. We try to pick the most appropriate model. Then exploring potential actions. My favorite part I told you, getting creative, analyzing effects, doing the real time actions and collecting data. And that data feeds into your next cycle of model development. While we talked, we were going to model all in this way. Did it work out? You look at the data, you're like, okay, we could improve here and there. So that's sort of how it goes. All right. So I will talk just a little bit about calcium. Calcium, we get a lot of reactions. It's a lower hate. I mean, I'm not sure if not many people love it. But it's an operations model that we use to evaluate water supply reliability. It just represents CVP and SWP. We'll get through what's in calcium in just a bit. But just something to keep in mind that we have a projected level of analysis. This model has a consistent level of development and a specific regulatory criteria. And if we're not doing new facilities, all the existing facilities, and then we run these, run this model over 100 series of different hydrological conditions and try to get it some statistical data about how things may change. So it's not transient. This is a misconception that we get all the time. 1977 in the model is not going to be the 1977 you live because the operations were different than the demands were different. So it's a bit different. And this is why we need to use it in a comparative manner. You can't use this as a predictive tool because it isn't representing what happened in the past necessarily. So whenever we run calcium in any other model that relies on calcium, we use them in a comparative manner. We run a baseline scenario. How are we operating the system right now? We run that.  What if I change in my Shasta operations like this? And then you look at the differences and see what happens. A question that comes up often is like, is calcium calibrated? No, because it is not again, I'm not going to say it's not physically based. It is a hydrologic, there's hydrologic components to it, but the historical conditions evolve and we're doing a projected level analysis. So it is not calibrated. There was an attempt to look at it and he did a pretty good job in 2004. We look at it more in the terms of looking at the results and seeing if the results make sense. Like is this how you would be operating? The data that goes into it is totally different. That's a different process. There is calibration in data development, the hydrology and the demands and everything. There are closure terms. Sometimes they help, sometimes they don't. But you've got to be careful about interpreting model results. So I hope I'm not confusing everybody. So what's in calcium really? Well, what has all the project features and the hydrologic input? As I said, 100 years worth of multi-data. It's not just 100 years of multi-data. We play with it to incorporate climate change, but I'm going to save it for another discussion. All the storage reservoirs and export facilities, canals and flood control curves and everything. It also has in it all of our project obligations. Starting from flood control, for the central control curves, capacities, water rights, regulator criteria. We still operate to D1641 and now we operate to biological opinions on top of everything. All the rules are in there. And then it also has a logic for coordinated operations between the state and the federal project that we share responsibilities for Delta operations. And then has our contractual obligations of providing water supply. The figure on the right is kind of showing the CVP split of contractual obligations. You'll see most more than half of it is senior water rights, based on Shasta inflow, which we don't have a lot of discussion. So I'll just pick that as an example. Well, this is my best map, but I'm not a GIS user by any means. So bear with me. It's just trying to show that we have a lot of flow and temperature requirements. This is only showing Sacramento to Delta and water quality requirements in the Delta. And the big red dot is other regulatory requirements, including Walmart, the first channel and everything else in Delta. All of those are in Council too. So the idea is it's quite complex. And CVP side especially we operate reservoirs in tandem, trying to meet our objectives. You're not operating one reservoir and deciding on one flow. There's low temperature operating the reservoirs in tandem, meeting Delta water quality. There's the sea coming in with the sea level rise and all kinds of complexities. So closer look at the Delta, kind of the points that I just made. The blue with the red line over there is all the middle river flows. That is the most fun to model. I'll tell you that because we do pretty good with physical things, physics, right? The flow, temperature is another degree. There's storage and flow component. But when it comes to the effect of flow and temperature on species and the biology comes in, it becomes even more complicated. Okay. This is how a typical planning analysis framework is. We just talked about calcium, which is the surface water operations. We're right there. And then we usually use the SM2 for Delta conditions for flow and water quality. We use schism, which is a 3D model for habitat questions. And I can expand on that just a bit. So basically whenever you need a deeper dive, you go find the appropriate model. And then surface water quality, water temperature, HST5Q is what we've been using. Reclamation is just about to finish a new platform, improved water temperature modeling platform that's going to use SQLW2 algorithm for temperature. And then we have the aquatic resources, which I'm going to just kind of flash on the last slide just a bit. And anything else that you may be looking at, you may be looking at hydropower generation, you may be looking at flood control, anything. So you go through that with and without project conditions or with and without your action, and you look at the change metrics. This figure was from a presentation that I put together for water storage investment program. If you're planning new facilities, then you try and monetize those changes, right? So you can do your cost-benefit ratio. But that's not the case for LTO. So we stop at the physical change metrics, now we do our impact analysis, right? Decide, what does that mean for the rest of the resource areas? This is a framework for LTO. It does look like a spaghetti. Let's see, what do we have? We have calcium, there's hydrologic input here, we have climate change system, everything climate change, everything at a projected level, all that. Then we have temperature models, then we have some temperature dependent mortality, all kinds of fun, biological models, econ, power, what am I not seeing here? Oh, the DSL2 series is here for Delta hydrodynamics and particle tracking, routing, survival. So the question is, are we decide which model to use? And how do we come up with all of this? It's a process that Josh and team led through knowledge-based papers, looking at what is the latest in great science, looking at the stressors, looking at what we're going to analyze. And it's the work between our divisions about how you connect each of those to the operations that you're intending to change. Each one of those arrows is actually a lot of communication, a lot of meetings and back and forth about like, oh, how am I going to take calcium result and run a STARS model? So there's a lot of collaboration that goes on within reclamation, with reclamation and other agencies, DWR and the Fisheries, the agencies. That's my overview. I'm going to stop there and see if you have any questions. Thank you for that.  