 If we could get started, please. Perhaps I'll just start with a few housekeeping points. First of all, can you hear me at the back? I don't have this longest voice. But please wave if the sound for any of the speakers drops and we'll bring it forward a microphone. Just on housekeeping, there's name tags at the back. So for speakers, folks, please feel free to pick up your name tag. For emergency exits in this building, should we have to leave the building quickly? There's two exits on either side of the room leading out of the patio, as well as two doors on this side that lead back through the hotel. And I think we're ready to go. Also for the speakers, you'll probably find it easier to walk down this side of the aisle if you're speaking. I'm thinking that there's a lot of cables and other hidden obstacles on the other side. So welcome, everyone. I'm Peter Goodwin. I have the honor of serving as chair of this National Academy's ad hoc committee that's looking at the long-term operations of the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project. I'm going to give a very brief introduction. I would also invite the National Academy senior staff to join us today and on Zoom. If I miss anything, please feel free to jump in. We would like to start with a land acknowledgement for this area. And we should take a moment to acknowledge the land on which we are gathered. For thousands of years, the land has been the home of the Patwin people. Today, there are three federally recognized Patwin tribes, the Kakeel Dehe tribe of Winton Indians of the Kalusa Indian community. The Kalusa Dehe Winton Nation and the Yoka Dehe Winton Nation. The Patwin people have remained committed to the stewardship of this land over many centuries. It has been cherished and protected as elders have instructed the young through generations. We are honored and grateful to be here today on their traditional lands. So this committee has been asked to look at the Old and Middle River management, the Shester cold water pooled summerfall delta smelt habitat. And in the first session, we'll be getting some elaboration and further discussion on the charge. And the second part of our charge is to provide recommendations on how modeling and monitoring strategies and decision making can be changed improved for the future of CVP operations. Our goal in this meeting, for those of you who were able to participate in meeting one, we're still very much in the exploratory phase, gaining background information, hearing from the various agencies and interested parties on how this committee can be most useful and effective to the entire science enterprise. We'll be hearing from the action agencies giving presentations, but we will welcome throughout the meeting comments from other participants that are with us today. And really our goal here is to try and elicit discussion on where this committee can provide the most value and guidance to enhance the long-term operations of water management here. And this meeting will also be used to inform the structure of our future committee meetings. So very briefly, we're going to be starting with an elaboration of the statement of task giving reclamation in the Department of Water Resources the opportunity to expand on the written charge. This morning, we'll be looking at the long-term operations monitoring and modeling. And then following that with the summer fall habitat actions monitoring and biological modeling. And there'll also be an opportunity this afternoon for interested party input. Tomorrow we'll be looking at the regulatory framework for the Old and Middle River management, flow management. And that will be followed by the management, what's actually being done in the monitoring and the modeling. And it's with all of our meetings, we will conclude with an open mic session. So who we are, the committee members, we don't have too much time. I just wanted to remind everyone, please go to the webpage to see who we are and the breadth of expertise, which we collectively cover. I'd also like to acknowledge Dr. Ellis and Dr. Thomas, who are the members of the National Academies that are working closely with reclamation and other agencies to put this study together. And in this meeting, we're also joined by Susan Roberts, who heads the Ocean Studies Board of the National Academies, one of the most major programs within the entire Academy. So thank you, Susan, for being with us over the next few days. And on behalf of the committee, we welcome input during the breaks and the sessions. And we also want to thank our committee members and the state to reach out to us. So it's daunting to try and pull together a recap of meeting one. This was the topics which we covered in meeting one. I know many of you are here. I won't go through that, but we learned just how complex the Delta Ecology is, the emerging role and important role of climate change, as well as an overview of background of both the Central and the Central. And we also really appreciated the open mic session. And based on this meeting, you'll see there's a lot more time and opportunity for interaction questions from the committee, as well as opportunities to engage with the speakers and people that have taken the effort to participate in the meeting. So what did we learn? In that first meeting, it was the first of the three meetings which we're using for what we're going to undertake. We're very appreciative of the more than 20 presenters and panelists that informed the committee's work last time. And there were also 18 comments in the open mic session. We also received extensive post-meeting written comments to the National Academies. And we'd like to thank you for that. And we'd also like to thank everyone for following the rules which were outlined of how the National Academy has done this, putting it through the staff people with the information that ensures that your information goes into the record. And we'll get full consideration by the committee. We also learned just how dynamic and complex this system is. And this is truly a socio-environmental system from my university NSF and a whole system on this. And this has to be the poster child. There's also a distributed science community working on the knowledge base. And there's pros and cons to that. One of the challenges, of course, is it's very open for innovation compared with the other systems around the US. But the challenge is, is how do you coalesce that science into a common knowledge base upon which decisions can be made? We also learned that much is now understood by the system, but there's still some important gaps to inform the decision-making that occurs. We've also learned, and we appreciate the feedback that there's considerable scientific research completed, and many documents were added to our bibliography. But there's also some significant efforts in progress and under review by various entities. And we also heard that traditional knowledge has much to offer in this state, and that tribal input is just beginning to be integrated in decision-making processes. So on behalf of the committee, I'd like to thank everyone for their engagement and to emphasize that we welcome all input through our public meetings. If you wish to present to the committee in the open mic, if you could please sign up either through contacting Maya or filling out the form at the back of the room, it would help us allocate a time to the various speakers so everyone gets a chance to talk. So if we know by 10 o'clock, we can get back to the speakers to say what time window they'll have. Please remember, if you're here in person, please sign in as well as a second sign-in sheet at the back just so we can have a record of the various contributors. And so with that, I'll stop there. I don't know if Laura or Susan or Stacey has, did I miss anything? No, no, it's wonderful here. So Susan, you okay? I'll just mention that there are copies of tasks on the table in the back. If you would like to refer to it as we go through the presentations today, there are no copies of the public agenda because it was just in so much flux. So if you need that, you can get it off of the committee's website. There is an updated version on the website. Right. And so when I'll go into the first session, and we appreciate both Dr. Mooney and Dr. Grimaldo coming to talk and elaborating a little on the written charge. And so I'll introduce both speakers together. Dr. Mooney is really the architect of this whole initiative. So we're very appreciative of that. He currently serves as the area manager of the Bay Delta office in the California Great Basin region of the reclamation. Prior to being appointed as the area manager, he served as the deputy area manager. He's also served as the chief of program management branch, the administrator of CVPA that we've had so much about in meeting one. And going back to our time, he also served as the lead engineer for the San Joaquin River Restoration Program. He received his PhD from Colorado State University in engineering. Lenny Grimaldo serves as the state water project environmental director for the Department of Water Resources. Lenny oversees environmental planning, permitting compliance activities associated with the long-term operations of the state water project. He currently leads DWR's endangered species consultation on both the state water project and the Central Valley project operations. Prior to his policy position, Lenny has spent more than 25 years as a researcher in the San Francisco estuary, where his research is highly regarded in food web dynamics, fish entrainment, ecology of listed species with reclamation department of water resources and ICF. Lenny received his PhD in ecology from UC Davis. So welcome and thank you for being here this morning. Thank you. Watch your step as you guys go around. I'm not sure this is your courts. Do you like this at the table? If you could sit at the table, that would be wonderful. And we're going to, if it's okay with you, we're going to have a table of all of the LTO core activities behind you as a reference for people to kind of put the three things that are in the statement of task into the larger perspective. Great. Thanks for reminding me that I was a researcher once. That's being on the boat. I'll say a lot of my doctorate program was doing surveys of many streams in North Central Mississippi. So I'll also share that it's nice to be out in the field every now and then and see real water. Do you want me to start? I don't know that we need to do a table. Yeah. And our impetus here is to better understand because this is planned to be a multi-cycle activity. Why these three particular actions rose to the surface and are the subject of cycle one. Excellent. So well, first of all, thank you all for agreeing to serve on this panel and to help us out with the operation of the Central Valley project and the state water project. I'm also excited for the opportunity for my staff to get a chance to talk to you all, both today and on the tours. I think I've had a handful of opportunities that just meet with experts from different areas in my career. Each one has been super valuable in sharing different perspectives and helping me see and understand how different folks think about problems and problem-solve and each one has been just a wonderful experience. So I'm super grateful for your time and expertise and interactions with my folks. So I think when we started this panel, my overarching interest is to learn how we can use these panels to better our operation. So as Laura mentioned, we're planning on doing it at least two. So we have an opportunity for some feedback on what went well for us sharing information with you, what went well for you sharing information with us and where we can do better in the future to get the most out of it. I think we've worked pretty closely with the Delta Science Program on how to structure reviews and they've been just super instrumental in helping us formulate our thoughts on how to proceed forward. So maybe getting into the three topics. We have our Old and Middle River reverse flow management, our summer and fall Delta smelt habitat action, and then our activities up in Shasta. Now we pick these three topics because we think that there's so much going on. There's a need to make the scope manageable. But we also think that these topics are ones that have high value, both for species and for water supply. And then each one of these is in a slightly different state of development in terms of the state of the science. And so we'll have the opportunity to look at how we interact with a different state of the research going forward. So it should be fun. So if we dive more into Old and Middle River for reverse flow management, from my perspective, that's an area that just has a tremendous body of literature, data sets and models. There's just an awful lot of information out there. That's not true for the other topics. I think there are certain actions like first flush and some of the basic protections of no more negative than minus 5,000 CFS. Hopefully that number will be very familiar to folks, if not today, then soon, that I think have a whole lot of support. And over time, shifting through the new biological opinions for us in 2008 and 2009, my impression is it's been super effective in limiting entrainment. So it's an action that we think worked. So now we're in a state of refinement. We're looking at how do we speak those different numbers? Where is the right level of actions? What information do we have? What tools do we have? And from my perspective, we're perfecting it. You can all tell me I'm wrong and I'm on the wrong track and we go a different path and that would be helpful input. Well, I'm just giving you my impression there. So I think within OMR, it's important for water supply. The water costs are substantial. So as we look at our models, we can take a conservative approach and be protective. That comes at a cost. And so it's reasonable for a water supply agency to try to refine that to fully understand that water costs. And then as I step back, I think we as agencies dedicate a whole lot of people to managing that in any given year. So from reclamation, there's like five to 10 staff people who spend about half a year real-time managing old and middle river flow management. That's roughly mirrored within our federal fish agencies and the combined federal effort is probably about the same for the state. So I think of 20 to 40 people for half a year working on OMR flow management in real-time. That seems like a ripe area to help us develop science and make that an easier action to take place. And if I start to get philosophical, at a certain point, I think the operation of the projects will longer be the driving force behind species and populations. I don't know that we're there yet, probably not. But having a panel help us pull this information together, understand where have we done enough for the operation of the projects and where can we take our 20 to 40 people and focus their efforts elsewhere. I think we have very high value. But that's perhaps more of a decadal viewpoint. So then shifting over to the summerfall delta-smelt habitat. From my perspective, and you'll hear from the scientists, that's on the other end of the spectrum. We don't have a huge body of literature that really ties to the mechanistic behavior of delta-smelt and how we get them from one year to the next. We do know that we have the delta-smelt don't make it over the summer. I think we have a pretty extensive monitoring data set. We have some great statistical models that help us correlate with various environmental parameters. But I don't know that we have specific mechanisms and actions that we've dialed into a high degree of detail. And so I think that having the panel help us think through that would be very helpful. And then I have the operation of Shasta as something that's kind of in the middle. We have some great tools for estimating the effects of temperature and doing some predictions there. I think we understand the uncertainty of those fairly well. But at the same time, the other thing that we have to do with the knob that we turn in order to achieve those temperatures is to reduce flows. And in most watersheds, most systems, we know that flows are a big driver for fish populations. And I don't think we have good tools for integrating that temperature management in the consequences of reducing flows. I think we have some great literature that we're starting to work into the mix and how to guide our research, how to guide our integration and our investments I think could be very, very helpful. So kind of stepping back overall, I think I see the CVP as unique and special in the sophistication of our water customers, our NGOs, our tribes. And so we're, I may not always feel like it's a great advantage, but I love the engagement of folks and the expertise. And so when we have a panel, there's an opportunity for folks to share me out with just getting that type of engagement and support for the types of actions going forward. And so I think this panel could play a critical role there. My other perspective is I think we have an incredible number of talented staff within the agencies who've done great work pulling together information. They don't have infinite time. They don't have infinite budgets. They don't have a completely free hand. And they're really just navigating all of the constraints and challenges in just a phenomenal way and they're coming up with great results. So my ask for the panel is I think as we look at that, we look at the work that they're doing. There's a recognition of just the expertise in the room from the agencies. And I'd really like your all viewpoint on how do I empower them and equip them and help us invest to take it for the next level and really a forward-looking viewpoint to keep the science progressing. I think with that I'm going to go over to Lenny. Thanks, Dave. And I knew I couldn't be prepared comments from Dave here. He's really good at those. But I just want a second thank you to the panel for diving into this very complex system. I know some of you have been working in this system for a long time and there's a lot being thrown at you. So hopefully we could provide some ideas on the scope that we want you to focus on and I'll cover a couple of those topics. Big picture for us at DWR, we're looking at climate change and where we're at with tools for both looking at weather forecasting, species responses, not just management for today but management over the next 20, 30, 40 years. So any insight, thoughts, comments that you could help provide to just not narrow in on those three topics but expand out and think about how we could use different tools, different approaches for dealing with climate change will be very important and that's a driving force for what the Department of Water Resources is focused in on now. We have something called weather whiplash. We have these dry years, you know, four years of drought all by wet years. We just don't we just we're in climate change and right now we're responding to what we're seeing and we need to stop responding. We need a better way of approaching climate change and our management actions. This year is a great