f which is coordinated through the interagency ecological program is a nine member agency team of researchers that I think you guys were introduced to in the first meeting and this is just kind of a snapshot of where we have monitoring continuous water quality discrete water quality then the invertebrates fight a plank and so plank and all kinds of fish surveys really coat the area pretty darn well because all of this we did have to add some additional monitoring to answer our specific hypotheses but a lot of it we could use these existing studies now evaluating this action I was just talking to one of the panelists of break here it's difficult because we have sort of a hodge podge of years where we had one action but not the other every year is different in California water years change so quickly and we haven't done these actions very frequently so it's hard to know how to define what the outcome of the action was versus the outcome of it being the year of the tiger we also if I'm designing an experiment I want to control right we don't have a control estuary be great if we had another estuary we could not do the action and then clearly evaluate the results so we based a lot of our analyses on inter-annual comparisons years with x2 actions years without x2 actions years with the gates we have one year this past year we had both combined let me add dry years with no actions at all we also are using regional comparisons so as I said we think that x2 is going to improve conditions into soon bay we think that salinity control gates are going to improve conditions into soon marsh and then upstream the Sacramento river where the low salinity zone would be if we didn't have an action it won't really change with the actions and it's always going to be not as good smelt habitat so I made like a little cartoon of what we think the data could look like so the y-axis is not important it's just an example of whatever metric we're looking at higher is better and this is just a well every year we're going to be measuring whatever metric this is starting with 2017 and in the river like things bounce around a lot but we don't see any major changes in our metric when we do a salinity control gate action in the soon bay things bounce around a lot but you don't expect to see a huge effect of a salinity control gate action in the soon bay however in the soon marsh years with a gate action like 2018 in orange and 2023 in green you'd expect an improvement but there's still a lot of noise and it's going to be really hard to find that signal if we are expecting an effect of an x2 action again we won't really see an effect in the river so soon bay will probably see a big benefit to an x2 action in those blue years and the green year on the graph here and in the soon marsh you'll also see an effect of the action but you won't see as big an effect as when you have both the salinity control gates and the x2 action combined like we had in 2023 so how are we actually monitoring this what data are we collecting well to answer our first hypothesis which is maximizing habitat we are relying chiefly on our network of continuous water quality stations we cannot only analyze this data directly it's also an input into our 3D hydrodynamic models we have a huge network of these continuous sands throughout the delta first year we did a gate action back in 2018 we revamped a lot of these to make sure they all included turbidity and chlorophyll as well as temperature, solidity and normal suite and then as I mentioned they are inputs into our hydrodynamic models we can use forecast models to predict the effect of our action and hindcast models to say okay these are these discrete points how much habitat did we get between those points and so I showed you just an example of some fake data that wasn't really data this is what we actually can get from all of those sands this is a number of days that were within smelt habitat parameters for turbidity and pink, temperature in dark purple, salinity in orange and days with combined appropriate salinity temperature and turbidity in green and one set of columns for each year so we can compare okay years with x2 actions in the bay at the top marsh in the middle river at the bottom in the bay years with x2 actions that green bar was really high all years. In the marsh a lot of times temperature was sort of a limiting factor and then the river we didn't see as much of a correlation between our actions and habitat conditions our next hypothesis is zooplankton so we can measure zooplankton biomass and community composition we really leveraged our existing studies here zooplankton sampling is very time and labor intensive but we already do have a good network of zooplankton and we added additional samples to make sure we had samples at all these purple points at least every two weeks during the action period and the surveys that helped us out here were CDFW with the fall midwater trawl and summer tow net, DWR as environmental monitoring program and the directed outflow project which was a special study funded by Reclamation now because these were several studies we had to mesh together we had slightly different gears slightly different methods of collecting the samples and different laboratories processing the samples they were all similar but not exactly the same it wasn't a matter of like you just get one excel file and you can add it together especially where you know one group identified things to genus and the other one did it to species there had to be a lot of magic to get all the data to talk to each other so this is where I put in a plug for the interagency ecological program synthesis team and Sam Shevkin in particular who is now with the state water resources control board headed up a great project to integrate zooplankton data from across the system so we can now use our integrated data set to answer this question as well as many other questions so we could get a graph by year of Sassoon Bay, Sassoon Marsh, and the river abundance and biomass of calabinoid kiltopods we can compare did we see an increase in biomass in years with the gate action or not our next hypothesis was on grizzly bay habitat so again the gates are off the chart over here and we were hoping to see an effect of the gate action all the way in grizzly bay this is an extended shallow bay with high turbidity and cool temperatures that has historically been really good for smelt but we don't have great or we didn't have great monitoring throughout the bay because it's very shallow and hard to get into we did however put in a couple of new sands GZM, GZB, and Tully Red all within the last five years that we installed those specifically to try to pick up a signal from this action we can also use hindcast modeling to fill in the gaps we don't have sands but all that stuff on habitat and zooplankton and turbidity is just a proxy what we really care about is not actually a delta smelt habitat it's delta smelt so we'd love to be able to monitor improvements to delta smelt growth survival population status as many people have told you over the past few meetings delta smelt are very hard to catch they're very rare the enhanced delta smelt monitoring program EDSM does Kodiak trawls at random sites throughout the estuary on a regular basis and they're pretty much the only survey regularly catching smelt these days even though they don't catch a ton and then the biops and ITP were revised in 2019-2020 and this whole action started there were no one was catching any smelt and how ever did it evaluate this action fortunately the experimental release of delta smelt over the past few years almost 200,000 have been released so far has really increased the number of smelt were recapping right now they are taking an experimental approach to these releases to try and go to a point of supplementing the population personally I would love to be able to get to a point where we have enough smelt we can specifically release some smelt in Sassoon Marsh during this action we're not there yet but they've really helped increase our smelt catch so with what smelt we did catch and this is just a plot of all the smelt that were caught during last year summerfall habitat period 10 of them but when we were operating the gates there were several in Grizzly Bay during the action so just point in the right direction we also not only just catch the smelt but there's a lot of every smelt is precious and it all goes to researchers who analyze diet liver glycogen health metrics sometimes things like gill histology liver histology lots of information gotten from those smelt so we don't have a lot of information don't have a lot of wild smelt but we get as much information from them as we possibly can because we don't have a lot of wild and we're not to a point where we can release a bunch of smelt in the marsh during the action we have a smaller number of smelt raised in the hatchery that we keep at least this last year we kept it in enclosures last year was the first time we did an enclosure experiment during an action we had two sites one in Monazuma Slough where we expected the gate action to freshen things one over in Sacramento River the control site left them out for six weeks in enclosures measured growth, survival of liver glycogen critical thermal maximum and diets and we do want to expand this repeated in future years this year we actually we're interested in differences between sites but our primary goal was to try and figure out a way to reduce biofouling because previous times we've tried change of experiments in the summer they got so covered in gunk full of algae and critters and we felt like the smelt weren't really in their natural environment they were in a box full of algae so we did some experiments to try and reduce biofouling this is if you want to see some gunky cages you can barely see the sun through that one that's the one that we didn't have the biofouling treatment on this one we reduced biofouling somewhat what we found and this is just some preliminary data our lab control at the Philz culture facilities the smelt condition factor on the y-axis we're definitely doing better than the ones in the field we didn't see a difference between biofouling treatments and reovista the smelt actually grew more than the ones in Sassoon still working through this data trying to figure out what it means could be because Sassoon was actually warmer this year but we are excited to try this again this year when we're expecting another action so kind of our future directions things we're working on for the future we're going to be repeating that enclosure study to figure out if there are different ways of doing it figure out if we see the same effect of lower growth in Sassoon and reovista we're also looking at our phytoplankton data collection we've been collecting phytoplankton for enumeration but smelt don't eat phytoplankton and can we say enough about the effect of phytoplankton on silplankton to make it worth our time to select that we're also looking at those songs in Grizzly Bay assessing whether we need all of them because they are pretty difficult to maintain and giving us somewhat similar data and we're looking at potentially putting new flow monitoring station in the western end of Montezuma Slough you'll have to blow actions but Britt also introduced these food subsidy actions which we are working on so North Delta food subsidy is the one that we've actually been able to do a couple of times basic question is does these augmented flow pulses in the fall transport of the delicious phytoplankton and silplankton that grow out in the olivipass down into the Cache Slough region where it can be available to smelt normally during the summer you actually have net negative flows things are moving upstream because of all the agricultural withdrawals so we can get even just a short term pulse of water downstream that might transport some of that productive silplankton and so there's been monitoring both in years when we do a flow pulse and sort of baseline monitoring on water quality phytoplankton throughout this whole region all the way up to Pluse Basin before, during and after the flow pulses in the summer and fall as well as modeling the hydrodynamics to go with this for the managed wetlands special study as Britt mentioned we've contracted with UC Davis to get a better handle on what the current amount of productivity on managed wetlands it's a soon march is soon march if you're not familiar is a huge area of wetlands most of them are managed wetlands and they're managed for waterfowl specifically dot clubs and they can be really highly productive in especially the spring and winter when they're flooded up water is kept on them the whole time but that productivity is just sitting in the pond it's not out where the fish can get it and it's, you know, very seasonal when the ponds dry down you get a lot of the productivity into the surrounding channels but what's the timing of that when is things most productive and can we suggest management changes incentivize management changes to get more of the dot club managers to, you know, produce food for spelled so we are working on monthly zooplankton phytoplankton water quality as well as growth rate incubations to look at those vital rates that Dr. Reid was asking about earlier and trying to see what the timing and appropriate amount of connectivity is because the initial studies showed that you know, tidal wetlands have lower standing stocks of this productivity but it's available to fish all the time versus managed wetlands where you have much higher levels of productivity and biomass but it's not available to fish at a consistent rate for the Sacramento ship channel again looking at using it as a food subsidy for delta smelt says as Britt talked about a dead end slew with really high zooplankton rate and high amounts especially towards the top where things are kind of I don't want to say stagnant but high residence time low exchange get a lot of phytoplankton zooplankton and stratification in the middle you have have really high turbidity it's actually a sort of second estrogen turbidity maximum and we catch a lot of smelt there year round there's a year round population of smelt that lives up here and there was this fertilization experiment to try and kick start that productivity even more but this would transporting productivity out of the ship channel would require modifications to the gates at the top end to actually allow things to pulse so Reclamation has contracted with Dr. Sandra's lab to do more monitoring of primary and secondary productivity in these low exchange and higher exchange zones to see where that productivity is going is there any way we could use this to increase downstream productivity as well as phytoplankton zooplankton and some of the low critters at the base of the food web so next steps for the North Delta food subsidy we're working on a stable isotope study to see are things from the wetlands really being transported downstream and incorporated into tissues and using cage enclosures of Delta smelts to look at thermal suitability across the landscape for the managed wetlands study we're finishing up the special study with UC Davis and then thinking about how to reach and incorporating their feedback in potential changes to management figure out how to incentivize changes in management but working on making sure we have enough data first to come to them with ideas on the SHIP channel we're working with Fish and Wildlife Service to NUSGS to look at some bioenergetics for modeling to try and figure out why this area is such a hotspot for smells because in some ways wouldn't think of it as a smell hotspot there's also work with Port of West Sacramento and the U.S. Army Corps are working on design alternatives for the locks at the north end and I believe I'm going to be going over