But you said calcium is used to evaluate water supply reliability. So what exactly is water supply reliability? Is it just water delivered to the OMRs, to the southern part of the state? Or is it to meet all of those obligations that you showed in that slide? I mean, what do you mean by water supply reliability? Yes, it's mostly our both state and federal projects, the NSWP contractual obligations. We have different contracts as you've seen, some of them are senior water rights. We have to provide that much water to them. And then we have some that we have our service contracts, where we have a little more discretion on how much we can deliver. And everything on the hydrology facility and regulatory side is a constraint. And then we run the model and try to operate to the best we can to deliver water under those constraints, like that house. Thanks. So we'll work our way around the room at Jay and then Steve. Thanks. Sorry when they get to this point. This is a problem for a long time. These problems of the delta, they're eternal. They will last a year longer than us, even the young people. And it takes a long time to develop modeling data for modeling. And it takes careers, you know, get spent developing these models. The calcium modeling and all of the modeling, the career is worth it. So that's a long term issue. The questions that we have, some of them are eternal and some of them are fashionable. Well, right. So, and he's got a dozen or so agencies and this several dozen consult confirmed that it involved in what kind of coordination is done to sorry. If these models ready in time, I'm looking at the list of names are the same, but they models as you meant to be changing your time. In a particular the hydrodynamic model, the SM2 has turned out to be a wonderful model. It's very, very useful for all kinds of operations, but a lot of the questions we're concerned with now are more toward 3D questions. And we, you know, everybody struggles to answer 3D dynamic questions with 1D models. And there are 3D models around, but I still, how do you see and coordinate the development of these new technologies? So you've seen it with temperature modeling or how does it work for us? What's actually to work when it's also complex? Well, I could go off on like we need more time, but I'm not going to do that today. You're right, there's a lot of coordination that happens, that actually happens. The SM2 has a users group, for example, DWR runs that they meet monthly to look at updates. We started one for CalSIM, but CalSIM people get overbooked very easily, and it's really hard to keep it going. But we have a process with DWR, at least, after each big push, either DCR on their side or LTO on our side, we come together and we work on a benchmark model. And anytime one of us does anything with those models, we go to the other one and make sure that they're okay with the representation of their operations, right? We make sure that everybody's on the same page. Temperature has been interesting. There was no necessarily one platform that kept everybody together. And this is what we're trying to attempt. We're attempting with this new platform. What happened in the past is you would, I spent 13 years as a consultant. So I would go to reclamation most of the time because reclamation is the agency that operates the temperature. And get the latest model from them, work on it, go back to them, share versions. That's how the private sector kind of can come and contribute. With the water temperature modeling platform, we're looking into developing a users group and something similar to what ESM2 does. So everybody is on the same page. We've done the whole development has been transparent and a collaborative way. We had participants from Fisheries agencies, public DWR reclamation. So we're trying. It is huge, though, if you can appreciate there's many models. And they're like, I'm sure Josh can speak to what happens on the Fisheries side. But if they go mostly on the publications, right, where we're published latest, and whatever, you know, they go through review and decide on what needs to be used. So that's how we do it. We, unfortunately, there's no one umbrella of like, here we do all the coordination kind of thing. I guess when I was talking, but if someone from DWR gives the same talk, there will be some overlap in the models that, you know, there will be different models inside. And the different agencies, they all have a lot of models. Many of them are very different. You're right. I mean, it makes people outside. Yes, you're absolutely right. And I don't know an easy way to help that. This is exactly why we did what we did for the LTO. And thanks to Dave, it was his idea. So I have to be really careful what I say here, but it was a lot of work. So it was more like I use the analogy of like open kitchen restaurant. It's just like you're cooking with everybody in there, watching you, all of them, with different perspectives and different levels of understanding. It takes an extra effort to, first of all, bring everybody to the same level and sort of then start understanding what their perspectives and sensitivities are. Yep, I agree that we're very supportive of any kind of community of modelers that can be developed in the future. We're working on it. But I'm going to say there's no easy way. And yes, it's going to be different for different projects. Because again, you're trying to answer different questions. If whatever question you're trying to answer, that is going to be your model selection. This is really heavy on the biological side because we're doing an ESA. If a project is not doing an ESA, it's only doing a NEPA, they don't necessarily dive this deep into the biology side. Anyway, thank you, Steve. Could we come to hoax? A lot of this is free of motion. Do you want to go next? That's sure. Yeah, thank you for the presentation. So in your spaghetti diagram in the top, I'll send there a lot of inputs from climate change projections from models. And for this particular area, climate models are particularly notorious for lack of consensus for presentation projections. So how do you deal with that uncertainty, especially that it propagates all the way down to other parts of the model? So that's the first question. The second question is, how do you explore these data-driven models?  Well, I'm going to take the second one first. Well, you saw how the AI did on my bio. It was really, you didn't see it. It was very short. Yes, we do. It is, there's no operator in this room. Good. So our operators get really, really tasked when you talk about replacing them with some kind of a model. The operator, there's a human aspect to it.  