example where out of the blue we're seeing steelhead coming down in big numbers. We've never had a steelhead action. This year we exceeded our 100% threshold on steelhead and folks don't know what's going on. And you know, honestly, we have no idea but I think these are the things where we need to think about how weather and hydrology and how the changing climate may be affecting some of the patterns that we're already seeing different over the last few years. Hopefully you all could provide some comments on the climate change aspect. For Olden River Management, I think last time I pleaded to this group please take a look at the last report that the NASP panel did. A lot of work has been done over the last 15 years and I know I have an assignment, Laura, to provide some additional information there. I think what we want to do is sort of tailor that into a narrative that helps you all focus on this is what we did this is the scope but now we need some additional items looked at. So one good example and I'm hoping that the panel picks up on this is we need a better understanding of population impacts that we have through our Olden Middle River management and not be as focused on salvage, just the numbers of salvage. We want to be able to put that in context as what does this mean for cohort replacement? What does this mean for impacting population growth rates? I'm not saying that we haven't done that we've actually done quite a bit of work there including for Delta Smelt and we can send you some of those references but I don't know if we have a complete package for all the species there so if you all could focus in on providing some feedback there I think that would be extremely helpful. And I think Dave sort of touched on this so thinking about the salmon life cycle their exposure to the projects is pretty small in terms of direct entrainment. I'm not talking about there's other exposures from the dams all the way but in terms of how we operate for OMR management that's a limited window for their lifespan right so then they got to go to the bay how are they using restoration then you know they got to go to the ocean how are they surviving in the ocean then they need to come back how are they dealing with thiamine deficiencies there's a whole life cycle here so trying to understand the importance of that life stage and that loss of that life stage the full life cycle is really important and that's not to say that we don't need to provide those protections right through a regulatory framework because the fish agencies as our partners you know they're on the hook for the protection of these species in some cases the recovery outside the permits I think that's all we're all straddling for recovery of these populations so putting your thoughts on paper about how we could do that better would be extremely helpful including looking at the existing life cycle models and maybe there's something in there that we missed or maybe we need some additional modeling there so I would appreciate some feedback into the salmon component of this longfin smelt's new to the federal government they're petitioned for listing on the horizon the decision the state we've been dealing with longfin for since 2009 so I think there's a lot of work to be done there I think we're a little bit behind on the longfin smelt side of things compared to Delta Smelt as you know from the 2009 or maybe you don't know I should say going back to the 2009 2008 opinions that were highly controversial played out in federal court that really drove a lot of the science for Delta Smelt so for longfin smelt I think we're a little bit behind there and I think there's new tools that we're developing we're developing a life cycle model with the health of the fish and wildlife service but I think any insights that you can provide on longfin smelt while we still have good numbers could be helpful there because we definitely see them at our project facilities probably in higher abundance than any other fish that we salvage by the listed species at the moment now there has been new science that talks about the population effects of those early life histories but I think we just need some additional work there to close the loop on what we need to be doing next finally I don't want us to be so focused on the old mar management that we're just looking at the losses at the facilities I think Louise Conrad touched on this last time there's a lot and Matt and Steve Lindley there are a lot of other actions that we're doing that help bolster abundance of the fish and the estuary and I think we have to think about that in context of our old mar management if we're doing restoration and that's improving fish numbers that's great so now how do we respond and how we dial in the response to those increasing numbers things like that could be helpful or where we restore habitat or how we restore habitat it's not entirely out of scope to think about how these pieces all may be connected so I encourage some investigation into these other activities that we're doing including things like our non-physical barrier that prevent salmon from we hope prevent salmon from entering the interior delta and then lastly for the summerfall habitat action I think Dave covered a lot of that that's going to be talked about a lot today so I think I'll defer a lot of that to the great technical folks that have been working on this a long time for me the main uncertainty there is that action was developed for a wild delta smelt and now we're moving to a phase where it looks like we're relying on supplemental culture releases of delta smelt and I think for me I want to understand what sort of tools what sort of information should we be looking at to help inform whether those cultured delta smelt respond the same way as wild delta smelt for this action in the summer and fall so I'll leave it at that for the summerfall habitat action and I won't comment on Shasta because DWR it's not our project so thank you everybody well thank you very much thanks for those clarifying remarks and I'll just open it to the committee as any follow up from what you've heard and I think well it's worth spending an extra five minutes or so while we have both Dave and Lenny here hang on one second we're going to get the mic to you we're going to be walking around with the mic can you turn it off oh this whole point is moving during Q&A please turn your cameras on on zoom thank you the host has stopped it so anyway my question is I've been thinking about the modeling elements and we hear a lot about life cycle models for example so I'm curious how the models are being used in particular how the life cycle model is being used which species any species well I think we could start with Delta Smell so for Delta Smell and Matt Nobrigo who's here speak to this and I'll put them on the hook for that but we use it I think in two different ways one for planning thinking about how when we're for example going through the consultation these different effects that these physical and biological conditions may have on Delta Smell and then thinking about how our project may affect those different physical and biological factors I think that's a very important aspect of the life cycle model but two I think for me what the life cycle model did was contextualize the importance of different factors that we argued about for years including OMR management and maybe fall X2 management maybe there's something new I think Matt said last time summer management may be important so I think it's providing a good framework for how we should be thinking about things in the future especially under climate change and I think that's where because we get so focused on the consultation and what we're doing now we don't think about that big picture piece as well and I'm guilty of that right because I'm we got to manage what's in front of us now but I think about that quite a bit for like for Longfin Smell there's been a couple life cycle models that have been developed we're working on another one I think ultimately we want to use that life cycle model to better understand the direct project effects on Longfin but we also want to use that maybe for habitat planning I think there might be some useful information that come out of that model that informs habitat which I don't think the previous two life cycle models did a a really good job at no indictment on those papers that just I don't think we thought about it in the same way because at the time that those life cycles were developed we didn't know that Longfin Smell were using all these restored habitats and where they were using them so now we have new papers that show that Longfin are spawning in areas outside the upper estuary South Bay they're in Napa River Petaluma River they can occupy salinities much higher than we thought so there's a lot of new information and they occupy actual Martians like Tully Red I don't know if that's still on the field trip within three months of that area being breached it was full of Longfin and I was out there you know we were collecting them it was amazing we had one of those woohoo moments we're seeing Longfin within three months of that being breached so I think as that science is coming along and we can build that into the life cycle model I think that could be quite helpful for some of our restoration planning as well very good thank you I would add to that I think everything Lenny said and then we also have some very specific tools for very specific mechanisms very specific stressors and so having our life cycle models help us stitch that all together into a bigger picture is one of the big uses that we have for reclamation I think we'll go to Steve and we'll probably have to cut this discussion off it's me that died into the weeds a little bit but when you talk about the life cycle models what are the performance measures you're looking at success for these critters and represent the life cycle model is it a on this level density growth reproduction success and I know this could be all of us clearly trying to find out what is happening which one's part of the life cycle model needs to be tested but I won't so I'm going to do the easy thing and punt that to the technical folks they're going to come since we only have a couple minutes but they could probably spend a lot more time answering that question and now that it's been teed up for them they should have a really good response I like Lenny's answer maybe the part I'd add to it is we have multiple hats that we wear within reclamation so one of it is consultation on the operation of the projects and we have this whole suite of other authorities and directives to do good things for fish and so I think it depends on how it's being applied so for operations we're looking at what is the effect of the project on these species and can we parse that out and then from the broader goal we're looking at the best investment of resources to help protect and support the environment and our listed species I understand that you're trying to protect a species or perhaps aid us in recovery but is that delta wide population number is that your team factor or is it how many are trained to do this operation today I think the summerfall habitat is one of those talks that provides a really good example where there's certain metrics from that life cycle model that they're measuring and it ties into the monitoring you're going to hear about that in just a bit but I think there's big picture and narrow scope and today you're going to hear a little bit about the narrow scope pieces related to OMR management and the summerfall habitat action for sure I should have done this earlier if you do have a question if you can just turn your name card on and it helps us manage the time just a little bit better so with that seeing no more immediate questions just one thing I might add both Dave and Nanny thanks for being here and both of you just touched on the emerging technologies and ideas and I know you've got a whole group of PhDs in your shops that are probably tracking these to but please let us know because we've got ideas but I know a lot of things have been tried already and we don't want to reinvent the wheel or make recommendations that you simply have not worked in the system so with that perhaps we'll give a quick round of applause to both Lenny and Nanny and that elucidation was very helpful please be careful okay you've got a prize for managing the obstacle course so our first technical session this morning is an introduction or a preamble to the monitoring of the long term operations and the actions and we have two speakers I'll introduce them both welcome back to Dr. Josh Israel from Reclamation Josh serves as the Science Division Manager in Reclamation's Play Delta office he's also worked on drought impacts of winter run Chinook salmon the yellow bypass fish habitat and fish passage modeling more recently Josh has focused on leading staff to incorporate decision analysis tools into Central Valley project real-time and long-term planning exercises designing a comprehensive acoustic telemetry program in the Central Valley in Bay Delta and establishing biological objectives to inform the effectiveness of monitoring Josh for those of you who don't know him received his PhD in ecology from UC Davis also we have Dr. Louise Conrad from Department of Water Resources she serves as the California Department of Water Resources lead scientist Louise works within the DWR executive team to guide the applied scientists to inform water resources management and facilities the application of best practices for conducting and communicating sciences at DWR and again I think it's indicative of the system that directors have the scientists deeply embedded with their leadership teams prior to taking on the lead scientist roles Louise served as the Deputy Executive Officer for the Delta Stewardship Council for the development processes public workshops and served on the editorial board for the 2022 issue of the state of Bay Delta science she also received her PhD from UC Davis in animal behavior so welcome Josh and welcome Louise I don't know if it's going to go first I'm going to go first Thank you Thank you Thank you finish for me. All right, good morning. Good to see you all again. Thank you for your service on this panel. I am going to cover a few slides by way of introduction and then hand it over to Josh. So we're going to be tag teaming a little bit here. So this again is intended to be an overview of our monitoring enterprise in the Delta or for the projects generally. Good context, I think, for some of the questions you're already asking about how we use the data and our models for informing decisions. And I think the next item on the agenda is about the models specifically. So this is really the data collection aspect. Okay, there we go. Okay, so first before diving into any of the more the specifics, we wanted to cover what we see the general purposes of our monitoring to be. And so this breaks those purposes down into three general categories. The first being real-time operations. And for reclamation and DWR, we need information to inform our day-to-day operations decisions that are required. For example, for the State Water Board's decision 1641, our biological opinions and the incidental take permits require that we meet certain conditions. And OMR is an example of that. We need real-time information in order to determine whether we're meeting specific conditions or encountering a number of fish that meets at the salvage facilities, which you got to see firsthand at your last month's field trip. See if we're getting to a level at which our permits indicate we need to change our operations. The next category here is the status and trends. So these are surveys and they cover everything from primary production to abundance indices for fishes. And in the case of Delta Smelt, there's a survey enhanced Delta Smelt monitoring survey that provides population estimates. These are really important for just understanding. I'm going to show you a slide in a second on the longevity of some of these surveys. But they are important for us to be able to just have baseline knowledge of the system and then use that in many different ways. Those data can be purposed for many different types of applications and analyses to understand generally how actions we're taking may or may not have any impact on the long-term metrics that we have, which again may not be population estimates in all cases, but abundance estimates and species assemblages, the composition of our communities, and in general abundances. Then we're putting as a third category here special studies. This isn't the same thing as status and trend monitoring. This is more of a targeted study to address a very specific hypothesis-based question, often based on conceptual models and might be targeted around the efficacy of certain management actions. So you're going to hear more this afternoon about the summer fall habitat action. Some of our staff are going to speak to that and learn more about some of the special studies that may that inform these specific actions. So I am going to move on here. I'm going to skip this next slide. Sorry, I wanted to go to this one first just to give you an idea of how long term these some of these monitoring programs are. So this is a slide from a presentation that Dr. Rosemary Hartman and I gave at an annual workshop in 2020. This was a fun sort of voluntary exercise that we did just out of curiosity, which was to look at the San Francisco Estuary, our system, alongside the monitoring enterprises of different other systems within the US. So we looked at Chesapeake Bay, Massachusetts Bay, Galveston Bay, and Puget Sound. Again, this was just out of curiosity and we were really interested in the longevity of our monitoring enterprise compared to some others. And so we looked at all these different parameters that we collect in our system, zooplankton, water quality fish, contaminants, phytoplankton, and benthix, and then looked at those same categories across other systems. And so you have here on the x-axis the decades and you can see those very thin lines. Those are really just zeros for no sampling. But Chesapeake is standing out here as the longest running programs going back to the 50s and our estuary is not far behind starting up mostly in the 60s and that thickness of the line indicates the intensity of sampling. So this was just a fun thing that we wanted to show you that many of these are very long-standing and comparable to some of the longer standing ecological monitoring programs in the country. So going back to this slide, I also wanted to note before handing it over to Josh that you're probably not going to be surprised to hear that there's been a lot of attention on the monitoring enterprise and reviews of it. And one of the ones that I want to point out is a pretty recent one from the Delta Independent Science Board and two of the panel members here are authors of this report where this was a really ambitious monitoring review that took on a huge task of inventorying and examining the full monitoring enterprise. This is not a technical review but recommended, among other things, the need for more routine monitoring program evaluations to identify gaps, redundancies, and ensure relevance. And I think the other examples here are other ones that are either ongoing or past monitoring review exercises. This middle one is science advancements for increasing management value of life-stage monitoring networks for winter run. That is really examined the full network of monitoring for winter run and made several recommendations, many of which have been implemented. And over the years there's just been a number of reviews including one of the Delta Juvenile Fish Monitoring Program, the Environmental Monitoring Program, among other efforts including one current one that is looking at the five Department of Fish and Wildlife Monitoring Surveys that are listed here. I won't, just in the interest of time, not going to go into detail, but are really looking at the spatial balance of these five surveys and how they can be better balanced and really represent the system for the species they're intended to monitor. So I wanted to mention and with respect to the this independent science board review that we are still in the process of standing up a real specific program for regular review, which was one of the recommendations of the ISB report. And I think that is in the works, it's happening. And I think that it's going to be really helpful from this panel to hear how the monitoring efforts that really specifically support the actions that are in your charge, how those might be helpful to enhance in order to serve the objectives of those actions, those management actions that we have. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Josh to finish the presentation and then maybe there's time for questions after. So I think that's your first slide, Josh. Okay, thanks, Louise. Thanks to the committee for joining us for another few days. So I'm going to quickly walk through sort of the different types of monitoring that are happening in the system related to sort of long term operations. We could spend a couple of weeks talking about this. So please let Laura know if any of these things pique your interest, we can get you study plans, annual reports, links to websites. And of course, I'm sure people would love to come in and talk with you about specifics. So, you know, to start to start with the environmental drivers thinking about flow and water quality. You know, there is a lot of gauges and water quality songs around the Bay Delta continuously monitoring flow and water quality constituents. A lot of this goes on to our CDEC and USGS's NWIS pages. There also is discrete sampling that happens on a monthly basis by the Environmental Monitoring Program, which is a compliance program for D1641. And then many of the FISH surveys also collect flow and water quality data associated with their discrete samples. So, primary productivity is sort of the next level, right? Trying to understand the algal communities, you know, and trying to characterize what's going on with desirable, less desirable or even harmful algal blooms. You know, our interest here really and what we aspire to have is a monitoring program that will help us measure the biomass and composition across what we say regions and seasons. So, we have quite a bit of this data collected again through continuous programs, as well as discrete programs, grab samples. And then what's not on this slide is a USGS project, which I think was included in your handouts in the first meeting, where they're also looking at primary productivity in different regions of the Delta. So, then we're interested in the bugs, right? What eats the algae? So, the secondary productivity and the Environmental Monitoring Program goes out on a monthly basis and samples various regions of the Delta. And also, many of the FISH surveys in the mid-2000s started to collect data on what the diet was and basically collecting zoocomite and information to try to look at the diet of FISH. And you can see we have a pretty broad array of sites that get sampled. All the different color dots that you see are sort of different monitoring programs that happen in sort of different months, depending on seasonality. Obviously, happen in different regions. So, then the FISH monitoring, we've got a lot of FISH monitoring that happens. I believe the red dots here are what's called the Enhanced Delta Smelt Monitoring Program, which is a randomized sampling. So, they're not doing all those sites every week. But you can also see that there are some studies that go all the way down into the South Bay and go as well. There's beach saining that goes up into the lower Sacramento there and into the lower San Joaquin River. And then the salvage sites, of course, would be on the very end of the Delta as well. So, quite a lot of FISH monitoring that's occurred. And then finally, we can talk more about tributary monitoring when we go up to Redding. This just wanted to give you an idea for sort of the status and trend monitoring that occurs across the tributaries. So, we do a lot of, when I say we, I mean the Science Enterprise, a lot of it's Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Wildlife and Pacific States Marine Fisheries Committee or Council folks. So, we do a lot of red surveys. There's also weirs and fishways that are using passives, sonar and video cameras to collect adult escapement data on these tributaries. There are also a lot of rotary screw traps along the main stem, the main site being downstream of the, if you can't see my cursor, the sort of at the top of the Sacramento River, Red Left Diversion Dam, we may go visit there. And then as you move downstream, we have a Delta entry riverry screw trap site and then a number of trawl sites that help us with operating the Delta cross channel gates and also helping us try to estimate production entering and exiting the Delta. There's a lot of new monitoring going on as well. Special studies associated with trying to estimate juvenile production of steelhead and spring bunch of salmon that isn't on this map. And then you can see like in that science advancements for salmon, we actually have a couple acoustic telemetry sites that we now are using regularly. We have about 10 years worth of pretty regular acoustic telemetry survival information now on the Sacramento River and for through Delta survival. So, you know, monitoring is really happening very broadly across many regions in the Bay Delts and the tributaries being supported by many different agencies. It happens really at different scales depending on the objective, whether it's real time monitoring or a status and trend monitoring. It can focus on many different performance measures. And I think Steven asked a really good question about, you know, are we, for instance, using life cycle models to measure specific things, which maybe then our predictions to compare to some of our observations. And it's a great question. I think we'll get into that over the next two days, hopefully. We're working to really document when we take actions in our seasonal and annual reports in our knowledge base papers. So we have a series of seasonal and annual reports focused topically on things like old and middle river management or cold water pool management, summerfall habitat action. And then like I said, we're really aiming to try to focus our monitoring to be able to test model predictions and support doing decision analysis on our activities. So I think that that is it. And I just really appreciate all of the folks who are constantly in the field collecting data for us. You can see it's a really large network. I love the word distributed. I heard earlier a group of folks. So really appreciative of the effort of hundreds of folks out there. Well, thank you, Josh, into the front. And we'll go around with the questions. Perhaps Joe, we'll start with you. I haven't really been in the cell, so I don't know if you can see it yet. Oh, sorry to hear you say this. It's okay. Go ahead. I'm going to wait for the microphone. Yes, please do. I love the button to cross the line. And it says through the middle of the button. Just take a chance. Thank you. Finally, not a mystery. So I had a couple of questions. Kind of reflecting on what I heard might not have been exactly what you said. Let me talk about earlier was to try to think about OMR, for instance, in the context of all the other things that are happening to the fish, right? That this potential loss could be in the context of the overall population. You said, and so one way of thinking about that is to think about that stressor in the context of other stressors. And for years, we've been talking about contaminants and pathogens and and plastics and things like that. And your presentations were silent on that today, even though that might not be something that you pay for, it may be information that you use. And so or should be using could be supplementing or whatever. So I would like to hear something about that. The other thing is that a lot of the other things that you talked about were kind of grab sampling or sometimes time series of what was going on at a point in terms of tracking or quality parameter. We might be going out and catching fish or taking a zooplankton sample. But do we actually understand what's going on? Are we measuring any process biological processes as opposed to just what is you know, I'm not biologist, as you know, stands stock apart, right? Or how many fish do we know? How much are they growing in this environment versus the environment? Do we know something about productivity as opposed to biomass, those kinds of things? So could you talk about one of both of those questions? Yeah, you're talking a lot about vital rates. So that's the word. And I think that falls in the category of those special studies that we talked about. So I couldn't add that to my talking points for that slide, that the special studies would be the ones that would take on those vital rates, because that's not captured in our monitoring programs per se. Should it be? Could it be? So, Kenjombe, are you on time? Yeah, well, just I think getting to say reproduction rates of zooplankton might be hard in a monitoring program that goes out every month or so. And so that's where, and there are examples. Once you catch it, what you can tell about where you've had recent been or whatever. So yeah, we have, we can send you studies that have been funded by DWR, Reclamation, others that... We're talking about monitoring here, Louise. We're not talking about special studies. I do understand the difference from that categorization. I'm saying, should you be advancing your routine monitoring to be capturing some vital rate measurements on a routine basis, as opposed to we'll do a study here then and then we'll do a study there? I think that whether it's part of monitoring or special studies, we have to be clear about what question we're, what are we trying to evaluate? What question are you trying to evaluate with the data that you showed us? If it wasn't exactly clear what questions we were answering with those data, you were collecting a lot of information. I'm not going to be argumentative, but I mean, I think that if you're saying you need to have a question to measure a vital rate in the field, then you need to have questions. I mean, you did say that ENP was compliance monitoring for 1641, right? A get compliance monitoring. If any of that other monitoring that you showed us is not required compliance monitoring, then what is the question that you're trying to consider? So, I think your point is a good one. And I think it is potentially important for us to be measuring vital rates. However, I don't think we've necessarily developed the models to say that vital rates are still important. And so I think these things go hand in hand is as we're moving more towards using this idea of having models that make predictions, where there's an equation that has a vital rate in it that's somehow linked to hydrodynamics or temperatures or environmental drivers around biogeochemical constituent. And then we start to say, well, how do those look in nature? And how are those impacted by our actions? Then it becomes more important to monitor it. And so I think it's a little for me, it's a little bit of a chicken or the egg. Do we do the model first or do we do the monitoring first? And I think places like measuring vital rates, good place to start is in the laboratory. And I think there have been studies over the last few years looking over your shoulder at Brian Bergamosky, who's going to join the summer ball habitat action monitoring and modeling discussion. And I know USGS and DWR and reclamation have worked on some of these questions, but we have not incorporated them into our models for things like habitat actions surrounding how to create a better food web to grow fish better. And I think that's something that perhaps would then require some modification or redesign to a monitoring program to see what's going on with those things in nature. So perhaps we'll go to Joe. I don't think we're going to get to all of the questions in here, but we'll get to as many as we can before the break. Thanks for the nice summary. So the real-time monitoring. Joe, can you hit the switch on the other side? Thank you. So the real-time monitoring is quite useful for your monitoring and all these things, but the second and third items you add because status monitoring, as well as the trans monitoring, particular trans monitoring, that's kind of tied into these adaptive management issue. And that's a really a recipe for adaptive management, because you use some of my models. This is how much adaptive management you bring in in this part of monitoring and practice. Adaptive management of the monitoring enterprise? Yes. So that's what I was getting at with the reviews slide, that there have been a number of reviews that are on that slide, and even other ones, and the winter run science advancements paper, and that made a couple of recommendations. Those have been largely implemented. I would say that's adaptive management of a monitoring enterprise. The larger Delta Independent Science Board review has a whole recommendation for how you can approach this in adaptive management, as you know. And that's where I think we still have some work to do to advance that, getting that into a more routinized look at our monitoring programs, evaluating whether they're achieving what is needed for their purpose, the metrics that they're trying to assess, and then change them as would be appropriate for management relevance. And I think the monitoring review also points to there's sometimes a gap between what the monitoring program has been doing that has been set up and in place for many decades, and what the current questions are. There, you know, the Sassoon Marsalinity Control Gate Action didn't exist until 2018. So, you know, we, and I think that's an example where we plugged in a lot of existing monitoring and put it to good use so that, and Rosie will talk about this. Sorry, Rosemary Hartman, you don't all know her. But she'll talk about that and how then we plugged in additional monitoring, additional work to specifically look at that action. So I would say that's an example of real-time adaptive management of monitoring programs where you can use what's there, but enhance if needed. So to address specific hypotheses, which is a hypothesis-based monitoring program, but in terms of status and trends, how we are evaluating our monitoring programs, that is what needs some work. And that report from the Independent Science Board, I would say already does a good job of making that recommendation. And I think what's helpful for this panel is more specific looks at the programs that are going to be informing those management actions that are in your charge. And what are tweaks that, that's a high-level review. What are technical advancements that might be achievable for those specific actions? And obviously, as we consider our part of the improvement. Okay, thanks. Thanks, Joel. Can I add one thing, please? Oh, please do. So, thank you. So just on this issue of adaptive management suggests that you're measuring performance of something. And I think a lot of times that's changed through time. And I think our aspiration to be able to look across regions and seasons and use status and trend monitoring to measure the biomass and the composition of these different trophic levels is not fully implemented at this point. And I don't know if that vision of trying to measure across regions and seasons, the biomass and composition of phytoplankton up to the fish community, are the right performance measures. And I think by identifying performance measures for status and trend monitoring, I think it can lead to port and redesigns and modifications. Because what's important to status and trends or what you're measuring, not the methods that you're using. And too often we get caught in methods being what we're trying to maintain. And that can be a problem when you're trying to use the most science-based approach because innovation and technology is always advancing. Counting methods and classification methods and enumeration methods that are important for getting to vital rates or better fish production estimates or better estimates of biomass. So. And that is a quick question. I think so. Okay, and then Steve, if you don't mind, we'll take the break and you could follow up in the answer to my question. Oh, he did. Good anticipation, Josh. So, Pat. Thank you. Thanks for your presentation. Thanks for all the work you're doing and your team to do. So we're all sort of dancing around the same. Even I think Joe was asking about adaptive relative to the monitoring program. I'm thinking about using the monitoring program to adapt to other things. And so it would help me if you could give a couple of concrete examples as to how the monitoring might have affected an action. So I think obviously how we estimate salvage has been historically important for understanding losses at the facilities. But one of the examples I would look to is, you know, as less and less wild smelt were available, we moved to thinking about using turbidity as an environmental surrogate. And we've continually refined sort of our environmental monitoring around turbidity in the south central and north delta to better understand what's going on with the turbidity fields. And now we continue to refine our operations for old and middle river management around the stations that we use for measuring turbidity. The, you know, we haven't really played much with like the value of that turbidity being high or moderate or the magnitude of turbidity. But where that turbidity is matters to fish migration and delta smelt migration. And that's been an advancement that sort of happened since 2009 because of a lot of efforts of the folks in the back of the room. It's more in context as opposed to trigger or something. Well, it's used as a trigger. So if we see turbidity outside of the south delta, like further north and then at the salvage facilities starting to be high, we actually will take preemptive actions to try to reduce and train at risk for that season. And we'll go to instead of having reversing flows of minus 5,000. Or if it happens early in the season, you may actually have