to modeling and then take questions may need you to I can change the presentation I'm just going to ask the smell that you're finding in the turban areas in the wild the turban areas of the SHIP channel so the past two years, three years we've had the experimental releases there have been very in terms of over the past three years no they've mostly been the hatchery releases or they're the offspring of the hatchery releases prior to the experimental releases starting the SHIP channel was like the only place we were catching any smells at all you know it would be like 90% of the smell catch would be in the SHIP channel and now that the experimental releases are starting we're still catching a few wild smells or ones that have at least one wild parent but it's still pretty hard to catch okay well hopefully you're not tired of me because you get a little more of me and then we'll have an open discussion with lots more people so that was all of the monitoring data but once we have that data what do we do with it and for this presentation I was asked to talk about how we are using that data to parameterize our models both planning models and real-time models so most of the modeling that has been done for the summer fall habitat action is planning models there are some real-time modeling that happens during the action but mostly the modeling is done in a structured decision-making framework to figure out what's exactly how to implement the action and then there is more statistical modeling done afterward to evaluate the effectiveness of the action so we have this suite of actions that are intended to benefit Delta Smell but we need to figure out what benefits are going to come from the actions we put together all of these models of zooplankton water quality hydrodynamics to give us what type of smelt growth we can expect from potential different management actions and that's how it works it's exactly how it works a whole bunch of us sitting around with this machine and we tram everything down in there and somehow some numbers come out it's great but it's definitely not something that was just me with my machine dealing there was a lot of coordination a lot of players involved management guidance on what models should we use what metrics are important what are our objectives and then evaluating which combination of actions will work come mainly from the Delta Coordination Group which is this interagency team of federal, state agencies and water contractors to give recommendations then the final decision is made by the agency leadership from Reclamation, DWR and CDFW but that's kind of like a lot of big people who often don't have time to actually do math we also really relied on technical sub teams many of which were pulled from the interagency ecological program project work teams and the modeling and research arms of the various participating agencies going back to our fancy overly complicated doctor management wheel we talked about monitoring which was in kind of the center of the wheel which I personally think that that little arm is too small it should be bigger now we're talking about the planning and destruction decision making where we take all of the monitoring metrics and data and use it to see what we want to do and in terms of like what we're actually testing we have these different management actions and each of those management actions has various variations we might want to test so for the North Delta foob subsidy we could use agricultural drainage water or you could use Sacramento river water we could do like a really quick high intensity pulse or a longer lower intensity pulse and just in terms of timing Sacramento river water we do that in the summer the agricultural water would be later in the year the salinity control gates we need 60 days sometimes between June and October but we want to do it like all at once starting in June all at once starting in September or do we want to do like seven days on seven days off to stretch that fresh water a little further fall X2 we don't really have options for implementation there we want to include it in our model so that we know the potential synergistic benefits of having X2 and salinity control gates in various configurations the additional 100,000 acre feet block of water is one of the ones with the most options it's not prescribed you need to do this with this water it's just to block a water that CDFW gets to the side you know what we want more gate actions it's to defer it to next year we want it as outflow and so they have the final call on this block but the Delta Coordination Group can discuss different options we're doing that tomorrow and then the deep water channel and manage water transactions they're not really ready for prime time so we did not evaluate those in this framework but they are potential for future years and in terms of performance measures someone was asking about performance measures earlier we have a number of them to see how they get to our ultimate objective of increasing smelt growth they are increasing smelt food which means zooplankton primarily halinoid copepods particularly pseudo-diapomous forbesi which say that 10 times fast pseudo-diapomous but they're smelt favorite food increased Delta smelt habitat and here we use the habitat suitability index made up of turbidity, temperature current speed and salinity that's the last one increased Delta smelt growth and survival and here we are really talking about increasing Delta smelt growth we have very short-term actions over a small spatial footprint so it doesn't work well to try and scale it up to a population level response instead we focus like okay if smelter in this area how much will they grow over the summer in these different parameters minimizing water cost using our hydrodynamic modeling minimize contaminant toxicity here we use expert opinion don't have good models that we use here minimize impacts to other species again rely on expert opinion because we don't have appropriate models and then increase our abilities to learn in the future it's always easy to say well let's not do anything because we're afraid of messing things up but then you're never going to learn what will happen so once we kind of had our performance measures outlined and our objectives in mind we started our modeling exercise and here we started with a conceptual model so we have our actions on the left hand side and we have our end goals the individual performance measures and the final ultimate objective increasing Delta snow recruitment and we did you know some box and arrow spaghetti diagramming of okay so how do we think each action is going to result in performance measures we're interested in just you know in words how do we conceptualize this process once we had this conceptual model we need to figure out like okay how do we put numbers on this because it's easier to really weigh the cost of benefits when we can quantify it at least roughly so we do a lot of monitoring and I have all of our input data in green over here that's the things we're actually measuring but most of the things we measure aren't actually our performance measures you know we can't go out there and measure Delta smelt growth we have to measure something catch of Delta smelt or temperature that we can then use to calculate Delta smelt growth um so how then what models do we need to use to get from our the things we're measuring to our actual performance measures well we have a lot of models as we heard about this morning so the Delta simulation model 2 will take the water forecast and give us potential water cost of these actions it will also give us Delta flow which if we combine with expert elicitation which means talking to a bunch of people who know what they're talking about to get us impact to saw monitors we can take those Delta flow parameter in DSM2 and use them to parameterize a three-dimensional hydrodynamic model along with observed turbidity and temperature to get a smelt habitat model um and end up with area of potentially Delta smelt habitat for different options um we could also use that flow and uh salinity that comes out of that flow to parameterize some zooplankton models to give us zooplankton abundance all of those models go into a bio-energetics based habitat suitability index um through the individual based Delta smelt model in R, IBMR uh to get individual Delta smelt growth contaminants again we don't have great models so this was an expert elicitation I'm not going to walk you through each of these models um give you a little more information uh you want a lot more information we have lots of documentation for all of them hydrodynamics starting with DSM-2 you were introduced to this morning it's a one-dimensional model probably a little hard to see but all the little dots on this grid are nodes in this model so we can calculate flow water quality through particle tracking uh but they're all based on these nodes um it is a one-dimensional model but we can use that input to parameterize a three-dimensional model the semi-implicit cross-scale hydroscience integrated system model I'm sure they work very hard on that acronym much easier to say schism and it'll give you the 3D hydrodynamics um transport of consistence and this is what we use to um calculate salinity and current speed we used observed temperature and turbidity and interpolated between those to get us our Delta smelt catacat and this could give us you know our forecast flows um on the right hand side we have flow in the old bypass that was used to um help parameterize our model of the North Delta flow action and on the left here we have the salinity of Belden's landing which is one of our compliance points for this action and we can evaluate different combinations of uh gate actions like 7 days on 7 days off starting on the spring tide starting with the heat tide 10 days on 10 days off operating continuously do all the things to try and see what is going to give you the best salinity of Belden's landing but even more fun we can uh use the temperature, turbidity and salinity to actually see what is the entire landscape like of spelt habitat not just at single points but across the entire region we can calculate total area um habitat suitability by area to see how much boost we get from our different uh flow actions we can use this forecast to try and predict what we might have but you never really know what the summer is going to bring especially in terms of temperature uh we can also do a hind cast um using the observed temperature uh when we are operating the gate so this is what we actually saw versus we can use schism to turn the gates off and with the same conditions that we had last summer what kind of habitat did we get and look at the difference so we can see the benefit of um our habitat action from this past year and this is just the number of days that were in suitable habitat for delta smelt so that's habitat the other important thing for smelt is food um biology is always more complicated than hydrology um you know even predicting temperature uh predicting zooplankton is way harder than predicting temperature um the individual based model in R that we use to uh model delta smelt growth categorize zooplankton in uh 12 different categories of things smelt each at varying rates suited up as four besides this one on the bottom here it smells favorite um and most of these have some kind of relationship to salinity um when you're in the soon marsh you get more pseudo-di-activists at lower salinities versus say uh cartiella you sort of maximize in mid salinities so um with the help of the interagency ecological program um flow alteration project working uh and especially sabershevkin who is um an excellent zooplankton wrangler uh calculated a series of generalized additive models one for each of these taxonomic groups to uh predict okay what will the predicted change in salinity mean in terms of predicted change in zooplankton and we could you know put a bunch of scenarios on our um x-axis here and calculate how much improvement in zooplankton you would get for each of the scenarios in the soon marsh so that was all of the bits but the ultimate goal again is delta smelt um and so we needed to take the smelt habitat and the smelt food and scale them up to smelt growth uh after a lot of different um we did a review of like all the different smelt models that are out there there's a lot of smelt models out there um you know the the life cycle model has come up a couple of times and um that is generally referring to the US Fish and Wildlife Service um population model which is uh on a longer time step and it's for the whole delta we were concerned that because our actions are very spatially pretty darn small um and uh short in time that we might not have the sensitivity to see a population level effect in our model from just one year of an action so we used a biohydrogetics based model um this is based on the individual model that uh Dr. Kenneth Rose developed a few years ago and has been expanded on by um Will Smith and Matt Noberga uh to be better um short answer uh and it takes various foraging conditions like water temperature um day-length prey density just recently we added turbidity an important factor um holding to biohydrogetics processes to look at increase in growth rate of delta smelt over the entire summer so we could put in all of the input parameters from smelt habitat in to this model and get the potential increase in growth in normal meters for delta smelt over the course of the summer contaminants as I mentioned we don't have a great model of contaminants um contaminants are always changing um they are expensive to monitor uh it is difficult to even come up with a monitoring plan you need to choose which ones you're interested in are you doing toxicity are you doing uh concentrations um and we also don't have great data on what this huge suite of contaminants out there will actually do to delta smelt and their prey resources um so there's been a lot of special studies on contaminants uh but not we haven't quite gotten to the point where we can put all of those into a model of what these actions will do so instead we um reached out to the contaminants project work team and got a group of uh experts to give um an estimate on a constructed scale of was negative three to one of the potential impact of our actions on the different performance factors in terms of zooplankton survival and quality delta smelt growth delta smelt survival um etc our conceptual model was that the north delta flow action would probably have a bigger effect of contaminants in the salinity control gates because they are mobilizing things in an agricultural area we tend to get a lot of contaminants um and the source water for that action was going to also be important so we got um experts to kind of weigh in on this constructive scale how they thought the actions might change contaminants and therefore uh smelt more effects to other species um and the other species we were most interested in was salmon and sturgeon uh we knew that these actions might change um migration patterns uh they might impact contaminants uh they might impact food support um so we got experts from different agencies for different agencies uh to weigh in on what they thought but there was really high uncertainty we got you know people to put their predicted numbers onto a um table that we could analyze and mostly people thought the effects would be relatively minor in terms of learning we had three sort of categories of learning that we rated um our different options on is one in terms of feasibility like there's some actions we've never done before if we decide to do them this year we'll learn whether or not they're possible that would be awesome uh for a lot of the other ones it was more in terms of effectiveness did our did we actually see the effect