When you don't have water, those things change. People talk and people walk back from 100% thermal contractor delivery, for example, even in one case, down to 18, which was really disastrous for them. But it was a really bad year. Those things are not going to be captured in the modeling. So yes and no. The very use kind of a machine learning is we have the AMN in artificial neural networks within calcium. Calcium knows flow of storage. It doesn't know what the salinity is going to be in the delta. And the way we inform it is training a neural network. And we plug that as a DLL in calcium. So it gets a good idea. Do we base all of our analysis on the outcome of that neural network? No. Calcium runs. Then we run the SM2 and we use the SM2 results. Look at the effects. The first question was climate change modeling. I kind of had this in the back pocket. It is a lot of... I don't want to kind of go through, but that top box over there is kind of going through what we have done in climate models. We went through... We probably spent close to a year with KWR before we started the LTO process on what should be the next methodology for modeling under climate change. And you're right. They don't necessarily agree. They agree more in the short term. And we're here in the lucky space because we're doing an NSA. We're not looking too far out as if it was a storage program, but we're looking more like near term. So we do get more kind of concurrence between the models. But there's still difference. And the way we kind of go about it is we run sensitivity analysis looking at trying to capture the uncertainty space. You're absolutely right. There's always going to be uncertainty. DWR is actually doing another... The way we work is every time we go back to it, we kind of go through what's been done and what can be done next. So for their DCR, they're actually taking another step, one step further, looking at the decision scale kind of analysis. To determine how to pick those sensitivity analysis. And next time we do LTO, we're going to probably put on top of that and kind of move forward. So that's how it goes. But yeah. Great, thanks. All right. Just one more question. We're to Renee and then come back for the other questions of each for lunch. Thanks. Thanks for the great presentation. So I think I come up with things from the salmon world where maybe you all are not the keepers of the models to the extent that you are with the Delta-Stone circumstance. But I would say every model related process I've been part of for the last decade has expressed at some point that love-hate relationship with Calcin. You name that it's enabled by Calcin to have a hydrologic component, but also that the time step, the overcommittedness of the developers, the cost of running it makes the extent to which the hydrologic component can be evaluated as in the context of everything else really constrained. And it's also, I've heard it said multiple times by people who will remain nameless that Calcin is an expression of its use over the course of its evolution and that if it were to be redeveloped today, it might look differently in the context of what the changes in technology that have happened since it was first developed. And I'm wondering if you all constantly making a new version that maybe is applicable to a wider range of things. Oh, okay. Calcin is continuously being maintained. DWR has a whole division that works on it, that the underlying software and the programming language has changed over the years and it continues to change. The difficulty is when I get these questions, let me try to understand if I'm not getting it right correctly.  You could do that. But we tried that too, actually, the first version of Calcin. However, the complexity is not actually with the model itself. The model has, you know, if you have any experience of coding, you can open it up and read it. It's not that bad. The complexity comes from the system. Everything that I just kind of flashed and we didn't talk about the details and I have slides if you want to, all those operational criteria are quite complex. And every time you change them, like this consultation, anything, you have to know what you're doing and you have to go in there and change it and make sure that piece that you change works with the rest of the system. And that is why, unfortunately, we can't have a more user-friendly model. Unfortunately, our system is too complex to do that. The user-friendly ones, there are ones that I still struggle with, like finding my way through, looking through formally and trying to understand who did what, version control, that gets really, really difficult. On the fishery side, this is a long time kind of an issue. You have a lot of uncertainty on other things on your end and then you want at least this one piece to be predictive and tell you, like, this is how it's going to be. But unfortunately, it is not, right? This model cannot be predictive. There are so many other things that come into it. As painful as it is, and I don't really know a way to really help on that side, we just need to kind of take it with what it is and try and do our best to interpret the results. It will never give you the exact conditions that would have happened in this drought, for example. It'll give you something and then we're going to have to come together and decide, okay, what can I glean from these results? That's really helpful. I guess one thing I would say is, I think it's less my, at least, there's many different interests in it potentially changing. My own that I've run into is the facility to simplify it. Like, it gets simplified. It's information it produces gets simplified all the time in different ways. But there is a limited scope for the ways that it is simplified based on who is operating it and what their interests are. And I think that there is a broader interest in being able to think about simplifying it in different ways. And to your exact point about the complexity coming from the system that's like the lens that we bring on that complexity affects what we learn from the simplification of the system that is the model. So that was more what I was thinking about in terms of looking ahead. On the decision making side on the operational decisions, we're doing a multi-times step. It's really, it's not even an explanation. I don't know how you would do, there's an effort to do daily, but how would you do a daily operation model? How would you decide on how people would make decisions given that there are several agencies working together on a daily basis? But I want to say something, I want to point out USRDOM is Upper Sacramento River Daily Operations Model. It's specifically developed to take customer results on a monthly basis. It kind of maps to whatever year in month you're in looks at similar hydrologies and kind of maps it whatever it can find the closes in history to make it a daily kind, daily fine, right? Trying to do a good job, never perfect. But then that's used for all the other like red, dewatering, water, a wet and usable area, fish spending, where you need that detail. We try and put that detail in to the best we can. But should we run council on a daily time step? We've got to be very careful. The operational decision on how you would would you be inserting more uncertainty to the results by trying to do it on a daily basis? Then the benefit that you're getting on the fisheries and if that makes sense, you know? It's a good question. Okay, yeah. Well, thank you. And as we have the same speakers in the last session before lunch and afterwards, what I'm going to do, Steve, while we've got Daria here, would you like to just field your question? No. It relates to this slide. It seems that with top two figures there, top two figures there would set connects calcium to spelt life cycle. It seems like you solved the problem of relating fish, close to fish. And if you have one here, up on there. Any mechanistic connection at all? It glows fish? Do you have any connection of calcium, mechanistic way of anything related to this? We do provide calcium data, but I'm going to look to math about the inputs and then we can talk about how we do the connection. But like there are certain inputs that they take from