reversing flows that are even greater than minus 5,000. We'll step down to have reversing flows of minus 3,500 or minus 2,000, depending on the duration and the specific timing and life stages that we're trying to avoid and train at risk of. Okay. Great. Thank you very much for that. That was a lot. Rich, did you have anything to add? Yeah, I think those are all great examples. The other point I just, at a broad scale, some of the flood plain monitoring work that started up in the 2000s really led to flood plain actions and the requirement for flood plain restoration. So that just just zoomed out another example of that. Yep. Great. Thank you. Great. Well, perhaps if we could thank Dr. Conrad and Dr. Ismail. And we will come back at 10.35, so a 15-minute break. Well, welcome back, everyone. This session, we are going to go through a preamble on the modeling for the LTO operations and actions. And we have two speakers, Dr. Israel is going to come back. And also Daria Summer, thanks for being with us. She's the modeling division manager for US Bureau of Reclamation. She oversees the water resources modeling program. And her responsibilities include, and this is quite a list, the development and application of system operations, hydrologic models, climate change models, groundwater, surface water interactions, temperature, and water generation, many of the things we're looking at. Prior to becoming the division manager, she was the branch chief for water supply and operations, and also headed the operations analysis of reclamation. She received her PhD and master's from the University of Arizona. So Dr. Summer, thank you so much for being with us today. Thank you. Thanks for the introduction. It's way better than the one that the AI wrote for me today. I really appreciate it. All right. Well, thanks everyone for having me today. I believe I'm the only presenter on this one, Josh, if you weren't. Okay, cool. So I am told, and I have 15 minutes to talk about, oops. Anything and everything about modeling on that view. And so this is going to be a really high level overview of what do we do? How do we do things? I'm really trying to trigger questions from you all. So if you're having questions, please ask away. This is by no means not even going to scratch the surface of what kind of modeling we do. But I'll try to give you kind of the overview, the processes and everything, hopefully, hopefully we can have a discussion, further discussion in other presentations. So model, model, everywhere. What do we do? Models are imperfect reflections of real life. And depending on what purpose you're using the model for, you pick different models. Even if you run the same model, you interpret it differently. It gets quite complex quite quickly. I'm going to kind of talk through these common purposes at least. My it's a general list. It also applies to LTO. So the first box is the most fun part of it. This is the high point of my career. I love to be in that box, because that's where you explore what is. So you know, where you can get creative. We look at newer modified facilities. If we're doing a project, let's say storage program or a domains program, you change things around and see how you operate them. Or you could be looking at operational strategies or regulations, which is the case in LTO. We're looking at, you know, how should we be operating this whole system? Incorporate climate change and sea level rise. How do you do that? Everything that happens in this box depends on, you know, what the question is, you know, if it's a question coming from, from my higher management, it may be confidential, but for LTO, this is the part that we did a lot of outreach for all the interested parties. We had monthly meetings where we were developing actions. And just to give a couple of examples, Shasta action, for example. Okay, how should the Shasta action be is a total of different. There's a different suite of modeling that went on we did what we call a position analysis. What you would know is more, more like a monocardotype analysis under various conditions. If I operate it this way, you'll get this result of temperature and, you know, the biology for the fix and so on and so on. And we kind of kept everybody up in the same loop and tried to form an action that was acceptable for all the participating agencies. Last one on the OMAR, we used that, you know, Delta Hydrodynamics Model, we used some two article tracking models about the effects of different levels of OMAR and how that, you know, they've been relate, right. So that is a plain box. Once we went through those individual actions, then we came up with initial alternatives. Then you start putting pieces together. Okay, for any IS, any plain analysis, you have to have a wide range of those actions, alternatives. Again, we continue to work with all the interested parties. We work with NGOs, we work with the water users, with the agencies, and we developed these alternatives based on the data, model data that we generated, come up with those alternatives that we're going to analyze. Okay, now we have a number of alternatives. We kind of step outside of our toolbox and toolbox, and now we're running alternatives and looking at effects, looking at impacts on all of the resource areas, which means operated. Now I'm looking at what are the effects, you know, of operating in that scenario. On species, groundwater, economics, whatever else you may be analyzing. That is a totally different suite of models. Then this process, when it ends, let's say we have the biological assessment, then we get the biological opinion, we put our NEPA out, we get record of decision, we have a decision on how we're going to move forward operating the system. And everybody goes home except for modelers and the scientists, because now we're going to start implementing those actions, right? Now we're talking about data collection, monitoring, and real-time operations and modeling related to that. Now we're looking at specific things, salinity, entrainment, red dewatering. You may be using the same model that you used in the planning phase, but in a different way. I know this may get confusing, but for example, I'm going to give the DSM-2 as an example. The DSM-2 that we use for planning is different than the DSM-2 that we use for operations. Why? Because the one that used for operations gets real-time data. The DSM-2 is physically-based, one the hydrodynamic model, and gives you effects for the next three days, for the next week. The one that I use for planning is totally different. It gets model data from the operations model and looks at over 100 years, what the change is making. So that's sort of different ways of modeling, the different kinds of modeling that goes into this process. As I said, it gets too confusing too quickly. I kind of wanted to talk about how we go about this between the agencies and specifically between DWR and Reclamation, because we're the more, at least on the operational side and the physical side, I'm going to say, we're more or less kind of the keepers of these models, developers and keepers. So we continuously work together. I kind of put a timeline over there. They have their delivery capability report published every two years, which is focused on their water supply liability. We have our consultation, which we don't want to be doing every other year, but it happens to be so. And so they look at more on the development of the model, and they look at the they look at more on the water supply reliability in those studies, at least ITP is different. And then we do more on the, how are we going to operate the system? Every big project goes through this little cycle of improving models. There's a continuous improvement in models. And if a third project, let's say the orange one of those orange arrows is starting anytime, somebody says, I'm going to investigate the storage program. They go and pick the latest set of models, and then they modify it for their needs. That's sort of just the lay of the land, how we go about this, you know, in general. And the circle. So the model development and maintenance is a continuous process. It's never perfect. It'll always change. It's going to have to change for the purpose that you're modeling. Okay. Let's say we started with the latest and greatest for the LTO. We were told that there was a desire to extend the simulation period to full 100 years. So we did that. We took calcium. And which was a 96 year simulation period. We extended it by the last five years. And that whole in theirs is model development. A lot of like hydrology demands. Then you come to analytical tool selection selection. That is the answer in question of what models should I be using? And it depends on what question you're trying to answer. This is where we work with Josh and team and others, depending on what effects they're trying to analyze. We try to pick the most appropriate model. Then exploring potential actions. My favorite part I told you, getting creative, analyzing effects, doing the real time actions and collecting data. And that data feeds into your next cycle of model development. While we talked, we were going to model all in this way. Did it work out? You look at the data, you're like, okay, we could improve here and there. So that's sort of how it goes. All right. So I will talk just a little bit about calcium. Calcium, we get a lot of reactions. It's a lower hate. I mean, I'm not sure if not many people love it. But it's an operations model that we use to evaluate water supply reliability. It just represents CVP and SWP. We'll get through what's in calcium in just a bit. But just something to keep in mind that we have a projected level of analysis. This model has a consistent level of development and a specific regulatory criteria. And if we're not doing new facilities, all the existing facilities, and then we run these, run this model over 100 series of different hydrological conditions and try to get it some statistical data about how things may change. So it's not transient. This is a misconception that we get all the time. 1977 in the model is not going to be the 1977 you live because the operations were different than the demands were different. So it's a bit different. And this is why we need to use it in a comparative manner. You can't use this as a predictive tool because it isn't representing what happened in the past necessarily. So whenever we run calcium in any other model that relies on calcium, we use them in a comparative manner. We run a baseline scenario. How are we operating the system right now? We run that. And then you run your alternative scenario. What if I change in my Shasta operations like this? And then you look at the differences and see what happens. A question that comes up often is like, is calcium calibrated? No, because it is not again, I'm not going to say it's not physically based. It is a hydrologic, there's hydrologic components to it, but the historical conditions evolve and we're doing a projected level analysis. So it is not calibrated. There was an attempt to look at it and he did a pretty good job in 2004. We look at it more in the terms of looking at the results and seeing if the results make sense. Like is this how you would be operating? The data that goes into it is totally different. That's a different process. There is calibration in data development, the hydrology and the demands and everything. There are closure terms. Sometimes they help, sometimes they don't. But you've got to be careful about interpreting model results. So I hope I'm not confusing everybody. So what's in calcium really? Well, what has all the project features and the hydrologic input? As I said, 100 years worth of multi-data. It's not just 100 years of multi-data. We play with it to incorporate climate change, but I'm going to save it for another discussion. All the storage reservoirs and export facilities, canals and flood control curves and everything. It also has in it all of our project obligations. Starting from flood control, for the central control curves, capacities, water rights, regulator criteria. We still operate to D1641 and now we operate to biological opinions on top of everything. All the rules are in there. And then it also has a logic for coordinated operations between the state and the federal project that we share responsibilities for Delta operations. And then has our contractual obligations of providing water supply. The figure on the right is kind of showing the CVP split of contractual obligations. You'll see most more than half of it is senior water rights, based on Shasta inflow, which we don't have a lot of discussion. So I'll just pick that as an example. Well, this is my best map, but I'm not a GIS user by any means. So bear with me. It's just trying to show that we have a lot of flow and temperature requirements. This is only showing Sacramento to Delta and water quality requirements in the Delta. And the big red dot is other regulatory requirements, including Walmart, the first channel and everything else in Delta. All of those are in Council too. So the idea is it's quite complex. And CVP side especially we operate reservoirs in tandem, trying to meet our objectives. You're not operating one reservoir and deciding on one flow. There's low temperature operating the reservoirs in tandem, meeting Delta water quality. There's the sea coming in with the sea level rise and all kinds of complexities. So closer look at the Delta, kind of the points that I just made. The blue with the red line over there is all the middle river flows. That is the most fun to model. I'll tell you that because we do pretty good with physical things, physics, right? The flow, temperature is another degree. There's storage and flow component. But when it comes to the effect of flow and temperature on species and the biology comes in, it becomes even more complicated. Okay. This is how a typical planning analysis framework is. We just talked about calcium, which is the surface water operations. We're right there. And then we usually use the SM2 for Delta conditions for flow and water quality. We use schism, which is a 3D model for habitat questions. And I can expand on that just a bit. So basically whenever you need a deeper dive, you go find the appropriate model. And then surface water quality, water temperature, HST5Q is what we've been using. Reclamation is just about to finish a new platform, improved water temperature modeling platform that's going to use SQLW2 algorithm for temperature. And then we have the aquatic resources, which I'm going to just kind of flash on the last slide just a bit. And anything else that you may be looking at, you may be looking at hydropower generation, you may be looking at flood control, anything. So you go through that with and without project conditions or with and without your action, and you look at the change metrics. This figure was from a presentation that I put together for water storage investment program. If you're planning new facilities, then you try and monetize those changes, right? So you can do your cost-benefit ratio. But that's not the case for LTO. So we stop at the physical change metrics, now we do our impact analysis, right? Decide, what does that mean for the rest of the resource areas? This is a framework for LTO. It does look like a spaghetti. Let's see, what do we have? We have calcium, there's hydrologic input here, we have climate change system, everything climate change, everything at a projected level, all that. Then we have temperature models, then we have some temperature dependent mortality, all kinds of fun, biological models, econ, power, what am I not seeing here? Oh, the DSL2 series is here for Delta hydrodynamics and particle tracking, routing, survival. So the question is, are we decide which model to use? And how do we come up with all of this? It's a process that Josh and team led through knowledge-based papers, looking at what is the latest in great science, looking at the stressors, looking at what we're going to analyze. And it's the work between our divisions about how you connect each of those to the operations that you're intending to change. Each one of those arrows is actually a lot of communication, a lot of meetings and back and forth about like, oh, how am I going to take calcium result and run a STARS model? So there's a lot of collaboration that goes on within reclamation, with reclamation and other agencies, DWR and the Fisheries, the agencies. That's my overview. I'm going to stop there and see if you have any questions. Thank you for that. That's probably a dumb question. But you said calcium is used to evaluate water supply reliability. So what exactly is water supply reliability? Is it just water delivered to the OMRs, to the southern part of the state? Or is it to meet all of those obligations that you showed in that slide? I mean, what do you mean by water supply reliability? Yes, it's mostly our both state and federal projects, the NSWP contractual obligations. We have different contracts as you've seen, some of them are senior water rights. We have to provide that much water to them. And then we have some that we have our service contracts, where we have a little more discretion on how much we can deliver. And everything on the hydrology facility and regulatory side is a constraint. And then we run the model and try to operate to the best we can to deliver water under those constraints, like that house. Thanks. So we'll work our way around the room at Jay and then Steve. Thanks. Sorry when they get to this point. This is a problem for a long time. These problems of the delta, they're eternal. They will last a year longer than us, even the young people. And it takes a long time to develop modeling data for modeling. And it takes careers, you know, get spent developing these models. The calcium modeling and all of the modeling, the career is worth it. So that's a long term issue. The questions that we have, some of them are eternal and some of them are fashionable. Well, right. So, and he's got a dozen or so agencies and this several dozen consult confirmed that it involved in what kind of coordination is done to sorry. If these models ready in time, I'm looking at the list of names are the same, but they models as you meant to be changing your time. In a particular the hydrodynamic model, the SM2 has turned out to be a wonderful model. It's very, very useful for all kinds of operations, but a lot of the questions we're concerned with now are more toward 3D questions. And we, you know, everybody struggles to answer 3D dynamic questions with 1D models. And there are 3D models around, but I still, how do you see and coordinate the development of these new technologies? So you've seen it with temperature modeling or how does it work for us? What's actually to work when it's also complex? Well, I could go off on like we need more time, but I'm not going to do that today. You're right, there's a lot of coordination that happens, that actually happens. The SM2 has a users group, for example, DWR runs that they meet monthly to look at updates. We started one for CalSIM, but CalSIM people get overbooked very easily, and it's really hard to keep it going. But we have a process with DWR, at least, after each