we were looking for we don't do an action we're not going to know whether the action is effective and then um there's some actions that will learn more if we have more special studies associated with that once we had all of that modeling done all those performance measures quantified we put them in a really fancy table using this um online tool supported by um compass uh to visualize the outcomes of the alternatives you know if you could select an alternative and see which ones were better and which ones were worse um and the Delta coordination group had a number of in-depth discussions about trade-offs the positives the negatives potential risks what the uncertainties were what we didn't have enough information talked a lot about contaminants um and once we kind of got the group to really understand the modeling process um the DCG came up with a recommendation uh and we also had to take water year type into consideration certain things that could only be done in certain water year types came up with a recommendation and it was like wait till May 15th May 1st May 1st um when the water year type is officially announced and then we can decide exactly what we're doing so that was all the planning modeling that we did um we also have some things that we do using real-time modeling um not as much as like the OMR um management but one of the major things is the position of X2 um we do not we have a lot of songs we have a lot of measurements out there but we don't have the entire system with so many measurements on it so um X2 is calculated with a linear regression between several known points um and the folks in our operations team do a lot of um magic to try and coordinate all of the exports inflows outflows to keep X2 approximately where it needs to be um the other thing that we were looking at in near real time was water cost we did also uh forecast water cost for the different parameters but um as explained this past year we operated the salinity control gates with this extra 100,000 acre foot block of water that CDFW had to do with what they wanted and they said okay operate the control gates and instead of 60 days it's 100,000 acre feet so we're like okay how do we tell when we've used 100,000 acre feet this isn't this is to me not being water project operations at first I'm like well you just turn it on until you've used 100,000 acre feet right no all of the coordinated operations you know you're dealing with multiple salinity compliance points um multiple flow compliance points all of the upstream and diversions and you can't just turn on a switch and then turn it off and you've used 100,000 acre feet so um the reason why the salinity control gates costs water at all is that um when the gates are operating it's pumping fresh water into the marsh that fresh water is no longer going out into the bay and uh that means that if fresh water is going in here we need extra fresh water to go out there to keep x2 where it needs to be or other salinity compliance points if x2 isn't a factor in that particular time period so what our operations modelers were doing is once a week they would use dsm2 to run a bunch of simulations with different levels of outflow to see what the change in salinity at Collinsville would be and use that to create a linear regression for the difference in salinity versus outflow to calculate how much water we had used um so this was used to control when we stopped our salinity control gate action last year in terms of future directions for modeling um we could definitely use some work on the zooplankton flow relationships that's um an area of active research as Christy mentioned improving some of the bionegetic modeling that's also a active and continually evolving model um and Will Smith and Matt and the folks at Fish and Wildlife Service are great at taking feedback and making additions to that um dusting temperature suitability curves historically there was some work that said 25 degrees was the kind of limit for adult smell but that's like when they start dying and we'd like them to like do well not just not die so working on um figuring out what level of temperature is appropriate um the x2 calculations right now it's a pretty basic linear regression and there has been some recent feedback that we should be using more different um salinity uh songs to calculate that and then incorporating results of some of our special studies like archaic experiments um some of the physiology studies of delta smell some of the contaminant studies to um improve all of our models and I think that's all of me and so now we can go to the panel and um yes more folks chance at the way in that was really great and it's also good just to see the critical central lol that IEP put play in the system in terms of synthesis which we've heard so much about so if we could perhaps invite the um uh Christy and Brittany and anyone else you think could be useful uh we look five seats at the front please Matt's name several times thank you okay somebody has a question for you Matt and we invite I think it's awesome that we have all these scientists I can answer the question if they want I don't really understand what I'm talking about oh no I promise I'm going into the rest of the questions we hear actually why don't you sit up here and we'll see how the questions go that sounds great thank you for having me should we have enough seats yeah actually why don't we just do one panel and we can hit both the questions so yeah please do sit at the front we also have an additional panelist we have Fannabon from our technical service he's on the line and he's actually involved if anyone has questions about the panel very young scientist Fred yes well Fred no need to be shy sorry Fred yeah that's all I was wondering they said for me to come here I was like why am I coming here that's why am I here in the right place we're in the right place where's Fred okay we have questions on the expert of the t-shirt maybe we'll put those to you yes for sure anything on the contaminants okay so part of the goal to the committee's knowledge is to expand the Q&A beyond the two action agencies who we asked to make these lengthy presentations and give us a lot of the details because we want to be as inclusive as possible and realize that the action agencies aren't the only agencies and groups thinking about these two particular things so we'll do the same thing tomorrow with OMR we'll have more than just the people who gave the presentations to help answer questions well thank you and by the way we haven't heard from you would you like to start with the questions so this is I guess for anybody on the panel would like to address it and it's kind of an open-ended question or comment but it seems to give you a little bit of a chicken and an egg thing where the bottleneck for these fish is between juveniles to subadults to adults but none of your performance metrics for your actions are for and bottleneck if you've been able to subadults to adults so it seems like it's really hard to assess whether or not these actions would be beneficial and then I heard some people say well maybe the supplemented fish could help us with that but then we'd only be able to use the progeny of the supplemented fish as performance metric or maybe not even that maybe just the progeny of the progeny of the supplemented fish yeah so there was definitely something that there was a lot of discussion about getting at delta smelt recruitment is like an ultimate goal but picking our individual based model through the lifespan would probably lead to reducing the sensitivity to relatively small actions so we decided that's why we decided to just use growth and make the assumption that improved growth would lead to improved survival and improved reproduction the next year in terms of the supplementation we have so few wild fish right now we need something and right now there are best proxy and the work that the culture and supplementation of smelt's team is doing to try and get to the point where we almost have a situation like we have with salmon where we're releasing fish on a regular basis to supplement population so I guess what I'm trying to say is that hatchery raised fish are going to be a cultured fish as I should call them are going to be an ongoing part of the future of smelt in the estuary and we need to use them where we can and saying oh we we'll only now know about cultured fish and not wild fish they're going to be such a huge part that we might as well learn about them is how I see it I don't know if Britt you want to weigh in or anyone else other panelists like to add I think to raise my response actually Sean so I think what you're really getting at there is really the way that we have implemented adaptive management in the delta particularly on some of these specific actions and I think before there's a fairly good one because it's been around for a long time I don't think the objective for that action were about clearly specified and then kept changing I don't think we really set up a monitoring scheme to really to your point to really tell how this is working and I think the general concern is that we haven't, I don't think our conceptual models are right and I think they need to be reevaluated from the perspective that my group's been coming from is one of limiting factors to try and figure out what factors are limiting the recovery of delta snow when and that's really hard because those things keep changing some years it's warm some temperatures other years it's like lack of food or whatever so it's when specifying our action we've got to be thinking about what those limiting factors are and whether or not we can develop a monitoring program that's good enough to catch that you've heard a lot about abiotic habitat and I have a very dear friend that says who happens to be a professor of Pew Scholar and Stanford PhD so there's no such thing as abiotic habitat right there is so the way it's been described so far is that you know it's that area where we've got satisfactory solidity, turbidity and temperature consists of left out of that is food it's not habitat that's really being missed in this whole conversation because the logical question then is well how much food do we need well we've addressed that in different papers right but for sake of argument in the fall let's say it's 4,000 micrograms of carbon per cubic meter so you can have this great action where you move you move more water into the system you increase the area of the low salinity zone but you and you actually do move some food downstream but you never move enough food downstream for smelt to survive in Sassoon Bay so it's not habitat you actually haven't done anything you've taken the food from where it was good and you moved it downstream to where it was always inadequate and women can tell you a lot more about that about the lack of food supply since the clams moved in and Sassoon Bay used to be a really great place for delta smelt before the clams that old conceptual model was great but since the clams moved in it's decimated the food supply in the fall in Sassoon Bay so until we start like challenging our thinking about this and re-evaluating our conceptual models I'm not sure we're going to get to the right place I thought Rosemary's graph you know when she showed what was going on in Rio Vista those two graphs right what was going on in Rio Vista in the cages first down in Sassoon Bay and the growth in in Rio Vista in the upper Sacramento was higher well that totally consistent with access to the model because that's where the food is right there was never enough food down in Sassoon Bay so I just it's you know I know it's controversial but I think we need to be able to set up these forms where we can really have these sort of discussions I would like to respond to two things there is that the results in 2019 were the opposite where we found higher growth in Sassoon Marsh than in Sassoon Bay and I forget what my second point was oh there are other hypothesis for why we saw those differences in growth was that it was warmer in Sassoon Marsh than in Rio Vista and that flip-flops like some years is warmer some years is not I would add one thing you know it's diving deeper into potentially you know the conceptual model from what IEP 2015 that mass model that's on the delta coordination groups sort of science activities to dive into this next year and what are we missing you know how are things evolving you know so you know I think in general we're interested in you know recommendations or gaps that you're seeing that maybe you could recommend some focus on or alternative strategies you know we've got a toolbox of six three four ish which can be implemented you know the North Delta you know that is highly managed adaptively you know and we aren't seeing the results that we anticipated and are pivoting to see what else we can do for food subsidies but food does seem to be a major factor thank you so we'll go to Gerard on the other side thanks for really interesting presentations I understand the need to address the food limitation aspect to increase growth rates and I really appreciate the food web perspective on that and I was wondering about the broader food web effects that that could have so for example to what extent are we selling the impacts or benefits of these actions to other key members of the food web like competitors or Delta smell do we know anything about that and then this morning we saw some I think I'm clear evidence about whether food availability will benefit or in fact the food infrastructure and I think you talked about limited statistical power but I was wondering if it's not clear that that increase in food availability is benefiting Delta smell why do we think that energy is going like what's happening in their other yeah I love that question it's complicated I mean I consider myself a food web ecologist that loves taking the broad view of it and the broader you get the more complicated it gets in terms of predators that has been a topic of hot debate in the community for a very long time there's been a lot of research on it and there's never been a real satisfactory this is the smoking gun I do know that Matt published a very interesting paper a couple years ago like hypothesizing that striped aspiration has been a major factor impacting Delta smell broad scale and that prior to 30 years ago everything else was doing well enough that the impact of striped aspiration wasn't decimating Delta smell you know they weren't doing great but they were fine then other factors have now synergistically impacting smelt competitors is competition is a very hard thing to show empirically we obviously have lots and lots and lots of non-native competitors I'm pulling this number out of my head so maybe Fred could correct me if I get it wrong but something like 95% of the fish in the Delta both in terms of biomass and numbers is non-native so like most of the Pilatian community are Shad more Shad, Silver Sides Juvenile Striped Bass Gobi's the larval Gobi's are everywhere so competitors are definitely an issue in terms of like where is food going if not to smell come on to all the rest of them yeah I was going to mention on top of that there's a the conspecific species Waukesake invasive species Waukesake very similar a recent synthesis you know suggest really overlapping sort of the psychological niche where smelt are often caught in the ship channel high I think Brian Maharja is here right high high patches of Waukesake invasive Mississippi Silver Sides are a big problem as well so there is likely that heavy competitor impact on if we are creating some sort of food subsidies and even making an impact on what you smell might be present Any other comments from committee members if not perhaps we can come over to you and then Stephen will come back to the other side Thank you