calcium or the asset. Matt, do you want to do a quick synopsis? If you want to come up and use the mic, it would be helpful. So people joining us online, this is Matt Dabriga from US Fish and Wildlife. That's definitely the safer mic to use. Okay. I'll start with saying it depends on what your tolerance to a mechanism is because I can see on the slide that there are some some relationships like Cyril Michelle's flow survival relationship. It's empirical. It's done with tagging data. So it's real. It's not just a correlation out of the air. I'm sure that Cyril could explain if he was here with the live mechanism. So definitely there is at that kind of level and we can do it in response as well. So then if you mean can you piece it apart into something even more magnetic than that? The answer is yes. And he rose has a version of his individual based model for Delta smelt that he built for us in the last five years that syncs with Calcine. And we'll tell you that if something is wetter than contemporary Delta smelt are better over 82 year time frame. And we have not pieced that apart to see exactly how the model says it works. But yes, in theory all of that can be done. I want to add I'm not very familiar with the smelt lifecycle model but for example for Delta passage model just to give you an idea of how the linkage is done they take the assent to results with the flow on a 15 minute basis downscaled from Calcine obviously. We also look at the Delta cross channel operations that are depicted in Calcine data export levels that are depicted in Calcine. So that's sort of each model is going to have the critical information that it needs from Calcine but it's going to have its own complexity within itself about the physics of it right? Well, actually we could thank Dr. Summerfarer really good. Well, thank you for that. So we're now moving to an in-depth presentation on the summerfall habitat actions and we have two speakers to cover this. Christy Arendt from Reclamation. She's a freshwater aquatic ecologist with experience in the Great Lakes. She's worked in coastal and wetland ecosystems inland reservoirs and tidal rivers. More recently she's worked on water management and endangered species in the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta and her areas of expertise include fish community surveys food web dynamics water quality and weather monitoring. She received her PhD in aquatic ecology from Cornell. The second speaker will be Brittany Davis with the Department of Water Resources. She serves as the environmental program manager at the California Department of Water Resources. She has numerous publications, many on smelt and has worked on monitoring and evaluation of the North Delta food subsidies North Delta flow action yellow bypass and other food web dynamics within the system. She's also worked on the physiological and behavioral effects of domestication of Delta smelt, which we've heard so much about today. So thank you both for being with us and I don't know who's going first, is it Christy? Yeah, thank you. So yeah, I think we'll fill up the rest of the time before lunch but basically over the next three talks my colleague Dr. Brittany Davis and Dr. Rosemary Hartman and I will be talking about basically how Delta smelt summer and fall habitat. So basically the availability and the quality of habitat and prey. How we think that that is really important in terms of their growth survival and recruitment at the population level. So we'll be just providing kind of an overview of some of the conceptual framework underlying these ideas and then we'll provide some information on the different management actions that are either being taken or being developed to try to improve the habitat and prey conditions and then what Rosemary will kind of focus in on later in the afternoon is the monitoring and modeling that we use to plan these actions and also evaluate them. So we'll get it currently I don't know how to use that. It didn't work for me but anyway now we're here. So for this first talk then we're really going to focus kind of review the conceptual model that we've developed some of these management actions under. So our management objectives and performance metrics that we're using and then provide sort of an overview of the actions and their associated operations and also identify some of the issues that we're grappling with in terms of adaptive management uncertainties and some of the data gaps knowledge gaps that we have that we've kind of discovered along the way and then finally just a quick review of sort of what are planning and evaluation processes. All right, now I've got it. So just a quick quick, quick primer on Delta Smelt basic biology. They're a small pelagic fish species that's endemic to the Bay Delta. They are thought to have a fairly weak swimming ability and and they have an annual life cycle and so during that time they migrate within the Bay Delta and that's shown over here on the right. They are right now seasonally so in the winter the adults migrate upstream in response to what we refer to as first flush which is basically really high flows and turbidity that result from one of the first storms of the winter after that then they spawn in freshwater so right around now we think that they've completed their upstream migration due to some storms we had earlier this winter and the water temperatures are suitable for spawning so they're probably spawning around now. Then the larvae and the juveniles migrate to low salinity habitat so brackish water during the summer and then remain there in the fall as their nursery habitat as they mature. And so this is really the time period that we're focusing on this the time when they have these different life history stages in the brackish low salinity water. They primarily consume zooplankton and other microinvertebrates copepods, claudocerans, amphipods and they prefer cool water, more turbid water and then again this low salinity to fresh water that I already mentioned. They're threatened federally endangered in California. So really the management actions that we'll be talking about are really focused on this transition from the juvenile through sub-adult to adult life stages. So this is operating again kind of June to December time period and we think that this is represents a bottleneck in their population growth. Some of the key drivers are the size and location of low salinity habitat quality of habitat and the availability of prey. So we've developed a lot of this based on a conceptual model that was developed by the interagency ecological programs management analysis and synthesis team and so within that broader conceptual model for delta smelt is the premise that if we have an increase in low salinity habitat that should maximize the area of suitable habitat for delta smelt and result in higher growth and survival. The way we think about this from a management perspective is that if we can augment flow in the summer and fall that should increase low salinity habitat and then decrease salinity in particular areas that we think provide really good habitat for smelt and prey for smelt. So this would be in Sassoon Bay and Sassoon Marsh and then that has a couple different effects. One is that we should see some increases in zooplankton production, maybe improvements in species composition to the prey that they prefer and that enhancement of food availability quality should lead to greater growth. Also this area is thought of as good habitat. It provides access to more turbid water