big push, either DCR on their side or LTO on our side, we come together and we work on a benchmark model. And anytime one of us does anything with those models, we go to the other one and make sure that they're okay with the representation of their operations, right? We make sure that everybody's on the same page. Temperature has been interesting. There was no necessarily one platform that kept everybody together. And this is what we're trying to attempt. We're attempting with this new platform. What happened in the past is you would, I spent 13 years as a consultant. So I would go to reclamation most of the time because reclamation is the agency that operates the temperature. And get the latest model from them, work on it, go back to them, share versions. That's how the private sector kind of can come and contribute. With the water temperature modeling platform, we're looking into developing a users group and something similar to what ESM2 does. So everybody is on the same page. We've done the whole development has been transparent and a collaborative way. We had participants from Fisheries agencies, public DWR reclamation. So we're trying. It is huge, though, if you can appreciate there's many models. And they're like, I'm sure Josh can speak to what happens on the Fisheries side. But if they go mostly on the publications, right, where we're published latest, and whatever, you know, they go through review and decide on what needs to be used. So that's how we do it. We, unfortunately, there's no one umbrella of like, here we do all the coordination kind of thing. I guess when I was talking, but if someone from DWR gives the same talk, there will be some overlap in the models that, you know, there will be different models inside. And the different agencies, they all have a lot of models. Many of them are very different. You're right. I mean, it makes people outside. Yes, you're absolutely right. And I don't know an easy way to help that. This is exactly why we did what we did for the LTO. And thanks to Dave, it was his idea. So I have to be really careful what I say here, but it was a lot of work. So it was more like I use the analogy of like open kitchen restaurant. It's just like you're cooking with everybody in there, watching you, all of them, with different perspectives and different levels of understanding. It takes an extra effort to, first of all, bring everybody to the same level and sort of then start understanding what their perspectives and sensitivities are. Yep, I agree that we're very supportive of any kind of community of modelers that can be developed in the future. We're working on it. But I'm going to say there's no easy way. And yes, it's going to be different for different projects. Because again, you're trying to answer different questions. If whatever question you're trying to answer, that is going to be your model selection. This is really heavy on the biological side because we're doing an ESA. If a project is not doing an ESA, it's only doing a NEPA, they don't necessarily dive this deep into the biology side. Anyway, thank you, Steve. Could we come to hoax? A lot of this is free of motion. Do you want to go next? That's sure. Yeah, thank you for the presentation. So in your spaghetti diagram in the top, I'll send there a lot of inputs from climate change projections from models. And for this particular area, climate models are particularly notorious for lack of consensus for presentation projections. So how do you deal with that uncertainty, especially that it propagates all the way down to other parts of the model? So that's the first question. The second question is, how do you explore these data-driven models? You know, in hydrology, it's kind of like a big thing now, using machine learning, deep learning models. Well, I'm going to take the second one first. Well, you saw how the AI did on my bio. It was really, you didn't see it. It was very short. Yes, we do. It is, there's no operator in this room. Good. So our operators get really, really tasked when you talk about replacing them with some kind of a model. The operator, there's a human aspect to it. And the way we do calcium modeling is, you basically model what should be your full obligations with everything in real life. When you don't have water, those things change. People talk and people walk back from 100% thermal contractor delivery, for example, even in one case, down to 18, which was really disastrous for them. But it was a really bad year. Those things are not going to be captured in the modeling. So yes and no. The very use kind of a machine learning is we have the AMN in artificial neural networks within calcium. Calcium knows flow of storage. It doesn't know what the salinity is going to be in the delta. And the way we inform it is training a neural network. And we plug that as a DLL in calcium. So it gets a good idea. Do we base all of our analysis on the outcome of that neural network? No. Calcium runs. Then we run the SM2 and we use the SM2 results. Look at the effects. The first question was climate change modeling. I kind of had this in the back pocket. It is a lot of... I don't want to kind of go through, but that top box over there is kind of going through what we have done in climate models. We went through... We probably spent close to a year with KWR before we started the LTO process on what should be the next methodology for modeling under climate change. And you're right. They don't necessarily agree. They agree more in the short term. And we're here in the lucky space because we're doing an NSA. We're not looking too far out as if it was a storage program, but we're looking more like near term. So we do get more kind of concurrence between the models. But there's still difference. And the way we kind of go about it is we run sensitivity analysis looking at trying to capture the uncertainty space. You're absolutely right. There's always going to be uncertainty. DWR is actually doing another... The way we work is every time we go back to it, we kind of go through what's been done and what can be done next. So for their DCR, they're actually taking another step, one step further, looking at the decision scale kind of analysis. To determine how to pick those sensitivity analysis. And next time we do LTO, we're going to probably put on top of that and kind of move forward. So that's how it goes. But yeah. Great, thanks. All right. Just one more question. We're to Renee and then come back for the other questions of each for lunch. Thanks. Thanks for the great presentation. So I think I come up with things from the salmon world where maybe you all are not the keepers of the models to the extent that you are with the Delta-Stone circumstance. But I would say every model related process I've been part of for the last decade has expressed at some point that love-hate relationship with Calcin. You name that it's enabled by Calcin to have a hydrologic component, but also that the time step, the overcommittedness of the developers, the cost of running it makes the extent to which the hydrologic component can be evaluated as in the context of everything else really constrained. And it's also, I've heard it said multiple times by people who will remain nameless that Calcin is an expression of its use over the course of its evolution and that if it were to be redeveloped today, it might look differently in the context of what the changes in technology that have happened since it was first developed. And I'm wondering if you all constantly making a new version that maybe is applicable to a wider range of things. Oh, okay. Calcin is continuously being maintained. DWR has a whole division that works on it, that the underlying software and the programming language has changed over the years and it continues to change. The difficulty is when I get these questions, let me try to understand if I'm not getting it right correctly. Why can't I click on a user interface here and there and run Calcin? You could do that. But we tried that too, actually, the first version of Calcin. However, the complexity is not actually with the model itself. The model has, you know, if you have any experience of coding, you can open it up and read it. It's not that bad. The complexity comes from the system. Everything that I just kind of flashed and we didn't talk about the details and I have slides if you want to, all those operational criteria are quite complex. And every time you change them, like this consultation, anything, you have to know what you're doing and you have to go in there and change it and make sure that piece that you change works with the rest of the system. And that is why, unfortunately, we can't have a more user-friendly model. Unfortunately, our system is too complex to do that. The user-friendly ones, there are ones that I still struggle with, like finding my way through, looking through formally and trying to understand who did what, version control, that gets really, really difficult. On the fishery side, this is a long time kind of an issue. You have a lot of uncertainty on other things on your end and then you want at least this one piece to be predictive and tell you, like, this is how it's going to be. But unfortunately, it is not, right? This model cannot be predictive. There are so many other things that come into it. As painful as it is, and I don't really know a way to really help on that side, we just need to kind of take it with what it is and try and do our best to interpret the results. It will never give you the exact conditions that would have happened in this drought, for example. It'll give you something and then we're going to have to come together and decide, okay, what can I glean from these results? That's really helpful. I guess one thing I would say is, I think it's less my, at least, there's many different interests in it potentially changing. My own that I've run into is the facility to simplify it. Like, it gets simplified. It's information it produces gets simplified all the time in different ways. But there is a limited scope for the ways that it is simplified based on who is operating it and what their interests are. And I think that there is a broader interest in being able to think about simplifying it in different ways. And to your exact point about the complexity coming from the system that's like the lens that we bring on that complexity affects what we learn from the simplification of the system that is the model. So that was more what I was thinking about in terms of looking ahead. On the decision making side on the operational decisions, we're doing a multi-times step. It's really, it's not even an explanation. I don't know how you would do, there's an effort to do daily, but how would you do a daily operation model? How would you decide on how people would make decisions given that there are several agencies working together on a daily basis? But I want to say something, I want to point out USRDOM is Upper Sacramento River Daily Operations Model. It's specifically developed to take customer results on a monthly basis. It kind of maps to whatever year in month you're in looks at similar hydrologies and kind of maps it whatever it can find the closes in history to make it a daily kind, daily fine, right? Trying to do a good job, never perfect. But then that's used for all the other like red, dewatering, water, a wet and usable area, fish spending, where you need that detail. We try and put that detail in to the best we can. But should we run council on a daily time step? We've got to be very careful. The operational decision on how you would would you be inserting more uncertainty to the results by trying to do it on a daily basis? Then the benefit that you're getting on the fisheries and if that makes sense, you know? It's a good question. Okay, yeah. Well, thank you. And as we have the same speakers in the last session before lunch and afterwards, what I'm going to do, Steve, while we've got Daria here, would you like to just field your question? No. It relates to this slide. It seems that with top two figures there, top two figures there would set connects calcium to spelt life cycle. It seems like you solved the problem of relating fish, close to fish. And if you have one here, up on there. Any mechanistic connection at all? It glows fish? Do you have any connection of calcium, mechanistic way of anything related to this? We do provide calcium data, but I'm going to look to math about the inputs and then we can talk about how we do the connection. But like there are certain inputs that they take from calcium or the asset. Matt, do you want to do a quick synopsis? If you want to come up and use the mic, it would be helpful. So people joining us online, this is Matt Dabriga from US Fish and Wildlife. That's definitely the safer mic to use. Okay. I'll start with saying it depends on what your tolerance to a mechanism is because I can see on the slide that there are some some relationships like Cyril Michelle's flow survival relationship. It's empirical. It's done with tagging data. So it's real. It's not just a correlation out of the air. I'm sure that Cyril could explain if he was here with the live mechanism. So definitely there is at that kind of level and we can do it in response as well. So then if you mean can you piece it apart into something even more magnetic than that? The answer is yes. And he rose has a version of his individual based model for Delta smelt that he built for us in the last five years that syncs with Calcine. And we'll tell you that if something is wetter than contemporary Delta smelt are better over 82 year time frame. And we have not pieced that apart to see exactly how the model says it works. But yes, in theory all of that can be done. I want to add I'm not very familiar with the smelt lifecycle model but for example for Delta passage model just to give you an idea of how the linkage is done they take the assent to results with the flow on a 15 minute basis downscaled from Calcine obviously. We also look at the Delta cross channel operations that are depicted in Calcine data export levels that are depicted in Calcine. So that's sort of each model is going to have the critical information that it needs from Calcine but it's going to have its own complexity within itself about the physics of it right? Well, actually we could thank Dr. Summerfarer really good. Well, thank you for that. So we're now moving to an in-depth presentation on the summerfall habitat actions and we have two speakers to cover this. Christy Arendt from Reclamation. She's a freshwater aquatic ecologist with experience in the Great Lakes. She's worked in coastal and wetland ecosystems inland reservoirs and tidal rivers. More recently she's worked on water management and endangered species in the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta and her areas of expertise include fish community surveys food web dynamics water quality and weather monitoring. She received her PhD in aquatic ecology from Cornell. The second speaker will be Brittany Davis with the Department of Water Resources. She serves as the environmental program manager at the California Department of Water Resources. She has numerous publications, many on smelt and has worked on monitoring and evaluation of the North Delta food subsidies North Delta flow action yellow bypass and other food web dynamics within the system. She's also worked on the physiological and behavioral effects of domestication of Delta smelt, which we've heard so much about today. So thank you both for being with us and I don't know who's going first, is it Christy? Yeah, thank you. So yeah, I think we'll fill up the rest of the time before lunch but basically over the next three talks my colleague Dr. Brittany Davis and Dr. Rosemary Hartman and I will be talking about basically how Delta smelt summer and fall habitat. So basically the availability and the quality of habitat and prey. How we think that that is really important in terms of their growth survival and recruitment at the population level. So we'll be just providing kind of an overview of some of the conceptual framework underlying these ideas and then we'll provide some information on the different management actions that are either being taken or being developed to try to improve the habitat and prey conditions and then what Rosemary will kind of focus in on later in the afternoon is the monitoring and modeling that we use to plan these actions and also evaluate them. So we'll get it currently I don't know how to use that. It didn't work for me but anyway now we're here. So for this first talk then we're really going to focus kind of review the conceptual model that we've developed some of these management actions under. So our management objectives and performance metrics that we're using and then provide sort of an overview of the actions and their associated operations and also identify some of the issues that we're grappling with in terms of adaptive management uncertainties and some of the data gaps knowledge gaps that we have that we've kind of discovered along the way and then finally just a quick review of sort of what are planning and evaluation processes. All right, now I've got it. So just a quick quick, quick primer on Delta Smelt basic biology. They're a small pelagic fish species that's endemic to the Bay Delta. They are thought to have a fairly weak swimming ability and and they have an annual life cycle and so during that time they migrate within the Bay Delta and that's shown over here on the right. They are right now seasonally so in the winter the adults migrate upstream in response to what we refer to as first flush which is basically really high flows and turbidity that result from one of the first storms of the winter after that then they spawn in freshwater so right around now we think that they've completed their upstream migration due to some storms we had earlier this winter and the water temperatures are suitable for spawning so they're probably spawning around now. Then the larvae and the juveniles migrate to low salinity habitat so brackish water during the summer and then remain there in the fall as their nursery habitat as they mature. And so this is really the time period that we're focusing on this the time when they have these different life history stages in the brackish low salinity water. They primarily consume zooplankton and other microinvertebrates copepods, claudocerans, amphipods and they prefer cool water, more turbid water and then again this low salinity to fresh water that I already mentioned. They're threatened federally endangered in California. So really the management actions that we'll be talking about are really focused on this transition from the juvenile through sub-adult to adult life stages. So this is operating again kind of June to December time period and we think that this is represents a bottleneck in their population growth. Some of the key drivers are the size and location of low salinity habitat quality of habitat and the availability of prey. So we've developed a lot of this based on a conceptual model that was developed by the interagency ecological programs management analysis and synthesis team and so within that broader conceptual model for delta smelt is the premise that if