so on a different topic and it was you know motivated by the discussion about Nucleus and Richmond this morning in the ship channel and about your monitoring and the salinity so thinking about estuaries they stratify you know is the system stratify and then with higher production you know you have more than potential for low DO is there and I didn't hear anything about monitoring DO in the system so is there low DO is there potential for low DO what role is that Very good question and as someone who was raised on the Chesapeake Bay and was indoctrinated with the idea that eutrophication nutrients are bad they cause chemical blooms that cause DO the delta is a really weird place we have very little stratification the ship channel is one of the few places where it does stratify sometimes we have high turbidity we seem to have lots of nutrients nutrients don't tend to limit algal production it's thought to be light limited in most cases and we don't have eutrophication we have not enough production most places you want to reduce phytoplankton production here we're trying to increase it we have recently started having some problems with harmful algal blooms in the summer in areas with long residence time but so far we haven't had major low dissolved oxygen concerns the only places where there have been low DO concerns is actually in the soon marsh when some of those managed wetlands are draining sometimes the material that's been sitting on that wetland doing nothing for a long time you do get super high productivity that causes local low DO that has mostly been remediated with just minor changes to management and sort of staggering releases to stop really low DO water from getting out into the soon marsh and the other place where there had historically been a low DO problem was the Stockton Ship Channel in the dead end where we did get stratification there had there's also wastewater treatment plant nearby and historically there was some problems with low DO but they installed aerators and increased putting some extra monitoring equipment to test when DO might be coming up problem but overall unlike so many estuaries we don't have a utrophication problem and we don't have low dissolved oxygen problems Brian did you want to add to that Brian perhaps you could just introduce yourself my name is Brian Bergamowski I'm with US Geological Survey I'm a biogeochemist working on phytoplankton productivity and nutrient turnover in the Delta so we the issue of our conceptual models and the carbon production in our system I think can find these conversations solely to the idea that chlorophyll biomass is the representation of both productivity and carbon supply and we know from the basic mass balance calculations we do in this estuary that a lot of our estuary is supported by detrital material export detrital material from tidal wetland systems export from the river particularly detrital material some estimates are up to 80% of the energetics of the estuary it's a heterotrophic estuary we don't have much productivity in our estuary and what productivity we had elapsed so I think we need to readjust our conceptual models to include the idea that we can get these large pulses of aloftness organic material into the estuary to have solubrious effects of one kind or another an example is the yellow bypass is flooded right now we see on the recessional phase the yellow bypass sometimes but not always see a massive transport of material out of that into the estuary but the modality of interaction with bypass is important in terms of producing that stuff and exporting it we also see that we just have no clear idea because we measure chlorophyll and chlorophyll fluorescence only what the phytodetrital component is that is supplying the estuary so I suggest we might consider the basics the fundamentals of our conceptual models and we have the data to be able to do some of this stuff we just look at productivity and we're just not doing it right now to add to that yellow bypass is another place where occasionally there have been low DO problems especially when you have a flow pulse in the fall on a drier year and I would just like to say we're not just doing chlorophyll we've got a lot of phytoplankton taxonomy we're now all of our sands that get chlorophyll also have phycocyanin probes that actually don't work that well but that's a problem we do have a couple of fluoroprobes which have a broader range of fluorescence they also seem to keep breaking but we're trying and then all of our discrete grab samples get not only chlorophyll but also phyophyten which gets you some of that detrital component but detritus is definitely understudied and one of the backgrounds for why tidal wetland restoration is part of the biological opinions and no that's not today's focus but the whole idea is the delta used to be all wetlands and so if detritus is important now it must have been such the lifeblood of the estuary 200 years ago we've lost a lot of that so anything we can do to get that back we also need to keep in mind that all phytoplankton are not the same and when we have our big series of blooms here in the system it was a lakasaira a lakasaira is a large, highly salacious chain-forming gyatons are great for the system, not this one it could not be consumed by Wim Kemmerer's work his crew showed that they don't support zooplankton production so it's complicated we need to face that thank you Brian we go to Steven and then cross to David on this side Steven thanks everyone I've got a question is it to the structure of the interagency ecological program itself actually I'm kind of curious because this seems to be a group that's working synthetically and I wonder if we can speak to questions among the different contributing agencies and how the information generated by the group is integrated by the other agencies yeah so unfortunately I the answer in terms of how it's currently structured may change in a few months that's undergoing some potential reorganization that I can't speak to greatly but it's was established a long time ago in 70s don't have the history off the top of my head but 74 sounds right, 74 sounds right all the member agencies got together signed a memorandum of understanding basically to agreeing to collaborative ecological research in the delta the idea of providing information to help the greater community a lot of the research is directly funded by the water projects but not all of it and the way it currently functions the way I describe it to someone in an elevator is that it's the cool kids club there's no monetary like you're not applying to IEP for funding you're coming together because you're interested in the system you want to collaborate with other scientists each agency sponsors their staff to participate it's not there are some contractual requirements but a lot of it is voluntary and we have a group of coordinators which are higher level managers the agency directors who kind of talk about the broad scale work plan this includes all of the major monitoring surveys as well as a lot of special studies that can be included in the work plan then there's a lot of smaller teams that are made up of more of the rank and file scientists our science management team that shares information coming out of the projects or out of the surveys reviews the special studies coming in reviews papers it's going to talk about science it's really fun and then there's a lot of specific work teams for particular topics and these are open to the public there'll be a call out like okay we're starting a new project work team on title wetlands monitoring anyone with an interest title wetlands can come there's presentations on different aspects sometimes there'll be work products like we want to put together a best management practices for title wetlands or something like that sometimes it's more of just a journal club collaboration people give presentations and people give feedback someone says hey I'm interested in doing this anyone want to work with me then I run the synthesis team in particular which focuses on taking disparate datasets and putting them together to answer questions in new ways so we meet quarterly just to talk broadly and then it's a good place for people to again give presentations on this is what I'm trying to do has anyone tried this does anyone want to participate and we form these ad hoc teams to answer these particular questions there's been a lot of work over the past five years or so through the data utilization workgroup as part of IEP and many of these synthesis teams to really start putting our data together making more of it available online in publicly accessible formats with version control and digital object identifiers to make sure that our data is of high quality and usable and findable and used and that's you know individual datasets but then realizing that we have such a wealth of data that historically had been well okay here's the fall middle of our trial data and here's the summer toe net data and here's the zooplankton data and the dates on all of them are in different formats like without that this example I don't actually know if the dates were in different formats but but they probably were so so I have now participated in a number of teams of like okay let's come up with scripts to go out there and pull down all those separate datasets making talk to each other and publish the final integrated dataset in a way that people can access it and so a lot of the inputs to the modeling exercise that we use for making decisions on summer fall habitat action came out of some of those separate formerly separate datasets that we integrated and you know made them more than what their original study plan was for I was just going to mention that the interagency ecological program actually has a full website with kind of information and annual work plan synthesis there's an IEP newsletter which is sort of like pre-literature for you know community folks to publish their science findings all that's available and I think it was on the Delta Stewardship Council website maybe well IEP is on it's through it's like an IEP.ca.gov it's an official we got our own thing but it's through the CDFW is actually on the back end of the yeah thank you I think that was a great summary and correct me if I'm wrong but there's also a lead scientist and there's engagement with the heads of the agencies so it's a way that the science community not individual scientists can get information you're up to the directors and vice versa which I think is a very important function of the IEP so there's no other comments from the panelists on that topic leave it you're next and then we'll come across to the news from here we're going back we're jumping around we're just getting coverage yes I got ya thanks just for the record it gets days unless you're running by counts so so it was a different sort of question this might be a premature question maybe very premature but I'm wondering if you give us a sense of the scale of the potential from these actions they work and I think that breaks down both into could you scale it up is there enough capacity in the system to scale these actions up and then also do you have a sense of reasonable good case scenario but for smell it might be and I'm just trying to get a sense are these minor demonstration projects that have to be repeated over and over again or might we have here a formula for species recovery I would say these are not a silver bullet in terms of scalability it really depends on the action so X2 and the salinity control gates we only have once a soon marsh we can get it as fresh as you want but we only have one can't really scale that or X2 the managed wetlands North Delta food web actions there's potentially more room for scale but still relatively limited and I'll admit that when we did our modeling putting all of the outputs into the Delta smell biodegetics model we saw that over the course of the entire summer the difference between not doing an action and doing the best action we could was half a millimeter of growth and that was a little depressing but it was also the best we could do and we do know that all of the model outputs that went into that and the biodegetics model itself there's a ton of uncertainty so we figured okay this doesn't seem like a huge impact but it is an increase in growth and it's their actions we know we can do so something is better than nothing but there was definitely a lot of the more political discussions on okay is that enough to make it worth it but yeah so Peter if I could so there's been two structure decision making processes going on one through the DCG and there's another one that's being operated or led by Compass Resource Management my understanding was that the DCG had a more narrow scope the second one which I participated in under much broader scope where we consider a much broader range of management actions the implementation of those so I was talking about limiting factors before and different problems in different years so essentially what you needed to do is to put together a suite of actions that would be able to hit essentially in any year any one of the limiting factors that were going to happen if you do that the population response is enormous it was like orders of magnitude that we were seeing huge increases in in delta smelt numbers and by far the most critical component there was the summer food supply so it really meant that you had to you know and I think we're a little bit limited by imagination here right because most of Sassoon Marsh is not connected to the estuary most of it is diked wetlands that does not come into contact with the estuary if we could just reconnect a lot of that stuff if we could connect a lot of flood plains upstream we could restore a lot of the natural functions and we're really not doing that but if we could do that if we could increase our summer food supply the modeling and we used four different models in our structure decision-making process one of them was the IVMR model we had another US Fish and Wildlife Service model the LCME model and then a monitoring model and then what we were calling our limiting factors model and surprisingly they all gave pretty similar results and when we were able to overcome the summer food problem they all show very strong recovery of delta snow so again this is public no they're working on campuses putting a draft they've got it first draft out now for circulation and they're not expecting I think J a public release one until the end of March I will say that I both Brittany and I had seen some earlier versions of the the Compass model and we thought that they used a unrealistic model of zooplankton from the North Delta food subsidy and some other of the zooplankton components but definitely that's why we are looking at production on these manned wetlands as soon and it's a big part of the title wetland restoration benefit that is being pursued for Delta smelts I was going to say in general I think that's a great question that when will there be that payoff and I think there's a lot of uncertainty but that's where this larger adaptive management process comes in and I don't think we have those thresholds yet of years down the line we've done this we've had enough replication what are our thresholds to say okay this is worth it and you pointed out this is just part of their life cycle and these are probably smaller actions and a lot of uncertainty that Lenny and Dave alluded to we're just sort of fighting off some of these strategies right now that we're going to need to replicate and develop this larger picture but there is a lot more going on and the SDM did highlight other spring actions summer fall actions in entrainment so this summer fall like Rosie mentioned is more narrowly focused but I think thinking about that larger adaptive management