so that should reduce predation risk and it also provides access to habitat that has somewhat cooler water just due to this coming up kind of atmospheric air temperature forcing from the ocean and so again those should lead to greater survival growth and ultimately recruitment. So I talked about this low salinity habitat I just want to dig into that a little bit more so we refer to this low salinity habitat as the low salinity zone and that's really where depth average salinity is between about 0.5 and 6 practical salinity units. This is what is thought to be kind of this range of salinities that delta spelt prefer and what I was just talking about is that we kind of want to see that in this red area of this map so what this is just showing is it's just plotting salinity kind of over space from the western saltier side of the estuary up to the freshwater and so we have this low salinity area here we have a lot of area in that more turbid water habitat that they can occupy. Obviously this isn't something that's stable or static so if we have a lot more flow coming in through the system we're going to expect that low salinity habitat to move to the west and if we have less flow like during a drought year we'll expect that low salinity habitat to move up more into the delta the lower part of the river due to that greater intrusion of saltwater so we can gauge kind of where this low salinity zone is by using X2 I think you heard about this a little bit in the first meeting but basically X2 refers to the distance from the Golden Gate bridge and river kilometers where a daily average bottom salinity is about two practical salinity units so we can estimate where this is and that can give us an idea then we can relate that to how much low salinity habitat we think is available what that zone looks like so in this figure right here we're seeing an X2 right here at 74 kilometers and the blue colors are showing you where that low salinity zone habitat is we can also look at what would happen if we have an X2 at 80 kilometers you can see somewhat of a shift where that low salinity habitat is upstream a little bit and then some reduction in low salinity habitat in this bay area so the other thing that we mentioned is being important is food availability just running really quickly go through a couple ideas for that so there is evidence for food limitation in the time period some of that could be due to grazing by invasive clams also the low salinity zone seems to rely on subsidies from freshwater so subsidies of coca-cola and other zooplankton for freshwater and so we can see that walk rating again there we go so we can see that here so the left hand graph is just showing zooplankton catch per cubic meter in freshwater zone for a number of different taxonomic groups and then on the right it's showing up for the low salinity zone I've circled this zooplankton right here suited up in this forbesi that's one of the preferred prey items for delta smelt so you can see much higher relative abundance in the freshwater area and lower in the low salinity zone but we think that with flows those flows can basically subsidize the zooplankton that are in that low salinity zone from those pressure water areas the adjacent areas so the goal and objective really of the management actions are to improve habitat conditions and food supply maintain more specifically maintain low salinity habitat in this Sassoon Marsh and Grizzly Bay area when water temperatures are suitable manage the low salinity zone to overlap with turbid water and available food supplies and establish contiguous low salinity habitat from the Cache Slough complex all the way down to Sassoon Marsh really what you know ultimately what we want to see is an increase in individual delta growth delta smelt survival growth and condition so that we have improved recruitment we have an interagency group that has worked together through the process of structured decision making to identify performance metrics that we're using to evaluate how these different actions perform given kind of these objectives these fundamental objectives so some of the ones that are related to delta smelt include increasing the area of suitable abiotic habitat increasing prey biomass and composition decreasing contaminant exposure so we are thinking about contaminants here and then increasing delta smelt growth which we and Rosemary will be talking about these measures more specifically later on so I'm just kind of listing them here we will go into detail later today we also think about other things like minimizing negative effects to other native species if possible minimizing resource costs in terms of water and funds and then how we can learn from this adaptive management framework so now I'm going to pass it over to Brittany and she'll talk about the actions and the operations okay this does or doesn't work it does okay thanks Chrissy thanks panel for joining us and I'm going to whip through these actions pretty quickly and operations and I just want to remind you that the three of us will be on all the panels today and Chrissy and I will also be on the field trip Friday and you can pick our brains then so in total we've described six summer fall habitat actions or strategies that we use to implement or are currently experimenting with in hopes to improve the habitat for delta smelt so the first three actions are all focused on these abiotic habitat conditions or expansion of that low salinity zone these actions include fall X2 re-operation of the Sassoon marsh salinity control gates that we have on here in Montezuma slough with that yellow star and then a requirement to provide an additional 100,000 acre feet of water the second three actions are either experimental or sort of concept feasibility stages right now and these are all focused on really stimulating and subsidizing food so primary and secondary production these food subsidy actions include first the north delta food subsidy study this is located here in purple here in the ridge cut slough yellow bypass area trying to move food into accessible smelt habitat and then cash through complex second highlighted in yellow here is the managed wetland study in Sassoon marsh and then the last food subsidy action is the Sacramento deep water ship channel highlighted here in green sort of parallel to the bypass right now the north delta food subsidy studies is the only one that is actually feasible and I'll go into detail about what are your types and when it can be implemented they vary so the first I'm going to go walk through the first three habitat actions first the first one is fall X2 so this is maintaining that bottom salinity at two PSU at 80 kilometers X2 is maintained through coordinated operations via reservoir releases or reduced exports X2 at 80 is to be maintained during September and October months in above normal and wet years so fall X2 has been implemented several times now first was in 2017 and then 2018 and X2 here was managed to 74 kilometers under previous biological opinions and then most recently this last year it was implemented and X2 was maintained at 80 kilometers with our current permit requirements and so some of the conclusions from at least the 2017 study highlighted here we did see changes in water quality such as increases in turbidity also decreases in water temperature in terms of food there are no significant observations in zooplankton changes and then for the smelt themselves there are observations of similar or less smelt than in other regions but like I said