we have an increase in low salinity habitat that should maximize the area of suitable habitat for delta smelt and result in higher growth and survival. The way we think about this from a management perspective is that if we can augment flow in the summer and fall that should increase low salinity habitat and then decrease salinity in particular areas that we think provide really good habitat for smelt and prey for smelt. So this would be in Sassoon Bay and Sassoon Marsh and then that has a couple different effects. One is that we should see some increases in zooplankton production, maybe improvements in species composition to the prey that they prefer and that enhancement of food availability quality should lead to greater growth. Also this area is thought of as good habitat. It provides access to more turbid water so that should reduce predation risk and it also provides access to habitat that has somewhat cooler water just due to this coming up kind of atmospheric air temperature forcing from the ocean and so again those should lead to greater survival growth and ultimately recruitment. So I talked about this low salinity habitat I just want to dig into that a little bit more so we refer to this low salinity habitat as the low salinity zone and that's really where depth average salinity is between about 0.5 and 6 practical salinity units. This is what is thought to be kind of this range of salinities that delta spelt prefer and what I was just talking about is that we kind of want to see that in this red area of this map so what this is just showing is it's just plotting salinity kind of over space from the western saltier side of the estuary up to the freshwater and so we have this low salinity area here we have a lot of area in that more turbid water habitat that they can occupy. Obviously this isn't something that's stable or static so if we have a lot more flow coming in through the system we're going to expect that low salinity habitat to move to the west and if we have less flow like during a drought year we'll expect that low salinity habitat to move up more into the delta the lower part of the river due to that greater intrusion of saltwater so we can gauge kind of where this low salinity zone is by using X2 I think you heard about this a little bit in the first meeting but basically X2 refers to the distance from the Golden Gate bridge and river kilometers where a daily average bottom salinity is about two practical salinity units so we can estimate where this is and that can give us an idea then we can relate that to how much low salinity habitat we think is available what that zone looks like so in this figure right here we're seeing an X2 right here at 74 kilometers and the blue colors are showing you where that low salinity zone habitat is we can also look at what would happen if we have an X2 at 80 kilometers you can see somewhat of a shift where that low salinity habitat is upstream a little bit and then some reduction in low salinity habitat in this bay area so the other thing that we mentioned is being important is food availability just running really quickly go through a couple ideas for that so there is evidence for food limitation in the time period some of that could be due to grazing by invasive clams also the low salinity zone seems to rely on subsidies from freshwater so subsidies of coca-cola and other zooplankton for freshwater and so we can see that walk rating again there we go so we can see that here so the left hand graph is just showing zooplankton catch per cubic meter in freshwater zone for a number of different taxonomic groups and then on the right it's showing up for the low salinity zone I've circled this zooplankton right here suited up in this forbesi that's one of the preferred prey items for delta smelt so you can see much higher relative abundance in the freshwater area and lower in the low salinity zone but we think that with flows those flows can basically subsidize the zooplankton that are in that low salinity zone from those pressure water areas the adjacent areas so the goal and objective really of the management actions are to improve habitat conditions and food supply maintain more specifically maintain low salinity habitat in this Sassoon Marsh and Grizzly Bay area when water temperatures are suitable manage the low salinity zone to overlap with turbid water and available food supplies and establish contiguous low salinity habitat from the Cache Slough complex all the way down to Sassoon Marsh really what you know ultimately what we want to see is an increase in individual delta growth delta smelt survival growth and condition so that we have improved recruitment we have an interagency group that has worked together through the process of structured decision making to identify performance metrics that we're using to evaluate how these different actions perform given kind of these objectives these fundamental objectives so some of the ones that are related to delta smelt include increasing the area of suitable abiotic habitat increasing prey biomass and composition decreasing contaminant exposure so we are thinking about contaminants here and then increasing delta smelt growth which we and Rosemary will be talking about these measures more specifically later on so I'm just kind of listing them here we will go into detail later today we also think about other things like minimizing negative effects to other native species if possible minimizing resource costs in terms of water and funds and then how we can learn from this adaptive management framework so now I'm going to pass it over to Brittany and she'll talk about the actions and the operations okay this does or doesn't work it does okay thanks Chrissy thanks panel for joining us and I'm going to whip through these actions pretty quickly and operations and I just want to remind you that the three of us will be on all the panels today and Chrissy and I will also be on the field trip Friday and you can pick our brains then so in total we've described six summer fall habitat actions or strategies that we use to implement or are currently experimenting with in hopes to improve the habitat for delta smelt so the first three actions are all focused on these abiotic habitat conditions or expansion of that low salinity zone these actions include fall X2 re-operation of the Sassoon marsh salinity control gates that we have on here in Montezuma slough with that yellow star and then a requirement to provide an additional 100,000 acre feet of water the second three actions are either experimental or sort of concept feasibility stages right now and these are all focused on really stimulating and subsidizing food so primary and secondary production these food subsidy actions include first the north delta food subsidy study this is located here in purple here in the ridge cut slough yellow bypass area trying to move food into accessible smelt habitat and then cash through complex second highlighted in yellow here is the managed wetland study in Sassoon marsh and then the last food subsidy action is the Sacramento deep water ship channel highlighted here in green sort of parallel to the bypass right now the north delta food subsidy studies is the only one that is actually feasible and I'll go into detail about what are your types and when it can be implemented they vary so the first I'm going to go walk through the first three habitat actions first the first one is fall X2 so this is maintaining that bottom salinity at two PSU at 80 kilometers X2 is maintained through coordinated operations via reservoir releases or reduced exports X2 at 80 is to be maintained during September and October months in above normal and wet years so fall X2 has been implemented several times now first was in 2017 and then 2018 and X2 here was managed to 74 kilometers under previous biological opinions and then most recently this last year it was implemented and X2 was maintained at 80 kilometers with our current permit requirements and so some of the conclusions from at least the 2017 study highlighted here we did see changes in water quality such as increases in turbidity also decreases in water temperature in terms of food there are no significant observations in zooplankton changes and then for the smelt themselves there are observations of similar or less smelt than in other regions but like I said given the status of the species it's hard to really use delta smelt detections to evaluate the actions which could change in the future with supplementation of fish so really it's it's a challenge to tease apart the effects of specific actions and given water year types because the hydrologic conditions you know can vary from year to year okay second action second habitat action is the re-operation of the Sassoon marsh Selenic control gates here we're trying to operate the gates to maintain that low Selenic habitat in the marsh so here we're conveying fresh water into the marsh so essentially the picture here is showing you the Selenic gates we're going to visit them Friday I believe the gates can essentially be held open so when water is flowing out of the delta it it could push fresh water out to fresh in the marsh and then the gates can be closed to prevent seawater intrusion so right now the gates for the summerfall habitat action specifically are focused in June through October operations for 60 days there is potentially some flexibility with this whether you're operating for 60 days continuously or you have some other schedule a lot of this discussion happens through this interagency delta coordination group that Christy talked about and I think Rosie's going to allude to more sort of taking a structured decision approach using modeling to figure out what the best scheduling is to improve habitat so the gates are implemented in below normal above normal some dry and some wet years so the gates action has been implemented I think Louise alluded to this earlier first in 2018 and then most recently last year conclusions from 2018 we did see increase and I say we but there I'm citing these studies here we did see increases of low salinity habitat we also saw beneficial changes in water quality so increase or there was higher turbidity in chlorophyll A and the marsh as compared to the lower Sacramento river region in terms of food again we didn't see significant increases in zooplankton abundance there were though in 2018 small numbers of delta smelt detected in the marsh during the action and again similar to fall X to you know anticipated effects can vary based on year to year conditions we're still working off the 2023 report we'd be happy to discuss those results Friday or later but there might be some differences already that we're detecting in the 2023 action compared to the 2018 action okay the third habitat action is this requirement of DWR to provide an additional 100,000 acre feet the decision to use this is that the discretion of CDFW the intent is to increase freshwater habitat in the marsh and grizzly bay the hunter taff can be operationally implemented via extra outflow or used through additional operations of the Sassoon marsh salinity control gates as was done in this last year 2023 so there is also flexibility in the timing of this action the hunter taff can be used in the above normal and wet year that it is provided by DWR in June through October or there's the option to defer that 100 tap the next year and redeploy sometime during March or October to supplement outflow if it were in the spring the benefits might be more targeted towards longfin smelt if they were in deferred and using the following smelt the following summer it would be intended benefits for delta smell so for example in a wet year conditions are already wet so you might choose to defer it to use next year in the summer when conditions could be very dry we talked about California's water supply years and so having that water available in drier conditions might provide more benefits and again that decision is at the discretion of CDFW but we discussed this in that delta coordination group so we have implemented this for the first time this last year that we implemented it not as outflow but through use of additional Sassoon marsh salinity control gates August through October and so in conclusions that were seen it did provide greater area of fresh water habitat there is a risk that has to be assessed in using this water if you use it in the in the current wet year you may not have as significant benefits as you would using that water under drier conditions but there's a risk of occurring if you have two wet years in a row then that water may not be available if it is spilled from reservoirs that fall and spring so now I'm going to move into the three food subsidy actions so the first is the north delta food subsidy study this is an experimental action it essentially creates net positive flow in the YOLO bypass region and attempts to stimulate and transport primary and secondary production operations there's some flexibility here we can create managed flow pulses by redirecting Sacramento river water through the bypass this would occur during summer in July mainly due to operation feasibility and some salmonid concerns the other managed flow flows can be implemented in fall utilizing agricultural return drainage in the Calusa Basin drain and diverting that through the bypass to create a net positive flow the agricultural drainage is mostly rice field drainage you can see anything else I want to say there no so the north delta food subsidy study if the water is available it can be implemented across the number of water year types dry below normal and above normal though there could be some water quality concerns in drier years for example dissolved oxygen so it's a mouthful the north delta food subsidy study it has been we usually just call it NDFS this action has been previously implemented so the first action but 2012 was when we really made the first observations and the concept of the experiment there was construction that needed to occur and so the water was diverted and we saw a big pulse and some productivity and hey the light bulbs went off and then there were two subsequent agricultural pulses in 2018 and 2019 we were able to work with reclamation closely to generate a managed flow pulse action using Sacramento river water in 2016 so the conclusions for NDFS really variable there's been phytoplankton responses in some years and not others we have relatively low statistical power to detect zooplankton responses and then there could be some potential consequences of moving pulses through these habitats we've detected relatively high contaminate concentrations that could lead to potential and negative effects on smelt or other species and then in this northern delta region particularly the yolo bypass temperatures in summer fall are really warm and so temperatures can reach sublethal and even exceed tolerance levels of smelt in some cases so it's really about moving food to more accessible habitat okay we're getting there the second food subsidy action this is more conceptual at this stage the managed wetlands food subsidy study the objective here is again to increase that primary and secondary production in the marsh and so seasonal operations of sort of draining wetlands in the summer and filling wetlands and doing this cycle can potentially pose as a really useful tool to create food for fish these are more restricted habitats so they're free of clams and might have higher residency time for food production versus tidal wetlands that are unrestricted and have more of these pulse blow effects and low residency times so recently in 2022 UC Davis began a study really evaluating these seasonally flooded wetlands compared to perennial more long-term flooded wetlands compared to tidally restored unrestricted wetlands and so you can see here in the marsh I think we're going to Tully Red this tidally restored habitat in the blue here Friday and so I'm not sure if this is going to go over it or not but some of the preliminary findings I don't have a slide on it but I've seen some of the data and I think the hypotheses thus far are being partially supported where seasonally flooded wetlands are promoting higher plankton production the perennial flooded wetlands are sort of creating this moderate production and then the tidal unrestricted wetlands are providing a lower plankton and it's probably due to these changes in the wetland features that I mentioned previously and so the last food subsidy action is the Sacramento Deepwater Ship Channel this is intended to stimulate plankton production in the main stem Sacramento river and so this the ship channel which is really one of the key habitats that remaining delta smelt are often found in supplemented smelt it's a dead-end terminal channel it has similar characteristics to other terminal channels where there are hydrodynamics zones that really drive gradients in nutrients, light turbidity and so the operations here would be creating some enriched nutrients in the upper channel of the sack ship channel and then creating some sort of managed flow poles to export that production downstream to the lower Sacramento river and reclamation is the lead of this study so the timing of this would likely be in the summer so similar wetlands experiments are ongoing investigations determining the feasibility of these actions there was a pilot study in 2018 through 2019 where fertilizer was essentially applied to a segment of the ship channel in the first panel here you can see there's low nitrate concentrations throughout the ship channel and then moving over to post fertilization and just one day you really see a rapid increase in nitrate concentrations and then across that week that concentration really expands spatially across the ship channel and so some of the conclusions from this pilot study the fertilizer application increased nitrate concentrations this resulted in short-lived but really substantial increases in chlorophyll the chlorophyll concentrations that were observed were higher when the water column was thermally stratified the study did highlight nitrogen limitation in that upper channel and this is likely due to those hydrodynamic gradients so greater light penetration and longer residency times occurring in that upper channel and then lastly implementation of this action to stimulate and export phytoplankton production it will require both likely enhanced nutrients supply via application or some other method and then altering the flow dynamics there via a flow pulse to export that okay and I'm going to hand it back to Christy for all the adaptive management issues in seven minutes yep we'll try to speed through this so yeah we're going to go through some of the science issues related to adaptive management uncertainties and our knowledge gaps so starting with adaptive management and just focusing on that north delta food subsidies study like Brittany mentioned we really have actually had a power analysis conducted and have very lowest statistical power to actually detect a food blood effect so it's hard for us to use those field monitoring data to say oh yes we have stimulated production up to the zooplankton so what we've started recently is a stabilized pilot study so that