and if and when that payoff could come and thresholds for that decision are something that we need to think about if I can just chime in one more time and I don't mean to make an enemy of DWR here and I love what IEP does the data that IEP generates is hugely important just a fabulous, fabulous resource but they've been collecting the data for 40 years now we have seen a huge range of variations through that time in terms of flows, in terms of food production in terms of fish responses there is a wealth of information there at the harvest you know because Rosemary was sort of saying well we don't have when we're trying to do these small actions we don't really have enough sort of data points to be really able to come up with conclusions like strong conclusions but we've got 40 years of data that actually provides us with a whole lot of insight about what circumstances we're going to see an increase in the fish response and when we're not it's a rich source of data that we can harvest and has been harvested Thanks Scott I'll find one comment and then we'll go to the next question Alright Sure I mean just to comment that I don't think this is the full range of possible actions these are just some that we're taking and studying now and that there are a lot of other possible actions that are perhaps scalable in different ways if we're trying to increase food web supplies I mean food supplies to the estuary in the summertime there are ones that perhaps come out of this water cost we talk about that a lot in our shop so it's great that we're testing some but we should keep testing them we should put them on the table and see if they work Thanks Brian So we'll go to Anias and then Steve Let's say walking to my cup and down the room I'm trying to think of a question if I can answer I've got one I've got some about the structure of decision making because the last presentation we talked about how these different things came together in the structure of decision making and I don't have a lot of direct experience but you obviously did a good job trying out the one that you described Rosemary was the DCG one not the other commerce one so you also did a good job trying to get your arms around all of the different factors even though you had varying levels some were expert opinions some were more quantitative some were 3D hydrodynamic model based so you didn't really say much at the end about how the structure of decision making informed the decision on what the decision was but one thing I didn't see in the kind of summary graphic that you showed that maybe I'm familiar with Scott from having seen earlier versions of the other one is the idea of uncertainty and you just started to discuss the idea of uncertainty and we're really good at acknowledging that there is a lot of uncertainty but could you tell us a little bit more about what your decision making process is being used by the Delta IV notion group to make these big decisions that use a lot of water that was Dave this morning he said why are we looking at these three things there's a lot of water involved in these three things and so we're making decisions about moving a fair amount of water around on the basis of some expert opinion and combined with 3D what I'm getting at here could you say a little bit more about how of confidence or lack of confidence that some of you have just expressed independently this question relative to the different factors that are involved kind of play into that yes does the question make sense yeah so we had a lot of discussion on uncertainty and lots of discussion there was a suggestion of trying to quantify that uncertainty somehow but like other than on a scale of one to five it ended up not being a useful exercise to try and quantify for this group and this particular structured decision model but what we had was we had our different performance measures the different scores that either came through the 3D hydrodynamic models or the expert opinion and you know we had some facilitated discussions on okay what we think of this alternative versus that alternative this alternative versus that alternative well this one it's worse for contaminants but it's better for delta smelt growth this one is better for delta smelt growth but worse for salmon and we went around the room and got all of the members feedback inputs their opinions on what counted most of them we also did do a waiting exercise of you know for each agency like would you rather have higher delta smelt growth for the different participants like took it metric by metric and which is more important to you so we could get a sense of where the different metrics fell in the different agencies minds and we did want to come up with a consensus recommendation so there was several rounds of discussion and finding out okay you're not on board with this idea what would it take how can we compromise yeah anything you want to add yeah I was going to mention DWR is hosting another independent review that's diving deeper into the structured decision making process and metrics and how we integrated quantitative and qualitative expert we've gone through about three iterations now across three years developed that initial pro act prototype the first year for example we had metrics that rosy rosy kind of gave you a hybrid of couple iterations there today we had water costs as a key metric that was discussed I think in general the agencies and water agencies that were present and we really were careful in defining our scope and scope was to benefit smelt and so in that second year water cost was removed as a objective knowing that sort of everyone the goal was to benefit smelt and these are mitigation actions in our permits and so the hundred taff action is out the discretion of CDFW fall X2 is required for our permits the gate actions is required for our permits and so some agencies felt it was inappropriate that we evaluate that we still included it and have those numbers and it was particularly helpful for the north delta food action seeing using Sacramento river water versus recycled ag water contaminants in our second iteration I think we'll no longer do ag pulses I think you know following sort of that adaptive management we pivot might consider a sack action just because of what we've learned on contaminants so through different iterations some of the objectives have dropped off learning was added we sort of operationalize that in the third iteration if we don't do an action and we don't sort of take a risk of learning then we'll never know how we'll be able to define sort of the scope this year tomorrow you know the DCG will be discussing the suite of actions it's likely going to be in above normal years so what does that mean fall X2 right so soon gates hundred taff water and so how are we going to implement all these what's the scope you know will we discuss risk will we discuss water costs those are sort of defined each year not all agencies have similar interests and so the swing waiting approach that we believe it or not it's a good group that we collaborate with though and I think everyone does want the same thing in some capacity and so we find a way to get there through just real and honest conversations and a lot of math like Rosie said was I going to mention I can't remember that's it so I don't know of the swing waiting this was something we just implemented this last year where anonymously you know each agency got to add a weight of value to what they wanted and I think there could have been some anchor bias you know given what you got your PhD in contaminants or you know smelt physiology and we were transparent and you know that figure of what action you would implement where you could see what agency waited what differently but in the end you know we we came up with a decision based on a structured tradeoff discussion of the benefits and potentially unintended consequences and I think you know the group had a consensus decision I just add to that that we're still hiring in the early stages of the construction so I have a lot of work to do and not a big group of people and so prioritizing what we've got efforts to do put our efforts into more research to kind of fill in some of the data gaps that we have and the knowledge gaps that we have so we're not relying on expert solicitation or do we spend more time on the actual decision making tools that we're implementing for the construction decision making so there are a lot of you know just trying to prioritize really the amount of time that each of us has put into it and the extra cheese that we have a lot of people so that's that's been a challenge to try to figure out the best way to move forward when we have a lot of different areas that we can tackle with that and then just to reiterate but what it said is that we don't have a plan of decision space because many of these actions are going to happen it's just kind of a possibility and how we implement them and so and they are recommendations we're not making big kind of sequential water decisions with the group we're making recommendations I just want to add one more thing on the you know certainty and you know you're saying a bunch of math I feel like there is sometimes false confidence in a number that we've put math into because it's like oh we really need to run the bioenergetics model to tell us the answer for what SMELT will do are SMELT really going to do that no they're SMELT they're going to do whatever they want I think it's a very useful tool but especially like knowing you can have a really good bioenergetics model that will give you a really accurate idea of what SMELT growth will do but if you don't have the input data that is accurate and we had these layers and layers of hydrodynamic models that gave us changes in salinity that gave us changes in zooplank that gave us changes in SMELT growth and there was uncertainty in all of those steps of the modeling giving us a final answer that was probably a good sense of what's possible but it wasn't necessarily something to be a forecasting for the future it was a useful decision tool but it should not be taken out of proportion to what it was You need to make it take 30 seconds to answer your question from the next group's perspective we essentially found that very similar to the digging to uncertainty didn't really resolve anything that there was uncertainty throughout the whole process and really the thought there was start to implement their management actions that make sense in an adaptive management framework and resolves that uncertainty as you go through because to Rosalie's point models are imperfect and they're not going to answer that question on the actions that really mattered the actions that provided through to critical times were the actions that were the best the flow actions, all four models showed no real benefit for a full flow action and a small benefit for a summer flow action but hugely expensive in terms of water cost 100,000 the CSAM group decided on a water the Collaborative Science and Adaptive Management Program had decided on a value for water so the 100,000 acre foot program is $87 million worth of water when you think about $87 million could do in other places it's now a question of are we using our resources in the right places so Steve? I think Ben will make a comment sure so I just wanted quickly to chime in about this uncertainty thing and I'm a hydrodynamic modeler so we'll do a modeling and then we'll come out with one number or a solution space and we pass it out that there is uncertainty in what we produce and the important to convey that uncertainty when we pass the information on but also understanding the sensitivity model sensitivity to what we produce so for example we have say a model and we simulate temperature space we say okay we have this threshold of 25 degrees Celsius for example the point one difference in the model prediction they make a difference in how much suitable we have right so I actually was happy when I saw Rosemary when she indicated in one of the future directions to better understand the temperature sustainability curves because that makes a really big difference and on implications to smelt so not just uncertainty but sensitivity as well as something that we power what are they they definitely don't seem to bug but Tim Corbula which is the clam that is the big issue for us Sturgeon one like biological control that has been documented from Tim Corbula is ducks there's like a huge bumper year of scopes in and they like managed to beat down the population one of the problems with biological control for them is they also bio accumulate selenium pretty darn good so you don't necessarily want to encourage anyone to eat them yeah bio accumulate selenium okay so let's come across the side and then there you will have the last question in this session thank you I agree this is a really good discussion I'm curious just thinking about Lenny's comments this morning my paraphrase wanting to move out of the reactive to the proactive and I'm thinking very basic way to do that you need a vision of where how you want things to be that you're managing for as opposed to stressors that you're managing against or individual things so my salmon guy and not a delta smell guy I spent a lot of time in a lot of delta strong heavy rooms over the years I I'm curious like can somebody describe to me just like a rough conceptual model of how from a process standpoint we think the system behaved historically geographically that supported delta smell like in my mind what I want to do is construct an overlay that's like here's what the hyper productive delta smell habitat look like and here's where we are now and I feel like tons of the things that we're doing now in some very basic sense feel like we're sort of managing away from the processes that we supported them historically in order to support them right now which is sort of where Alper's question I think earlier was going feels like it had tons of unintended consequences and also probably has a limited capacity for success to some of the others that you know to Dave's question I almost said Dave's but so yeah I'm just curious to hear like how do we think it worked my knee jerk reaction is to site Whipple at all 2012 excellent historical ecology study of the delta it was more focused on landscape not like plastic productivity but we had a flashier system so we had really high spring flows spring flight of plankton blooms what stops me from being able to come up with a really good conceptual model of how things worked historically is that our self-planking community as well as our fish community but our self-plank community we don't even know whether some of them are native or not and the major players in terms of co-pods which are all non-native so my since we're definitely bigger a bigger component I know Fred you have any ideas well I guess I'll start off by introducing myself because I know many of you but not all of you so I'm Fred Byra I'm a research fish biologist at the US Geological Surveys California Water Science Center and for better or for worse I'm really the reason why we're here talking about fall X2 so I wrote the two original papers describing the X2 issue and so what we did back in almost 20 years ago now about 17 years ago we wrote these papers originally and people are still debating them now what we did is we went and we used all of the amazing survey data that Rosemary's been talking about and we used those data to describe the habitat affinities of delta smelt and regardless of what my esteem colleague to my left here like you to believe abiotic habitat is really a thing otherwise we wouldn't have fresh water and saltwater fish are we be able to colonize them but so we did that we describe delta smelt habitat based upon the features that were available to us with the survey data and then