given the status of the species it's hard to really use delta smelt detections to evaluate the actions which could change in the future with supplementation of fish so really it's it's a challenge to tease apart the effects of specific actions and given water year types because the hydrologic conditions you know can vary from year to year okay second action second habitat action is the re-operation of the Sassoon marsh Selenic control gates here we're trying to operate the gates to maintain that low Selenic habitat in the marsh so here we're conveying fresh water into the marsh so essentially the picture here is showing you the Selenic gates we're going to visit them Friday I believe the gates can essentially be held open so when water is flowing out of the delta it it could push fresh water out to fresh in the marsh and then the gates can be closed to prevent seawater intrusion so right now the gates for the summerfall habitat action specifically are focused in June through October operations for 60 days there is potentially some flexibility with this whether you're operating for 60 days continuously or you have some other schedule a lot of this discussion happens through this interagency delta coordination group that Christy talked about and I think Rosie's going to allude to more sort of taking a structured decision approach using modeling to figure out what the best scheduling is to improve habitat so the gates are implemented in below normal above normal some dry and some wet years so the gates action has been implemented I think Louise alluded to this earlier first in 2018 and then most recently last year conclusions from 2018 we did see increase and I say we but there I'm citing these studies here we did see increases of low salinity habitat we also saw beneficial changes in water quality so increase or there was higher turbidity in chlorophyll A and the marsh as compared to the lower Sacramento river region in terms of food again we didn't see significant increases in zooplankton abundance there were though in 2018 small numbers of delta smelt detected in the marsh during the action and again similar to fall X to you know anticipated effects can vary based on year to year conditions we're still working off the 2023 report we'd be happy to discuss those results Friday or later but there might be some differences already that we're detecting in the 2023 action compared to the 2018 action okay the third habitat action is this requirement of DWR to provide an additional 100,000 acre feet the decision to use this is that the discretion of CDFW the intent is to increase freshwater habitat in the marsh and grizzly bay the hunter taff can be operationally implemented via extra outflow or used through additional operations of the Sassoon marsh salinity control gates as was done in this last year 2023 so there is also flexibility in the timing of this action the hunter taff can be used in the above normal and wet year that it is provided by DWR in June through October or there's the option to defer that 100 tap the next year and redeploy sometime during March or October to supplement outflow if it were in the spring the benefits might be more targeted towards longfin smelt if they were in deferred and using the following smelt the following summer it would be intended benefits for delta smell so for example in a wet year conditions are already wet so you might choose to defer it to use next year in the summer when conditions could be very dry we talked about California's water supply years and so having that water available in drier conditions might provide more benefits and again that decision is at the discretion of CDFW but we discussed this in that delta coordination group so we have implemented this for the first time this last year that we implemented it not as outflow but through use of additional Sassoon marsh salinity control gates August through October and so in conclusions that were seen it did provide greater area of fresh water habitat there is a risk that has to be assessed in using this water if you use it in the in the current wet year you may not have as significant benefits as you would using that water under drier conditions but there's a risk of occurring if you have two wet years in a row then that water may not be available if it is spilled from reservoirs that fall and spring so now I'm going to move into the three food subsidy actions so the first is the north delta food subsidy study this is an experimental action it essentially creates net positive flow in the YOLO bypass region and attempts to stimulate and transport primary and secondary production operations there's some flexibility here we can create managed flow pulses by redirecting Sacramento river water through the bypass this would occur during summer in July mainly due to operation feasibility and some salmonid concerns the other managed flow flows can be implemented in fall utilizing agricultural return drainage in the Calusa Basin drain and diverting that through the bypass to create a net positive flow the agricultural drainage is mostly rice field drainage you can see anything else I want to say there no so the north delta food subsidy study if the water is available it can be implemented across the number of water year types dry below normal and above normal though there could be some water quality concerns in drier years for example dissolved oxygen so it's a mouthful the north delta food subsidy study it has been we usually just call it NDFS this action has been previously implemented so the first action but 2012 was when we really made the first observations and the concept of the experiment there was construction that needed to occur and so the water was diverted and we saw a big pulse and some productivity and hey the light bulbs went off and then there were two subsequent agricultural pulses in 2018 and 2019 we were able to work with reclamation closely to generate a managed flow pulse action using Sacramento river water in 2016 so the conclusions for NDFS really variable there's been phytoplankton responses in some years and not others we have relatively low statistical power to detect zooplankton responses and then there could be some potential consequences of moving pulses through these habitats we've detected relatively high contaminate concentrations that could lead to potential and negative effects on smelt or other species and then in this northern delta region particularly the yolo bypass temperatures in summer fall are really warm and so temperatures can reach sublethal and even exceed tolerance levels of smelt in some cases so it's really about moving food to more accessible habitat okay we're getting there the second food subsidy action this is more conceptual at this stage the managed wetlands food subsidy study the objective here is again to increase that primary and secondary production in the marsh and so seasonal operations of sort of draining wetlands in the summer and filling wetlands and doing this cycle can potentially pose as a really useful tool to create food for fish these are more restricted habitats so they're free of clams and might have higher residency time for food production versus tidal wetlands that are unrestricted and have more of these pulse blow effects and low residency times so recently in 2022 UC Davis began a study really evaluating these seasonally flooded wetlands compared to perennial more long-term flooded wetlands compared to tidally restored unrestricted wetlands and so you can see here in the marsh I think we're