we can really track those carbon sources and their movement into the food web to see if our concept of how that should work is the way that those nutrients and carbon is actually being transferred through the trophically through the food web it also has a fairly small footprint so it is unlikely to increase primary and secondary production well into the lower Sacramento river which is kind of one of the targets for where we expect, we would like the adult to be able to benefit from that just as Brittany mentioned it's up in the area where this is happening it's really warm and contaminate levels are higher and we found that the hydrodynamics aren't quite as they were expected to be quite as much of a linear flow and we also anticipate that some restoration projects that are being wrapped up and ongoing right now are expected to change those hydrodynamics as well so some of the focus has shifted in response to these challenges and also in response to these high contaminant and temperature concerns and so right now we have also another new study that is evaluating the thermal suitability throughout the cash loop complex and also recognizing that some of the if it's working and we're subsidizing the food web and it's not going straight down to the river but kind of spreading throughout the area what does that look like in terms of thermal tolerance for adult to smell we also have some adaptive management issues related to the fall X2 and salinity control gate actions there are tradeoffs between freshwater pool management for other native and listed species so what we do with our reservoirs thinking about delta fish might have consequences for fish that we care about in the upper part of the river and then there's thinking about how to maximize gate operations that really can depend on your perspective of whether you want to maximize freshwater habitat over space in that area you want to maximize it over time so you have that freshwater lasting a little bit longer but maybe not covering quite as much area again we are challenged by limited statistical power to detect a zooplankton response fortunately they're patchy highly variable and it's just really hard to do the level of monitoring that's required and then finally what Brittany mentioned before and explained before is this relative benefit of using the water the 100,000 acre feet during that year when it becomes available the water above normal year versus deferring it to the next year where that water could be lost and potentially not able to be used in terms of uncertainties do we know that delta smelt are going to migrate to higher quality habitat if we create it for them how can we improve our understanding of what's going on in these lower trophic levels so can we improve our models of phytoplankton and zooplankton important subsidization to really have some concrete hypotheses that then we can test and look at in the field how can we improve the individual based delta smelt model so this is the model that we're using the component of it the biologetics component of it to estimate growth in response to these actions but then we can also use the full model to look at the consequences of the population level so one area that has been identified for improvement is that the biologetics model is based on ribosmelt not delta smelt so can we do some experiments to parameterize it based on delta smelt and then also have the best incorporate movement into that model again with these assumptions that ideally smelt are going to be moving into this better habitat and then really can these flow actions result in detectable food web effects and population benefit level benefits for delta smelt all of these have kind of a small footprint hydrologically so what does that mean at the population level and how can we really scale it up or understand if and how it does scale up and then finally the kind of wide open question that I think we're hoping to get input on is what are other approaches that could be used to facilitate population transition through this bottom up period what are we not thinking of we're thinking a lot about flow pulses what else could we be thinking about so some of the information and synthesis needs that have really come up and come to light as we've had this group using structured decision-making to evaluate and make recommendations regarding these management actions you know what have we learned since that conceptual model was developed that I presented earlier we've had a lot of publications a lot of studies come out since then so we're working right now to kind of update our conceptual model and really bring in this newer information to what extent do some food subsidy actions increase contaminants and impact delta smelt growth and condition we know it's probably an issue with the north delta food subsidy and may also be one with the ship channel do and if so how to our do our actions impact other native species particularly USA and CISO listed species I was going to talk a little bit more about that and how we score that using export elicitation right now it'd be nice to not rely on just expert opinion to understand these effects and then what is the relative role of temperature with respect to other habitat conditions now and in the future temperature temperatures are warm they're warm in the summer and fall in kind of these areas so you know what role do they play now and really limiting the area of physical habitat that that's really high quality and then how is that going to change this climate changes so you know the way that we kind of go about this from a bigger picture is through this sort of planning reporting and evaluation process so annually CWR and reclamation jointly develop an action plan based on the recommendations from this interagency Delta BCG why am I blanking out Delta coordination group thank you and so basically these recommendations come from this structured decision making we also have a science and monitoring plan that we update annually that describes the monitoring the modeling activities and also any directed research that may be going on to evaluate these actions and then a seasonal report basically our annual report that describes the implementation of the actions and the modeling and monitoring results for that year there are also a number of peer review publications that have come out as I mentioned looking at some of these actions and their effects and then right now DWR is currently working with the Delta Stewardship Council on a four year independent review of the summerfall habitat action for the California incident will take permit so this should inform how well the science plans and the structured decision making approach are being integrated into adaptive management for summerfall habitat recommendations ideally will improve certainty and metrics and confidence in decision making so this effort's kind of digging in a little bit more into the reads and the details than I think what we're going to continue to do but that information will be available to you ideally we think that it should be completed by June of 2024 and I think that's it yeah lunch time that's great well thanks for finishing on time so we can take a break as I mentioned earlier as we had those questions around the modeling we're going to come back and we'll roll the panel discussion into the session immediately after lunch so we'll get the presentation okay with the speakers you'll get the full set file and it's written before and after so if we could just thank the speakers first and we'll be back at one o'clock okay what we're going to do this afternoon if you look at the agenda is that we have two sessions this afternoon one on the summerfall habitat action monitoring and the second one is going to actually be on the biological monitoring what we're going to do is to go through both presentations and then have a panel discussion at the front both with the presenters and other folks you may want to bring up who might have something to offer we're also adding to the original agenda extending the presenters and it's a pleasure to invite Dr Rosemary Hartman again who is the lead for the interagency ecological program synthesis at DWR her prior experience is with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife that's right and she's well known on fish restoration programs your across the system so Dr Hartman thanks for being with us and if I kill the first yeah you're going to be a lot of me so hopefully I don't bore anyone I am as Peter said the lead for the interagency ecological program synthesis team which I like to say means that I know all the data that's being collected so whenever there's a big question I can take all the data put it together and answer that question and so for the summerfall habitat action the monitoring framework that I'm going to go over is really taking mostly data that's already being collected adding additional data where we need it and putting it all together to answer these big questions so I've been the lead on the monitoring for the salinity control gates and working with Britt and Christie and putting everything together to evaluate the effectiveness of these actions so come on buddy there we go so as Christie introduced we have this conceptual model for the summerfall habitat action that smelt our food limited in the fall and whatever we can do to get them through this kind of crunch period is going to be a good idea our overall hypothesis was that food and habitat in the fall were better in Sassoon Marsh and Sassoon Bay than upstream of the Sacramento River but this is a hypothesis it's not something that we know for sure that it's always going to be better to get smelt into Sassoon Marsh and Sassoon Bay in the fall and so we really took a hypothesis based approach to evaluating the effectiveness of these actions and putting monitoring in place that would allow us to evaluate our hypotheses so our hypothesis for fall X2 which again the action says that we need X2 at 80 kilometers in September and October and we hypothesized that a lower X2 maximizes the overlap of appropriate temperatures, turbidity and salinity so that's the abiotic habitat low X2 also increases kalanoid copepods in the low salinity zone in Sassoon Marsh and Sassoon Bay and that better habitat and better food will mean better delta smelt growth and survival for the salinity control gate action we have a very similar set of hypotheses again we're operating the salinity control gates for 60 days June through November this is going to freshen Sassoon Marsh so that's going to maximize the overlap of appropriate temperatures, turbidity and salinity in Sassoon Marsh X2 hypotheses focused on Sassoon Bay this action focuses on Sassoon Marsh operating those gates is also going to increase copepods which are smelt's favorite food into Sassoon Marsh and operation of the gates can even increase habitat all the way in Grizzly Bay because monozoma flows flow through system so we definitely think freshening the marsh is going to be good and if we can get that fresh water all the way over to Grizzly Bay it's going to be even better if that area tends to be cooler so Christy introduced you to this sort of adaptive management wheel that we use to conceptualize the planning and action implementation process and she would never kind of some of the backgrounds but we really are taking adaptive management approach where we evaluate this action every year and change our plans next year and in order to evaluate the actions monitoring is obviously super important fortunately there's a long history of ecological environmental monitoring funded by reclamation and DWR as well as other groups much of 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. Science within river survival, you know, you've heard folks talk about, you know, predation and that sort of thing. 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's a little less than a million acre feet. 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. It's just such a valuable resource. 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 success story. I will say in the Lower American River, we are one of the only basins in the state that have actually improved our groundwater levels. The Lower American River was actually one of the models for Sigma when it was originally put forward as a proposed regulation. So really important to keep that in mind. Flood control entities. We have SAFECA, the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency. Really great group. Definitely chat with them. There's a lot of interesting constraints on the Lower American River due to flood issues. So I think they'd be great resource and water forum staff. I mentioned the water forums data. They're fantastic. They can point you in the right direction if you need any information. And just finally on a cool note, I just wanted to say that along with our 20 plus year success story, our restored sites on the river are now supporting 30 to 50 percent of our in-river responding annually. So that's a huge success story. Again, I think we have a lot to share. We're open to contribute and collaborate and just really appreciate the opportunity to be here. So thank you. Being on the line, Emily, I have a presentation or if you would just hand it to us. I'll be relatively quick. As I mentioned earlier, we are a state conservancy. We are created to serve the Delta as well as the Soon Marsh. Not quite as unique as Bruce's group in sort of a majority of local involvement on our board, but we do have five county supervisors on our board. The intention there is that everything that we do, everything that we fund is locally supported. We work, our applicants have to demonstrate local support and to be able to get funding from the Delta Conservancy. I'll talk a little bit about each of our programs and how they relate to the Center for Value Project and then a little bit about science needs and how I think we can help provide information. So our first big program was Proposition 1. It brought $50 million for ecosystem restoration of the Delta. That funded about 34 projects, provided some sort of ecological uplift on about 11,000 acres in the Delta for a wide variety of projects throughout. Some more notable, we funded the bulk of the Nutri eradication program. So that's looking at trying to stop the Nutria from getting established in the Delta through control outside the Delta, although they seem to be showing up and some quite a few are in this soon march right now. Looking at planning to reconnect Elk Slough, which would be an alternate pathway for Salmon of Migration as well as improved floodplain habitat and flood protection in that area. Provided some planning money for the Paradise Cut, looking at a South Delta bypass that functions, it would function a lot like the yellow bypass. And then other projects, wetland projects for Perian invasive species control, water quality and some fairly significant tidal habitat restoration projects. The other half of our mission is to do economic development. So we've funded a number of projects throughout the Delta, looking at increasing recreation tourism opportunities, trail systems, historic preservation, a couple of visitor centers that will be in the Delta to help people understand how they can come in, understand the Delta, utilize the Delta and then also just contribute to the overall economic condition in the Delta. As Bruce mentioned, we ran a drought response pilot program for the last two years of the drought. This was with a $22 million allotment from the Department of Water Resources. We worked with individual landowners, Jose Way was very helpful in that project. Basically funded them to reduce their applied water through changing their agricultural practices. It was a very successful program in terms of engaging with Delta agriculture, but as Bruce mentioned, you don't save a lot of water in the Delta because what you apply is if you stop applying, you get subsurface irrigation because you're below sea level and the nature of the peat soil. But still a wealth of information about how applied water moves through the system as evidence use using open ET to measure that. And then we have some longer-term projects that are looking at using eddy covariance towers that are really looking at how water moves through agricultural systems in the Delta. The thing I'm most engaged in personally in the Delta is really looking at nature-based solutions to address subsidence in the Delta. So I think you all are probably aware that there's an enormous hole in the Delta between 150 and 200,000 acres. That was all carbon that has volatilized into the atmosphere. I fully agree with what Tom's going to say and what Bruce says about we need to maintain the levees and agriculture as a driver. We also have to recognize that we continue to go the wrong direction and increase that subsidence every year. And we also put a tremendous amount of carbon in the atmosphere between 10 and 20. We've even seen 30 tons of carbon per acre per year going into the atmosphere into the Delta. And again, that's your 30 feet below sea level. That's all carbon that was in the peak has now volatilized into the atmosphere. We've done a tremendous amount of science through the years. We know the rates of subsidence. We know what causes it. We know how to stop it. We simply put water back on the landscape. So we had a $36 million allotment. We've funded four projects, one of them with Meshbomb Large District, to take all of web tract and put about 3,500 acres into managed wetland and about 1,500 acres into rice cultivation. Expectation it's a whole island management scheme that's sort of a mosaic of these two practices. Stop subsidence, stops the carbon emissions. Should still be economically viable with carbon market, but also with the rice cultivation. They're going to be looking at whether or not those wetlands sort of the surrogate can provide fish food at the base of the food chain be pumped back over into the surrounding waterways. And then again, sort of really trying to make that these islands stop society, stop belching carbon and be economically viable into the future. Very exciting. We did get this money. We put it to projects very quickly. Sadly, that's the end of the funding. And so now we're really after a federal funding to see if we can keep that keep that going. A couple of other things that we do. We coordinate or co-facilitate the Delta Delta interagency invasive species committee. And that's their focus at this point really is looking at rapid detection response. There's not a lot of money for invasive species control in the Delta, but it's a critical issue. But working with all the agencies trying to get them to focus on how do we identify quickly and respond as quickly as we can to do what we can as early as we can as invasives hit. We also co-facilitate the Delta restoration network, which is a subcommittee of the Delta plan interagency implementation committee. And essentially that is bringing all the practitioners together and with the Delta community as much as possible to really talk about restoration of the Delta, where it's happening, what's planned, and what's kind of sharing best practices and information to just better facilitate restoration in