we used those relationships to then quantify the quantity and quality of habitat in the estuary over time so we looked at the space show temporal dynamics of this habitat delta smelt habitat during this fall period over time and when we did this it was abundantly clear that the amount and the suitability of habitat had gone down over time and it was very clear that it was in direct response to how the projects were operating in the fall okay done deal okay that's that is what it was the question was and still remains to be whether or not that's important okay the fish and wildlife service recognized that question and said okay well what we want to do here is we're going to stop this habitat degradation but we want you guys to also study it and understand it and try to tell us whether or not it really is important and meaningful and so that was kind of the origins of these fall habitat studies the flow mass work groups and all that and it's been going on since 2008 when the last biological opinion was written and here we are still without an answer right whether or not it is important and how important it is but I think in order to get there we're going to have to re-envision like Scott and others have been saying we need to re-envision how we're looking at the problem because it may be important it may not be important one can make an argument right now that is absolutely of no importance because there's no delta smelt right now so what are we doing spending all this money and all this water but one of the challenges I think is that the way these studies have been set up is they've been set up to look at responses that are instantaneous responses and then trying to put that in the context of the life cycle of a fish and as you've seen with the kind of the uncertainty that's been demonstrated in all of these studies and these results that are really hard to do it's really hard to take a bunch of measurements of things that are happened at a given time and place and then try to put that in the context of such a dynamic system and a complicated fish and so I think rather than scale things up because I think trying to do this in an observational manner as an observational study in such a big large dynamic system it's gotten us where it's gotten us there's only so much capacity for what we can really do and what we can learn so I think really to move the needle forward I think we need to do this experimentally and move beyond just the observational side of things and I've always been a big proponent of and this is what I would do if I was in charge I would do experimental studies in the ship channel I would use the experimental releases that we're using with hatchery rear delta smelt and I would deploy those fish very carefully and very thoughtful manner with a very specific experimental design into the ship channel because we know how that system works from the fundamental physics all the way up to the top of the food web and you saw that earlier today and if we do this the right way we can learn a lot about how that system works and how delta smelt are responding to it and understand why delta smelt are actually persisting that particular habitat there's a lot of very key habitat features to the ship channel that make it seem to make it useful for smelt it's got everything smelt need except for salinity it's basically a freshwater system but it's got as Rosemary said it's got this habitat gradient where you've got this kind of upstream kind of isolated zone and then you've got downstreams connected to the S-ray with a lot of exchange and then you've got this kind of exchange zone in the middle that really functions as a little mini S-ray, a little turbidity maximum and that is where we see all the action take place and so I could very easily see an experiment where you deploy these fish in these habitat zones and really try to understand what's going on here and then that can give you a sense for okay well what would happen and what would it look like if we did this on a bigger scale like okay we see it working on this scale and we're going to manage and learn something from right in an experimental way and so I really think that's how we're going to be able to move the needle forward if we're really going to get a if we ever can get any kind of definitive answer on this fall X-2 issue I think we're going to have to go in that direction well thanks for I think almost out of time I want to get David's question into the record and if the response could be very brief and then we could carry the discussion over into the folk I was curious about the one of the questions I had was in terms of in addition to all the great monitoring that the idea is doing is there much of a potential to actually be doing gross primary production estimates but something that would be part of us North Delta was kind of project specific yeah usually there are special studies I wouldn't say part of the whole idea but I don't know not certain special studies definitely with the wetlands managed wetlands also they were they're doing some gross primary productivity but it's not something that is done like on a broad scale I think the reason I would ask that question is with the decrease in suspended sediments and maybe roughly constant chlorophyll that you would translate that maybe into an increase in the gross primary production in places and I don't know if you can say that chlorophyll is relatively flat across the years and part of the Delta but I've just been increasing and curious about the how well understood the balances of the solutions I would love to have a further conversation with you about that I'm like trying to mentally graph chlorophyll in my head and it bounces around a lot in the Delta it's been relatively a stable very bouncy curve the one thing that has increased in the past 10 years is microcystis which doesn't show up in the regular chlorophyll samples that are usually a meter down they're floating on the top scum and I don't know how much of the that like plays into the change in suspended sediments but it might a lot of potential ideas though so with that I'd like to call this session to a conclusion I'd like to thank Brittany and Brian Rosemary in particular for the long presentation we've got Christy at the back Scott and Fred for being here really I think it's just been one of the most engaging discussions we've had so thank you all sorry I was looking in the wrong direction that's great so we are all here and may you boost your life kick us off just say who you are and who you're with and then we'll come back for your more detailed presentation in a moment certainly we're in Portugal and then Ciparastro in our relationships we're engaged in our relationships and we know that we are and it's already out there so we're going to go through this and see if we can respond to the state federal my name is Sean Acunha I'm a community expert I've done a lot of research I've done pretty well I've done this we do big water projects and we supply water to manganese people at least 7 million heavily dependent on the delivery from the water project for human water services and we also have four island developers so we are also we are as well respond and it gets me we were we were created in 1992 we were a 15 member commission five county supervisors five Delta counties three city council members three recommendationers three land owners and then both state agencies so we're only we're mostly controlled state commission makes us a little bit hi there, my name is Michelle I'm with the regional water authority I'm the Sacramento metropolitan region we represent 22 water agencies we represent the region we are concerned for the health of the lower American river for multiple reasons however we also have member agencies in the city your nation gets right again and that's it Good afternoon, I'm Pam Melvigram I'm the executive officer of the state's health security health security I'm part of the local economy in 2009 I'm a primary and home agency I've been in public knowledge for a long time Hi, I'm Tom Jefferman I represent the Central Delta Water Agency which is the agency created by the legislature in the mid 70s and it consisted of about 125,000 acres of land, levy, islands in the Delta which is close to the fiber of the agricultural environment while I founded that and it's on the rest of the community Hello, I'm Heidi Lowens I'm a fair amount of water district I'm a full-sale supplier I'm a fair amount of land but I provide I manage some water as well I have two more people and we both manage that water supply I was followed by water and sea stewardship in the family and I have one public water agency that both gets water from the state water product I'm simple Hello, my name is Jeff Cain I'm the assistant general manager of the Western Water District Westerns is the largest CDP agricultural water contractor and it's perhaps the largest agricultural district in the western United States We are entirely reliant on water supply from the Delta and we are focusing on the in other practices and we are we are also among all of the users within the Southwood Delta there's a priority so we are so we are so we are so we are so we are so we are so we are we are so we are we are we are very very some related to the Civil War topic so that they can satisfy all of these. And obviously, we are at the president's Civil War topic for the faculty, obviously. And more importantly, we also are using the facilities for the policy decisions about the Civil War topic. My name is Bill Farmer. I'm here today representing the coalition for sustainable delta. The coalition was put together and funded by landowners in the southern San Joaquin Valley, where both the state water project and the CDP are significant sources of surface water. And it was launched more than a decade ago when we came to the realization, at least in our view, that delta was being severely mismanaged. And more about that later. I have spent my life in production agriculture, number of different crops, number of different surfaces including processing. And I am still chairman of the water bank, which is one of the largest underground water banks in the world with significant environmental benefits in part of the civilization. Yeah, thank you. So now move to the virtual world. And Bruce, would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah, thank you. And I deeply regret that I'm not able to be there in person. Actually, I'll mute it. Just a minute or two. Can you hear me? You should be coming as well. You should be playing out of that box because of the show. Go, Zero. How is it technical difficulties? It's a tight. The button on the box should be. OK, could you try again more? Sorry about that. Yeah, can you guys am I coming through now? Am I coming through? No, never in the past. OK, no, no, we should be good. Sorry, please go ahead. OK, can you hear me now? Yes. OK, Lewis Bear, I'm a manager for Reclamation District. When I wait, we're on the Sacramento River in the Sac Valley. And today I'm representing one of 130 Sacramento River settlement contractors. We're essentially the water users on the Sacramento River in the Sac Valley that predate Shasta Reservoir. So we're sort of an obligation of Shasta Reservoir since they now control the river. So look forward to the discussion today. Thank you, Lewis. So what we're going to do is perhaps we'll start at the end. Rick, if we could start with you, we'll go through all the panelists. So if the committee could hold their questions until we've had that, and then we'll jump into a deep discussion. And hopefully there'll be an opportunity for interaction between the panelists as well. So Rick, please go ahead. And if I could just ask everyone speaking to hold the microphone quite close to your mouth, because people online are saying they cannot hear unless you have it right up to your mouth. I can do that. And I think you have a slide deck. I don't know if we can hold that up. Ashley, would you like to come up? You can. Yeah. Let's do it. That's Rick. I'm going to go over the other one. I got it. I'll just step and mic up there. So those on the drill box. You might not be. I thought here's a Rick. I don't know. Oh, there are. Oh, there are. Yeah. Is he's going around? Yeah, we're good. Yeah. Thank you. There you go. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I really, really appreciate the opportunity. Some of you folks might be familiar with this slide or this comparison. Essentially, this is the extent of the wetland footprint in the Central Valley. Historically, you know, 130, 20 some years ago versus where we're currently at. And so some folks that aren't from California don't realize that at one point we had 4 million acres of wetland in the Central Valley and hosted hundreds of millions of birds annually. And through lots of projects, diversions, you know, really important things that needed to take place that resulted in less than 5% remaining. And that's really in the best of times, right? Those are when we're receiving, you know, adequate water allocations, we're not in successive critically dry years, but remarkably, we're still able to host about 10 million water birds in the Central Valley annually. And a recent study by Audubon came out Pacific Flyway, which includes the Colorado River basin, we're hosting about a billion birds annually that utilize the Pacific Flyway. So how did we, how do we do such a remarkable thing? A really important piece of legislation that was enacted in the early 90s was the Central Valley Project Improvement Act. There's obviously, you're probably more familiar with the fisheries implications of CVPIA, but likewise, there was a Refuge Water Supply Component. And really the impotence was mitigation for the construction and operation of the Central Valley Project and it established firm and reliable water supplies to 19 wildlife repuges throughout the Central Valley. We have a suite of them in the Sac Valley, we have a suite of them in the San Joaquin. A little bit of jargon, level two supply is what we refer to as the component of the Refuge Water Supply that comes out of the Central Valley Project yield and makes up about two-thirds of the bull need for these wildlife refuges. And then we have another color of water called incremental level four that needs to be acquired on the open markets from willing sellers. That makes up a lot of a third. And so collectively, I pose the question to you all, what would you do with 555,000 acre feet annual in the best idealistic situation? So these are the refugees throughout the Central Valley. We've got Sac, Delavan, Colusa, Grey Lodge, Sutter in the north and then down south. We've got this is the area that I'm overseeing and deliver water supply to in the grass and ecological area and then we've got a couple down in the South Valley. As you could imagine, we harbor more than just waterfowl, this is really the last remnant habitat ecosystems, viable ecosystems that remain in the San Joaquin and the Sac Valley. And we have a lot of teeny species as well. So we need to ensure that we've got reliable water supply that's delivered throughout the calendar year. But these things need fresh drinking water every day, just like we do. Things like the tricolor blackbird, the giant garter snake, the western pond turtle, sandhill crane, they're all very dependent on these landscapes. And so they're very important. Managed wetlands provide critical food for overwintering birds, waterfowl, the Pacific flyway. And I caught a portion of the last session and bioenergetics is something that has been refined in these managed wetlands. So the building blocks of life, chlorophyll, azole, plankton, the whole suite of invertebrates, micro and macro, whole ecosystems exist. And that is our charge. We manage these moist soil habitats to create as much