going to Tully Red this tidally restored habitat in the blue here Friday and so I'm not sure if this is going to go over it or not but some of the preliminary findings I don't have a slide on it but I've seen some of the data and I think the hypotheses thus far are being partially supported where seasonally flooded wetlands are promoting higher plankton production the perennial flooded wetlands are sort of creating this moderate production and then the tidal unrestricted wetlands are providing a lower plankton and it's probably due to these changes in the wetland features that I mentioned previously and so the last food subsidy action is the Sacramento Deepwater Ship Channel this is intended to stimulate plankton production in the main stem Sacramento river and so this the ship channel which is really one of the key habitats that remaining delta smelt are often found in supplemented smelt it's a dead-end terminal channel it has similar characteristics to other terminal channels where there are hydrodynamics zones that really drive gradients in nutrients, light turbidity and so the operations here would be creating some enriched nutrients in the upper channel of the sack ship channel and then creating some sort of managed flow poles to export that production downstream to the lower Sacramento river and reclamation is the lead of this study so the timing of this would likely be in the summer so similar wetlands experiments are ongoing investigations determining the feasibility of these actions there was a pilot study in 2018 through 2019 where fertilizer was essentially applied to a segment of the ship channel in the first panel here you can see there's low nitrate concentrations throughout the ship channel and then moving over to post fertilization and just one day you really see a rapid increase in nitrate concentrations and then across that week that concentration really expands spatially across the ship channel and so some of the conclusions from this pilot study the fertilizer application increased nitrate concentrations this resulted in short-lived but really substantial increases in chlorophyll the chlorophyll concentrations that were observed were higher when the water column was thermally stratified the study did highlight nitrogen limitation in that upper channel and this is likely due to those hydrodynamic gradients so greater light penetration and longer residency times occurring in that upper channel and then lastly implementation of this action to stimulate and export phytoplankton production it will require both likely enhanced nutrients supply via application or some other method and then altering the flow dynamics there via a flow pulse to export that okay and I'm going to hand it back to Christy for all the adaptive management issues in seven minutes yep we'll try to speed through this so yeah we're going to go through some of the science issues related to adaptive management uncertainties and our knowledge gaps so starting with adaptive management and just focusing on that north delta food subsidies study like Brittany mentioned we really have actually had a power analysis conducted and have very lowest statistical power to actually detect a food blood effect so it's hard for us to use those field monitoring data to say oh yes we have stimulated production up to the zooplankton so what we've started recently is a stabilized pilot study so that we can really track those carbon sources and their movement into the food web to see if our concept of how that should work is the way that those nutrients and carbon is actually being transferred through the trophically through the food web it also has a fairly small footprint so it is unlikely to increase primary and secondary production well into the lower Sacramento river which is kind of one of the targets for where we expect, we would like the adult to be able to benefit from that just as Brittany mentioned it's up in the area where this is happening it's really warm and contaminate levels are higher and we found that the hydrodynamics aren't quite as they were expected to be quite as much of a linear flow and we also anticipate that some restoration projects that are being wrapped up and ongoing right now are expected to change those hydrodynamics as well so some of the focus has shifted in response to these challenges and also in response to these high contaminant and temperature concerns and so right now we have also another new study that is evaluating the thermal suitability throughout the cash loop complex and also recognizing that some of the if it's working and we're subsidizing the food web and it's not going straight down to the river but kind of spreading throughout the area what does that look like in terms of thermal tolerance for adult to smell we also have some adaptive management issues related to the fall X2 and salinity control gate actions there are tradeoffs between freshwater pool management for other native and listed species so what we do with our reservoirs thinking about delta fish might have consequences for fish that we care about in the upper part of the river and then there's thinking about how to maximize gate operations that really can depend on your perspective of whether you want to maximize freshwater habitat over space in that area you want to maximize it over time so you have that freshwater lasting a little bit longer but maybe not covering quite as much area again we are challenged by limited statistical power to detect a zooplankton response fortunately they're patchy highly variable and it's just really hard to do the level of monitoring that's required and then finally what Brittany mentioned before and explained before is this relative benefit of using the water the 100,000 acre feet during that year when it becomes available the water above normal year versus deferring it to the next year where that water could be lost and potentially not able to be used in terms of uncertainties do we know that delta smelt are going to migrate to higher quality habitat if we create it for them how can we improve our understanding of what's going on in these lower trophic levels so can we improve our models of phytoplankton and zooplankton important subsidization to really have some concrete hypotheses that then we can test and look at in the field how can we improve the individual based delta smelt model so this is the model that we're using the component of it the biologetics component of it to estimate growth in response to these actions but then we can also use the full model to look at the consequences of the population level so one area that has been identified for improvement is that the biologetics model is based on ribosmelt not delta smelt so can we do some experiments to parameterize it based on delta smelt and then also have the best incorporate movement into that model again with these assumptions that ideally smelt are going to be moving into this better habitat and then really can these flow actions result in detectable food web effects and population benefit level benefits for delta smelt all of these have kind of a small footprint hydrologically so what does that mean at the population level and how can we really scale it up or understand if and how it does scale up and then finally the kind of wide open question that I think we're hoping to get input on is what are other approaches that could be used to facilitate population transition through this bottom up period what are we not thinking of we're thinking a lot about flow pulses what else could we be