Wednesday March 26, 2025
Center for Water Resources Policy and Management —
Research scientists have developed a game changing resource-management strategy to identify, in real time, the specific circumstances that decrease risk of delta smelt losses at State Water Project and Central Valley Project pumping facilities in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
This important risk-analysis tool will allow for management decisions to protect delta smelt from population-level impacts from water-project pumping in the south Delta, while enhancing essential water deliveries to California’s cities and farms. The strategy contributes to meeting the State’s goals, set out in the California Water Code, that call for “providing a more reliable water supply and protecting, restoring and enhancing the Delta ecosystem” and Governor Newsom’s recent Executive Order intended “to help California to capture and store more water”.
The model approach is detailed in an article Identifying the environmental conditions that determine the distribution of an endangered estuarine fish to manage risk of entrainment, authored by Scott Hamilton, Dennis Murphy, and Eduardo Montoya, in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
“Despite more than 15 years of investment and work to improve water supplies and protect the embattled native fishes of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, an effective or efficient strategy has been elusive,” said Dr. Hamilton. “Our model will provide resource managers with a tool that can contribute to increasing protection of delta smelt, while helping to satisfy the water demands of California families and farmers.”