energy. Because remember, we're dealing with 5% of the habitat. Yep, we've got hundreds of millions of birds that are dependent on those systems. And so that's a critical component. And then also breeding habitat. So everybody knows that birds fly south for the winter. Well, the Central Valley is in many cases as far south as they fly. And so many birds also breed here in the spring and summer months. Two thirds of the remaining wetlands in California are actually privately held, which is a surprise to most folks. And these private wetlands are intensively managed at a great cost to those landowners. And these are predominantly duck hunters that have preserved these landscapes and perpetuated this conservation. Public refuges also provide critical recreation for many of our disadvantaged communities in the Central Valley. Most, you know, many families don't have the resources to take their family to Monterey or Yosemite. But we do have wildlife refuges, open space, teeming with wildlife, teeming with birds, a great opportunity for the public to enjoy these landscapes. And it's been hugely successful in a lot of regards. This is kind of a time step. This is when the Central Valley Project Improvement Act was built in in the early 90s and you see an immediate response. So the left is a dabbling and diving ducts, 22 species. We've increased their population by nearly 50%. And geese and swans are skyrocketing. I don't know that we can take credit for that. There's something else likely going on there. But the work is not done. So this is a cool chart out of the state of birds report from 2022. Outside of geese, swans, dabbling and diving ducts, everything is spiraling towards extinction, unfortunately. I hate to bring that bummer to the table, but that is what's happening. And shorebirds are especially being impacted in this era. 26 of the 28 shorebird species are declining, more than half have lost more than 50% of their abundance. And the rates of decline are accelerating. Lots of other terrestrial birds are also experiencing these declines. And so the work is not done. It isn't perfect, but we are seeing some successes in certain yields. So from this perspective, what are the best science recommendations as it relates to long-term operation of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project? I can't emphasize the importance of maintaining the ecological backbone of the reliable level two water supply to these wildlife refuges because many, many terrestrial species are completely dependent on it. And the needs of the wildlife refuge are sort of staggered from, say, commercial agriculture, right, when most of the irrigation is happening in the spring and summer months. Really, the vast majority of the water supply that we need for wildlife refuges comes in the fall and winter. And so we don't think that it actually competes directly with the needs of fish. Salmon is cold water temperature pools. This is a period where we need this water supply after the fact. So the recommendations would be to analyze the impacts to wetland-dependent species and balance any perceived trade-offs between fish and terrestrial species. And I think this is probably the most important point that I'd like to deliver is to investigate the current and potential benefits of managed wetlands in the Central Valley as it relates to anadromous fish restoration. So what is this guy talking about? So back to the point, ducks eat the same stuff as fish, right? And the schedule at which we deliver what I call the bug soup back to the tributaries is on a timescale that is complementary in a lot of ways. We need to focus science to understand the implications of this. And maybe there are things that we should be doing together more collaboratively in terms of timing. I don't know that this phrase has been coined yet, but the concept of managed floodplain. So everybody knows what a managed wetland is, but what about a managed floodplain? So I and my district were partnering with some NGO partners and we're trying to push some of this bug soup out to some floodplain areas that historically would only see those floodwaters once a hydrologic cycle. So let's how about if we can do that two or three times a hydrologic cycle? Would it make sense when we have the water supply and the timing is all good? So that's that's my spiel. Well, thanks again to take all the questions at the end. So Sean, if you would like to go next and then we'll go online Lewis, we'll put you in after Sean. Okay, thank you. So we welcome the opportunity to have the committee here. It's been really nice to have you guys here going over all the things that we're working on. We'd like your thoughts on the effectiveness of science and monitoring to inform decisions regarding these actions. We'd like to know your thoughts on what was brought up earlier about FOLIX 2, some things to help us navigate through the uncertainties regarding that action, and then incorporating proportional effects. It's important to understand the portion effects so we understand what we can do to help in a proportionate way to improve that or mitigate that effect. So in regards to the effectiveness of monitoring and science, we appreciate the having the state federal agencies include us and a lot of the discussion and development of the science. We really commend them on doing their best to try to leverage what research, what monitoring they have, and to try to improve that using technologies and expanded understanding of what's the best time scale or spatial scale for doing that monitoring. But we think there's a lot of potential for growth and maybe there's some ideas that you can bring to your review on what are the strengths, because that's just as important as understanding what are the limitations, because knowing the strengths, then we can have some idea of, okay, so we did that well, what are some things that we can do better, that would be really helpful in understanding what we need to do. Because as we know, just having long-term monitoring is not in itself an intrinsic value, it's really how well it's used and how it's developed. And like as I mentioned, I commend the state and federal agencies that includes the resource agencies and the fiduciary agencies on trying to be adaptable on changing their monitoring. And that change requires some trade-off. So if you can write us your insights on how well done that, that would be extremely important. Now in regards to our concerns about fall X2, now fall X2, as was mentioned earlier, was part of the biological opinion 2008-2009. It had a variety of mechanisms embedded within it that it essentially could be doing, some of which include moving delta-smelt downstream or the low-slinted habitat downstream into more favorable habitat. That includes prey and the fish itself. But lines of evidence has occurred. Since then, we've developed a lot more information, but unfortunately with more information, we don't have greater clarity. We still have a lot of different understandings of how the lines of evidence add up to support and not support the actions. For example, we do see a higher occupancy of delta-smelt and low-slinted habitat. But using more state-of-the-art occupancy modeling that didn't find out that X2 was a really good metric to do that, it was actually better to use sliny itself as opposed to the X2 metric. In regards to the dietary benefits downstream, we see some benefits in the dietary condition of the fish. We've been able to look at them internally. I've been part of those dissections. I've dissected many of these fish and know them inside and out, a lot of their biochemistry metrics. We also found a lot of other things, lesions and the gills and livers. So it suggests that they're trade-offs when it deals with this kind of thing. What are the benefits and the trade-offs with these kind of actions? In addition, the livestock models, as you've heard, there are four different livestock models. Even one of the livestock models has two versions, at least. One is a little older than the other, but they perhaps look at different things. One of them found that Bollocks 2 is actually very supportive related to the recruitment of the species, while another iteration of that same livestock model, as well as some of the varied analyses done prior to this, found that Bollocks 2 was not as well-supported as maybe in the other metrics, such as OMR or turbidity. So it's things like this that are really clouding how we understand the action and if there's a way for us to navigate through these lines of evidence, some thoughts on that would be really helpful to understand how it would be the most effective at implementing the action. The last thing I was hoping the committee can weigh in on was the proportionate effects. When it comes to proportionate effects, we know that for Delta Smelt, OMR management has potential to affect the most, if not all the population, given the low numbers that they have. We do have a freshwater residence, so maybe less of an impact on them. That might be part of your briefing documents, so you'll learn about the freshwater residence. But Longfin Smelt spans the whole estuary. So is OMR, what is the actual proportion effect of OMR and is the proportion of mitigating actions appropriate for that effect? If you look at the evaluation as well as monitoring, are they helping you capture that proportionate effect to help you inform what kind of decisions that need to be made with that monitoring and synthesis? And then, lastly, I'd like to say that it was asked, what can we bring to the table? We've been working with the state and federal agencies as well as with academics, with our partners. We believe in collaborative co-production of science, we believe in transparency and innovation with management relevance. We've been working with a number of different, all these different groups as partners to try to find solutions to our management needs. And we look forward to working with you and working as partners. Please rely on us. We've been part of this process since species were listed in the 90s and then also prior to that during the water quality control plan in the 70s. We are very interested in this. We have a unique set of scientists that are somewhat unique among the public water agencies, a really wide bench, and we've established relationships and we look forward to working with you. Thank you. Yeah, Sean, so we're going to hop now to Lewis virtually, but I just noticed, Sean, of course, you got some very detailed notes there. And just on behalf of the committee, we welcome you. You've got notes even if they're in a rough form. Please don't hesitate to send them to Laura after this. Those focus questions are very helpful. So we'll go to Lewis now online. Would you like to go ahead? Yeah, hopefully you can hear me this time. It's working still. We can hear you very well. All right, thank you. So I introduced myself before, but I'm actually an engineer by training college, but I've really been working for about the last 20 years on salmon recovery in the Sacramento Valley, and I, you know, privileged to work for a group of landowners that want to take care of their valley and are interested in recovery. And I think that's one of the primary things that I would ask of the committee. I think we're, we do so much of our work on the fishery under section seven, under a project, a responsible, you know, entity instead of in the recovery realm. I think that tends to lead us towards, you know, what that responsible agency can do. And it sort of directs our energy and resources inappropriately to get us to a solution. And so, so I'd ask you not to limit yourself to the proposed action or what could be done by the responsible agency, but to instead look for recovery solutions would be best for California, and then allow us to all figure out how to make sure those things get done or at least include those things in your findings. I also think that, and I was really encouraged earlier by some of the questions about, you know, the resource cost, and the expectation that we should have. And I do think that a lot of times we are making management decisions that are hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars, and that's going into those, or the data investment that's going into those doesn't reflect the magnitude of those decisions, nor does it, you know, imply or take into account the opportunity cost, and the investment that should be made that could further improve the species, because it's not part of the proposed project or something within the control of the responsible entity. And I think we need to change that framework and we need to be thinking about recovery and thinking about what we should do and everything being on the table. Another thing, I think, and I've heard it again and again, I've been able to listen today, and I really enjoyed the talks. But so often, I think, because we're thinking about water and the water operations, our questions are, you know, how can we do a pulse flow? Or how can we use water to manage salinity? But really, we need to be thinking about, you know, how can we expect or have a reasonable expectation to support native fish if we have a dramatically changed system? And I think most of the conversation can be explained by the fact that we've divorced our rivers from the landscapes. You know, we heard Rick Ortega talking about all of our wetlands that are no longer here. Those are the same wetlands that used to provide residence time and food production and detris for the, you know, for food production system. And we're trying to now do things that are sort of artificial or in a small location to reproduce those things. But we're not going to be able to do that. Our modified system has shown us that it'll produce 95% of what we call non-native fish right now. And our natives are struggling because we have a different functioning ecosystem. And unless we change that, we're unlikely to be successful. And so what I'd like to share with you is what we're doing in the Sacramento Valley to change that. I mean, if we really are interested in supporting native fish, we need to do things that result in a system that actually supports native fish. And so we have approached that with Northern California Water Agency and what we call our salmon recovery program. And it really is a comprehensive approach from spawning areas to upstream habitat to flood plains to food production, bringing that back to the river and, you know, trying to do all of that at scale. And so, you know, I think I'm supposed to be five to seven minutes, but we have a science program. You know, the settlement contractors bring unique access to landowners, those adjacent lands that used to be connected to our rivers and can bring those back in. And so we've been able to do that. The, we have been working with the agencies on something called a winter run action plan related to LTO. And it's, you know, includes accelerating alternative spawning locations. So not just trying to spawn winter run and redding, you know, we need to get fish to locations where they'll be able to spawn with climate change. We need to improve our data acquisition to better inform our management decisions. And so we'd be accelerating some of that data acquisition and science work with the agencies, extensive habitat improvements that are also present in voluntary agreements. So these include significant investments and landscape level changes in those investments. And I'll talk about a couple of those later.  