thinking about so some of the information and synthesis needs that have really come up and come to light as we've had this group using structured decision-making to evaluate and make recommendations regarding these management actions you know what have we learned since that conceptual model was developed that I presented earlier we've had a lot of publications a lot of studies come out since then so we're working right now to kind of update our conceptual model and really bring in this newer information to what extent do some food subsidy actions increase contaminants and impact delta smelt growth and condition we know it's probably an issue with the north delta food subsidy and may also be one with the ship channel do and if so how to our do our actions impact other native species particularly USA and CISO listed species I was going to talk a little bit more about that and how we score that using export elicitation right now it'd be nice to not rely on just expert opinion to understand these effects and then what is the relative role of temperature with respect to other habitat conditions now and in the future temperature temperatures are warm they're warm in the summer and fall in kind of these areas so you know what role do they play now and really limiting the area of physical habitat that that's really high quality and then how is that going to change this climate changes so you know the way that we kind of go about this from a bigger picture is through this sort of planning reporting and evaluation process so annually CWR and reclamation jointly develop an action plan based on the recommendations from this interagency Delta BCG why am I blanking out Delta coordination group thank you and so basically these recommendations come from this structured decision making we also have a science and monitoring plan that we update annually that describes the monitoring the modeling activities and also any directed research that may be going on to evaluate these actions and then a seasonal report basically our annual report that describes the implementation of the actions and the modeling and monitoring results for that year there are also a number of peer review publications that have come out as I mentioned looking at some of these actions and their effects and then right now DWR is currently working with the Delta Stewardship Council on a four year independent review of the summerfall habitat action for the California incident will take permit so this should inform how well the science plans and the structured decision making approach are being integrated into adaptive management for summerfall habitat recommendations ideally will improve certainty and metrics and confidence in decision making so this effort's kind of digging in a little bit more into the reads and the details than I think what we're going to continue to do but that information will be available to you ideally we think that it should be completed by June of 2024 and I think that's it yeah lunch time that's great well thanks for finishing on time so we can take a break as I mentioned earlier as we had those questions around the modeling we're going to come back and we'll roll the panel discussion into the session immediately after lunch so we'll get the presentation okay with the speakers you'll get the full set file and it's written before and after so if we could just thank the speakers first and we'll be back at one o'clock okay what we're going to do this afternoon if you look at the agenda is that we have two sessions this afternoon one on the summerfall habitat action monitoring and the second one is going to actually be on the biological monitoring what we're going to do is to go through both presentations and then have a panel discussion at the front both with the presenters and other folks you may want to bring up who might have something to offer we're also adding to the original agenda extending the presenters and it's a pleasure to invite Dr Rosemary Hartman again who is the lead for the interagency ecological program synthesis at DWR her prior experience is with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife that's right and she's well known on fish restoration programs your across the system so Dr Hartman thanks for being with us and if I kill the first yeah you're going to be a lot of me so hopefully I don't bore anyone I am as Peter said the lead for the interagency ecological program synthesis team which I like to say means that I know all the data that's being collected so whenever there's a big question I can take all the data put it together and answer that question and so for the summerfall habitat action the monitoring framework that I'm going to go over is really taking mostly data that's already being collected adding additional data where we need it and putting it all together to answer these big questions so I've been the lead on the monitoring for the salinity control gates and working with Britt and Christie and putting everything together to evaluate the effectiveness of these actions so come on buddy there we go so as Christie introduced we have this conceptual model for the summerfall habitat action that smelt our food limited in the fall and whatever we can do to get them through this kind of crunch period is going to be a good idea our overall hypothesis was that food and habitat in the fall were better in Sassoon Marsh and Sassoon Bay than upstream of the Sacramento River but this is a hypothesis it's not something that we know for sure that it's always going to be better to get smelt into Sassoon Marsh and Sassoon Bay in the fall and so we really took a hypothesis based approach to evaluating the effectiveness of these actions and putting monitoring in place that would allow us to evaluate our hypotheses so our hypothesis for fall X2 which again the action says that we need X2 at 80 kilometers in September and October and we hypothesized that a lower X2 maximizes the overlap of appropriate temperatures, turbidity and salinity so that's the abiotic habitat low X2 also increases kalanoid copepods in the low salinity zone in Sassoon Marsh and Sassoon Bay and that better habitat and better food will mean better delta smelt growth and survival for the salinity control gate action we have a very similar set of hypotheses again we're operating the salinity control gates for 60 days June through November this is going to freshen Sassoon Marsh so that's going to maximize the overlap of appropriate temperatures, turbidity and salinity in Sassoon Marsh X2 hypotheses focused on Sassoon Bay this action focuses on Sassoon Marsh operating those gates is also going to increase copepods which are smelt's favorite food into Sassoon Marsh and operation of the gates can even increase habitat all the way in Grizzly Bay because monozoma flows flow through system so we definitely think freshening the marsh is going to be good and if we can get that fresh water all the way over to Grizzly Bay it's going to be even better if that area tends to be cooler so Christy introduced you to this sort of adaptive management wheel that we use to conceptualize the planning and action implementation process and she would never kind of some of the backgrounds but we really are taking adaptive management approach where we evaluate this action every year and change our plans next year and in order to evaluate the actions monitoring is obviously super important fortunately there's a long history of ecological environmental monitoring funded by reclamation and DWR as well as other groups much o