Although we tend to believe that if you produce the right sort of riverine estuary, you'll get a natural balance between predators and the native fish that you are trying to rear in your area. And then I just wanted to mention that the settlement contractors spent $200,000 last year on thiamine treatment for in-river spawners on the upper Sacramento River. And we are working with the agencies to see if we'll continue to do that again. And I think that's, you know, it's that sort of thing in responsiveness settlement contractors have been able to bring with voluntary agreements, which is a different program. It's really a program about connecting our rivers to our landscapes. We have a number of obligations under that program for spawning gravel inside channels. But a minimum of 20,000 acres of fish food this last year, we had 30,000 acres of fish food. So that's 30,000 acres in the Sacramento Valley that are flooding, raising the, I don't know if Rick called it zoop soup, but essentially phytoplankton draining that back into our river. We've been doing that for seven or eight years now, and we're seeing growth, essentially improving growth rates within the main stem of the Sacramento River. And wherever we do that, we see that propagate downstream for miles. So that's, I think a critical thing that will help our native fisheries. And then the biggest investment really is a program called floodplain reimagined. And that's a program that's looking at half a million acres in the Sacramento Valley. We're very fortunate that we have a flood control system that is prevented development in our Valley. And there's 500,000 acres of the original native floodplains in our Valley that our flood control system has separated. And it's unnecessary in many locations, and we can bring those back. Our commitment under the voluntary agreements would be to bring 20,000 of those acres back. And that's really just a function of time, right? We only have eight years or 15 years under that program, much more can be done there. And I think that that sort of functioning ecosystem is what would bring back our native fisheries, not necessarily some of the small experiments that we do at very high water costs soon. I'd also like to mention that we believe everybody needs to be a part of this, whether it's tribes or the fishing groups. We actually have a partnership with the commercial and recreational fishing industry, where we're working with the state and federal agencies on reconsidering their hatchery practices and we're developing an approach, where they're developing an approach, and we're all looking forward to supporting that. So I guess with that, it's quite a bit of information, but I'll stop there and excited to listen to the other folks. Right. Well, thank you, Lewis. I'm moving right along the line to Bruce. Thank you. Again, Bruce Lodge in the Delta Protection Commission. It's kind of an unusual thing and I'm going to make a shameless plug. If you haven't had enough meetings today, six o'clock this evening, there's another one. If you'd like to tune in, go to delta.ca.gov and look at our national heritage area. There is one national heritage area very in the state of California that's the delta. So this place that we're talking about where water goes through for these projects is extremely important. It was so important. Congress recognized it was so important that the legislature wanted to protect it back in 1992 when they created our commission. Urban encroachment was a real concern then. One county alone, Tom's familiar with this, had five new town proposals at one point, San Joaquin County, just five in one county, and some of those were close and into the delta. So you looked at that, the legislature looked at that and said, this is a place we want to protect. This is a place we want to preserve. This is a place we need to protect for agriculture and to protect it moving forward. So that was very clear. If you read the authorizing legislation in the past and it created us, agriculture was a real focal point of that. I mentioned 15 commission members, urban encroachment. So what's happened since we have a primary zone and a secondary zone at the delta that was created by the state legislature, the secondary zone is does allow for some development consistent with general plan uses. There's a whole series of hoops they need to go through. But the primary zone, there's been no urban development, no urban encroachment. There've been a couple projects proposed. But the legislature said we're committed and we're going to keep this for agriculture. That is also a commitment back to agriculture in the delta to do what's best for them because you can't have agriculture and then get rid of the farming. And that's one of the things that we want you to look at and think about is your weighing decisions, especially decisions that could impact the land use of the delta. Agriculture is the base industry, the only real big industry. Recreation is extremely important, but a very distant second. Obviously, we'd like to see that recreation component increase as well as agriculture increase in the future. So we are governed by our economic sustainability plan, our land use and resource management plan. We'd be happy to share those documents with you that talk about the policies and why it's important to protect this agricultural resource. This is the most efficient place in the world to grow crops. Bar none. You grow almonds in the delta. It takes a lot less water. You grow anything in the delta. You have sun service irrigation, the white water amounts in the delta, pale in comparison to the rest of the state, pale in comparison. So telling, you know, when we see stories and we see different studies and the suggestions, well, let's just get rid of a bunch of that farmland up there. That's the most important place we should be growing food in, in the state of California. Planets, for that matter, the water's there, the water's available. We should be growing food there. Found out last summer, actually through Campbell's group was doing some research on drought policies and in encouraging people to adopt different practices to save water. They found out the delta didn't save that much water using those practices. Those things work really good outside the delta. Inside the delta, it's always growing something. Always. If you're not growing crops, it's growing tulies. It's not growing tulies. It's growing some other invasive. It's growing something all the time. I mentioned that. So yeah, role of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project on a day-to-day basis, the Delta Protection Commission doesn't have for recommendations that come forward to benefit those projects in impact land use in the delta. That's when we take notice. That's when we'll take notice. And that's when our commission gets concerned. Best science operations was the second question we were asked to kind of relate to. I've heard a lot of discussions on best science and I'm really optimistic and hopeful that this will be the best science because we've seen a lot of political science when it's been coming to water decisions and water projects that impact the delta. Part too much political science, not enough science. And that's one of the things we've been concerned of. There's some, the seismic risk. If you talk to people in the delta, there's, my family was only there in the 1890s, not near as long as Tom's. Talking about seismic risk, my family farmed there from the 1890s. We never had an earthquake result of the levee failure. But yeah, people are saying seismic is seismic. We're going to lose the whole delta. Not one earthquake has ever created a levee failure. Levee failures have not come in because of earthquakes. Never. Not one. That's the same. That's death. One of the things I think we're going to take a great interest in and looking at your panel members and the future ones. Are you getting to the people like Tom Zuckerman in the reclamation districts, the engineers, the people that are in the delta? So as you're doing things relative to the delta, not specifically maybe project operations, but if you're looking at different projects or looking for different ideas in the delta, who are you talking to in the delta? We've seen things on levees. People outside the delta are going to solve our problem on levees. They're not talking to the engineers of the delta. They're not talking to the reclamation districts who manage those on a day-to-day basis. So it's getting to the right people. And I guess what can we contribute? We can help you get to the right people. We can work with the Tom Zuckerman's of the world. We can work with the other people that are in the delta that have been fighting this fight, farming these lands, recreating on these lands for all these years from 1800s. And we can make sure that you're at least talking to the right people. That's our commitment. Thank you, Bruce. See you down the table. Thank you. And I had a short presentation. You want to come up here, Michelle? Okay, I'm sure of you. I will project. I think this would exist in the delta. She might use the point of the tab. All right. I will do my best to project so people online can hear. Again, I've just been noticed that the regional water authority. So just really quick, I just wanted to kind of set the stage for sort of our region generally. Now, this doesn't include everything because, of course, I'm focused on the river here. But one of the things I did want to point out mostly with this map is, if you notice where Folsom Dam is and you notice where the delta starts, kind of in this area, Folsom Dam is not that far away. So why does that matter? Well, Folsom Dam tends to be the first line of defense for delta requirements or exports. The water gets there faster. Other reservoirs are tapped into, but because of the length to the delta, it takes a lot longer to get there, right? So why does that matter? Well, Folsom Reservoir is small.  It doesn't have a ton of storage. And that becomes a huge issue because temperature for fish species in the lower American river is the number one limiting factor. And so small reservoir getting tapped into not a lot of cold water pool built up and it can be released very quickly. You can lose that cold water pool and it can create major issues. And our tributary for Fall Run Chinook, but primarily for ESA is, you know, you're all considering steelhead. So I won't go into the role of the organization because I know we already kind of touched on that at the beginning. I will say, and I think it's really important to add that in our region, the regional water authority was actually born out of something called the Sacramento Water Forum. And it was an agreement signed in 2000. Essentially, the idea was that a huge group of stakeholders got together, water providers, NGOs, business leaders, the public, they came up with this agreement. And essentially, it plans to balance some objectives, mainly to balance water supply for the region, while also preserving the ecosystem and recreational values of the lower American river. So that's really important to keep in mind. You know, Lewis mentioned voluntary agreements. We kind of see the water forum is like the original voluntary agreement where everybody came to the table and they negotiated. And it's served us really well. I mentioned, I'm going to go to the right column here. I mentioned temperature is the number one limiting factor. I think one of the things we've really learned, and I think Sean mentioned this too, related to adaptation, we've learned from the implementation of the 2019 biop. We also have something in the lower American river called the modified flow management standard, just part of the biop. But it's also something we engage in with reclamation through a memorandum of understanding. Essentially, what it does is it seeks to meet certain flow requirements, pulse requirements in certain times of the year. It maintains certain cold water pool storage targets at Folsom. But we have noticed, you know, even despite that implementation, there are still major, major challenges with meeting temperature requirements downstream. So I think the idea is that we need to learn from that. We've been collecting data over the implementation of this period. And we really need to adapt. We need to change our methodology. We need to make tweaks around the edges to try to perfect it and do what's best for the species. The other thing I just wanted to mention is use local regional resources. We have some great resources in the upper watershed of the American River, so up above Folsom. We have Sacramento Municipal Utility District and Placer County Water Agency. They have forecasting tools and modeling tools. Really need to integrate that into the overall operational analyses that are being done for the biops. This is so important. Their tools, for example, in some years where maybe more traditional forecasts have been have been a lot more refined. So we need to be able to share that information and make sure that we're doing that efficiently. The other thing I would mention is the Water Forum. They've got great fisheries and water quality data. They've been collecting it for over 20 years.  We need to be able to utilize that and happen to that. The other thing I would just mention is community concerns and impacts. Well, what do I mean by that? I think if you talk to anybody that's a member of the Water Forum, whether it's an NGO, a water supplier, a business leader, they're all going to say that a healthy river equals a healthy water supply across the board. I think that just really needs to be taken into consideration that the health of our ecosystem is so valuable to the people in our region. We really need to understand that those things are inextricably intertwined. The other thing I would just mention as the last case here is I think we know that trade-offs are really difficult. If you don't already know the CBP and SWP, which I know some of you do, but if you don't know it, it is complicated. You pull on one string, things unravel somewhere else. It's the way it is, but I think one thing we know on the American River is that temperature is directly related to fish health on the lower American River. There's a ton of data that backs this up. Multiple studies, multiple analyses. What's really important is to consider that some things are quantifiable and not just hypothetical. We have to understand that there are certain trade-offs that yield more definitive and lasting results. I think that's really important to take into consideration and that should be weighted accordingly. Last slide. You asked how can you contribute to the work or how can we contribute to the work of the committee? We have a ton. Again, folks with really great resources in our region. I mentioned the upstream reservoir operators. There's more than that. We have a lot in our region. They have a ton of data. We have downstream diversions that are downstream of Folsom. We should talk to them. The one thing I did not include in this list, and I apologize for that. We also have folks that divert off of Folsom directly. San Juan Water District, for example, Roseville City of Folsom, they all directly divert and they have a lot of data and a lot of experience with concerns over Folsom going to Deadpool as well in extreme drought scenarios. I think having that conversation would be good. We also have a lot of groundwater providers. I'm going to jump to the last part here about conjunctive use, but we've had a really good success story in the Lower American River. We have groundwater providers. We have been alternating using groundwater and surface water supplies to folks pull off the river when the situation is such that there's a lot of water. Then they're banking that water. They're putting that water in the ground and using it in critical and dry years and reducing diversions off the Lower American River. That's helping us from a water supply reliability perspective, but it's also helping the Lower American River because in those critical and dry times, there's more flow showing up in the river. So we've just got a really good succes