the Delta. I think we're looking to the group. A couple of key issues. There's big targets out there. There's 60 to 80,000 acres of restoration to be done in the Delta, but obviously that's going to be long-term. It's going to cost a lot of money to do that. Where do we best spend money now? When we've got money, where do we prioritize to put that for the greatest effect in the Delta? It's really important. A lot of talk about how salinity in the system changes when you start to inundate lands for title habitat restoration and how that affects water quality throughout the system. Clearly we need a better understanding of that. Basically right now people propose projects to us. We evaluate them against best available science. We make them show us the best available science and we say whether or not we should fund them. But those are bigger issues that really should be directing where we invest money more heavily. And then I think the two areas where we can help hopefully provide you with information is again around the drought response and agricultural water movement through agricultural systems in the Delta as well as just we've got a wealth of data and information about the whole subsidence and carbon issue in the Delta and everything that's gone on for 20 plus years to support our efforts to try to make those changes. Thanks. Thank you, Hamill. Hi, I'm Tom Zuckerman. I'm the elder statesman here. I've been around a long time as you've heard and I got involved in this water issue and habitat stuff about 56 years ago. So I've seen a lot. I have some fairly strong opinions. I've been involved in a lot of different aspects of this. I'm happy to be here with this distinguished group of scientists, which I am not a scientist, although I've been accused of being an osmotic scientist from the amount of involvement I've had in these issues over there. And it's fun to see some familiar faces from the from the Delta Stewardship Council and staff here today. What I really want to do is pledge cooperation with you going forward. You know, I could go on for several hours talking about the subjects that are that are gone here, but I'm not going to do that. I will make an observation that I think is important. And it's one that we've been making since about 2007 or before. It's embodied in a paper that we that I authored, but 25 members of the Blue Ribbon panel for the CalFED operation supported. I'm going to pass this down to you. And I hope you make it available to your panel here. It involves a water plan for the 21st century, which really talks about trying to utilize the reservoir that we've systematically created in the Sacramento Valley with a capacity of half a billion acre feet by inadvertently overdrafting the groundwater resources of the area. And I think we can use existing facilities, re-operate them to try to fill that those voids back up again during performing necessary flood control in these really whiplash situations that we get. And we have an opportunity to reduce reliance on the Delta, which is going to be a key to any successful reclamation of the wildlife resources and the fish resources. We've over committed the resources of the Central Valley. Same way we've over committed the resources of the Colorado River. We have to come to grips with that. It's not something that's caused by climate change, it's caused by deliberate decisions that were made in the development of the CVP and the state water project, over committing supplies that they never developed or didn't have, or didn't understand what the needs for them were going to be in terms of fishery resources and so forth. So this is all well and good. I listened to the presentations this morning, and my overwhelming response is one of sympathy to the people who work within the Department of Water Resources and the Bureau of Reclamation. One of them used the phrase, they have limited decision space. And I think that was a rather important admission to make that when you're working for the organization that's committed itself to deliver water supply that they don't have, it's very difficult to be very bold in terms of the suggestions that you're making. We need to be bold. We can't just sit back and conduct studies. They look more like autopsies than prescriptions to me. We're still trying to figure out where they went instead of trying to figure out how we can get them back. And that's the key point that I wanted to make. And I want to thank you for including me in this and I look forward to in my organization as well to providing you with additional information as we go forward and hopefully come to grips with some very serious, serious problems. All right, we're more than halfway through. So Heidi Williams, Valley Water, and I wanted to highlight that Valley Water were charged by the California Legislator through the Santa Clara Valley Water District Act to enhance, protect, and restore streams, riparian corridors, and natural resources. So in our local system, we have steelhead and fall range of salmon and some other vulnerable species. And so we're tackling on a smaller scale, some similar challenges to what we've been hearing today. So we know how hard it is to balance all these beneficial uses and also how important it is to get it right. And so, you know, we're we're attached to the Bay of the Bay Delta, we're at the South Bay, and we do seek out a lot of diverse sources of water, local supplies, a water recycling program that we're trying to double our source of supply from water recycling and conservation. But even with these things, we still find that imported water remains necessary for various reasons, but we have different local constraints. And about 40% of our water currently does come from the Delta, and that percent is higher in drier years. So for example, our local water supply is strained right now because of some seismic safety restrictions on several of our local dams. And that includes our largest source of local water, the Anderson reservoir, and that's been drained since 2020. And it's probably not going to come back online till about 2032. And then we have other dams to retrofit as well after that. So but both intrinsically and to serve the beneficial uses of California water, we do recognize that the health of the Delta is very paramount. We're engaged in a lot of these collaborative forums we've been hearing about. So the collaborative collaborative science and adaptive management program CSAM, California adaptive management team, CAMT, and then the state water contractors and the Central Valley project contractor science programs that are trying to focus on the management relevant science. And now I'll mention three recommendations to this committee to accomplish. And then I'll have like a lightning round of framing questions at the end. So one is to help us move forward with dynamic triggers. I think through a lot of interagency collaboration and coordination, we are slowly moving away from some of the static triggers and going towards more dynamic triggers. Things that come to mind for me are the work on the juvenile production estimate and genetic run ID. And those are really good steps forward. And we need to get better at continuing towards that dynamic and linking our actions with population level responses. The fish presence in the system can vary a lot from year to year. And in a really good fish year, it's possible to trigger those Omar restrictions at times simply because there's more fish. And then sometimes it takes a while to know that were these triggers brought about because of fish that are really tied to the ones that we're trying to protect through that action. There's possibilities like the fish might be from other genetic runs or they might be unmarked hatchery fish. And there's this lag time that we're experiencing to figure that out. And there's also the possibility that the set thresholds can be such a small amount of the cohort in that year. And so in those cases, sometimes the Omar triggers might not be meaningful to the species. And so to all of you, please help to identify places in the regulations where we can continue to move in a dynamic and adaptive direction. And where we can be managing based on the fluctuating conditions and the population levels that we're experiencing. And then to also think about under what conditions could off ramps on Omar management work while still, of course, being protective. And then number two, I think you've been hearing about this a lot today, but using existing collaborative project products to help. As you've seen, it's a highly studied ecosystem. It has layers and layers of committees and coordination groups that exist. And, you know, all of, in all of these, we're trying to earnestly to tackle these big questions. And so I just wanted to add my plus one to take a look at all those resources, especially products from places like CSAMP camp, Delta Independent Science Board, IEP. I mean, some of you are very intimately familiar with these groups. And you might add to that list. It could be useful to look at the camped salmon scoping team report, the SST report, as well as the ongoing reorienting to recovery project. And then number three, you're already doing this, but keep engaging with the public water agencies to understand our constraints. There's so much uncertainty in the effectiveness of the actions. And just taking a look at what is truly working and, you know, requirements because of this uncertainty can sometimes be conservative in the interest of protecting the fish and covering bases. And the trade off, of course, is that then that can come at a very high water cost. And the more we can really hone in on reducing the uncertainty, the more targeted we can be at benefiting species. And then the less blanket higher cost water actions will likely need as a result, because we can start to pinpoint more and public water agencies, we can help with the details on how the amount and the timing of water deliveries as a result of OMR, Bollocks 2, Shasta Releases, how they impact us. For example, bringing it back to Valley Water, our limited local supply that I mentioned, it means that dry years can sometimes hit very hard. And to supplement our supplies during these dry years, we use water transfers and out of county storage. And during the last drought, a limitation we had is there's a lot of uncertainty on the timing of receiving these waters from transfers and out of county storage supplies. And that uncertainty of delivery that can start to lead to treated water storages. For us, 96% of our water in treatment plants comes from Delta supplies. And so when you start to have a risk of treated water shortages, it can lead to some of our retailers turning to groundwater pumping. And because of the size of our groundwater basin, compared to the demand of our area, our groundwater levels are at risk of dropping quite rapidly in a single year and experiencing subsidence, which of course can have all kinds of other environmental consequences. So that's just one example to say that you should really keep in mind the importance of water supply reliability in the decisions as you're making your recommendations. And now that lightning round I mentioned, these are just some framing questions that I came up with that a lot of others have touched on already. But I encourage you to think about what scientific areas are overstudied, where we do have more to learn, but we could take more concrete actions in decision making now. And then what scientific areas on the other side of things are understudied and need more attention? Are there high cost tools we're currently using that don't yield enough benefits? And again, on the other side, are there underutilized tools that we could be implementing more? How can we integrate actions with population level effects? And finally, how do we best be proactive in addressing new challenges? How do we keep up with new climate realities? And how do we understand what it means to have more culture delta melt in our ecosystem? Those sort of things that we need to be on the ball and proactive about. And that's it for me. Valley water is very happy to help contribute whatever you need. And we're available to have additional conversations on any of the topics that I briefly mentioned. Thanks. Hello, my name is Jeff. I'm assistant general manager at Western Water District. I'm reminded of the Danish idiom being the raisin at the end of the sausage. It's supposed to be a good thing. Sort of like waiting for the best for the last. And the interest of keeping it to saint, I'm going to go a little bit off script here and I can circle back and give more detail later and I can provide some notes once they've gone through legal review. So I'll start with a little bit of framing about what we hope to get out of this process. I'll give you some an answer to the last question and then I'll go into what I've got is four things that we would be very interested in that we find great hope for for this committee and three that were not as enthusiastic about if they occur. So with that, you know, my you may know me from my recent step at the Bureau of Reclamation, I was deputy regional director and I don't speak for the Bureau of Reclamation in this moment. But when I left a month ago, there was great excitement and enthusiasm for this panel and hope for this panel. And I can represent for Westlands Water District that that hope exists at Westlands as well. And some of the backdrop, I mean, we're here talking about science, we're talking about all the water supply and the issues in the woes. But what you're not seeing is all the things that we have to do if this doesn't work. If there's no slack in the water supply and the delta for South Delta delivery, if there's not some way to balance things differently, there are a lot of pursuits to balance that water supply and make ends meet for the communities, the cities, ecosystems throughout California that require additional investments, additional reservoirs, additional tunnels, and each of those costs at least a billion dollars. So that's what we're looking for here is science to help us understand really what what is truly needed for the ecosystems, because I don't think there's any desire to see the ecosystem. I know there's no desire that I've heard to see ecosystems fail. They're actually, we relish the opportunity to say we're doing our part. But there's the suspicion or the fear or the concern that maybe more can be done with less. And so we're hopeful that this panel can help us find that path. So for the last question, Leslin has for decades made tremendous investments in in the name of advancing science and is very continues to be very supportive of those aims and goals. So to the extent that our staffed on our consulting expertise, our review or participation anything can be of assistance to this panel just let us know we'd be happy to provide that. And with that, the four things that we're interested in. Number one, a reliable method, call it a tool or call it whatever you want to, but a reliable method to explain linkages between flow conditions and then stressors and then anticipated species outcomes. We'd love to eventually hear the relationship between actions to be proposed and the benefit of curing one issue on a given life stage on referring adults and to be able to cross compare things very stoically and easily. Number two, reliable method to evaluate the effectiveness of actions taken for the species, particularly those with the highest cost of water supply. And I don't have to dwell on this that were identified earlier in Dr. Mooney's presentation. Number three, an assessment of critical path needs that are outside of the CVP and SWP actions. And by critical path, I mean critical path for species recovery survival. There are a lot of ongoing parallel efforts among the regulated community. You've heard a couple of them referenced here today by all the speakers before me, the voluntary agreements and others where the regulated community, so to speak, the water users who are paying up with their water supply currently are looking for other things that could be done that could be more effective with less water supply. And to the extent that this panel can reveal things that need to be done that are not just CVP or SWP facilities or operations specific, that would be a great interest to us because we're not just waiting for the regulations to come and to sit idly and to fight the regulations. We're actively out there trying to find solutions that are even perhaps outside of what we're doing day to day. We're all in it for species survival. And I think that should be an echo of something you've heard several times already. And number four, and this one's a sticky wicket, but advancing a shared vision for science applied to fisheries. And I don't know that that's something I can charge you with specifically. It's something that we all have to be in on. But the regulations are not necessarily in step with the science that we have. And it would be helpful to have this process help to align that process. We'd like to have more participation with regulatory agencies that are affecting water supplies. ESA consultation has historically been legalized, divisive and hidden in its black box from inspection. And that capacity is not helpful. And it's incongruent with the amount of transparency that's demanded of water users. We've made great strides in reporting what we're doing, how it's affecting the Delta is the best of our ability. We would like a reciprocal amount of transparency on what what happens in an ESA consultation. So what are we, what can I say we're less interested in? Suggestions on water management investments. Ideas on groundwater banks, desal, irrigation efficiency and conservation, low flush toilets, all that can be figured out once we know what the water supply is and that we know that the water supply being used for fisheries being withheld from our contracts. We understand the contracts were written at a time where it wasn't that good in. But if the environment needs a certain amount of what would have been our contract supply and we have faith that that's going to be helpful and is working, then we'll figure out the rest. Suggest, and you've heard this this one a lot today, suggestions that ignore our resource constraints. We don't have a lot of time for non-strategic study or exploratory analysis without a foreseeable target. We need to focus on key constraints for the species and key knowledge gaps and we're running out of time with the species. We're running out of time for the delta smell already. And as a parable to avoid when something ineffective is proposed in the past, the first thing is the ag and M&I water users, super water supply hits. Next, we all burn up all of our energy on court processes in the court. The thing that's not working gets turned into a political football where preserving it is somehow a win despite the effectiveness for a species who are, if you're not keeping score at home, not winning. And the last thing is a lack of context. This is sort of a double negative, but I'm going to say it anyway is something we don't want. A lack of context for the effects on CBP and SWP operations. Know that while the biological opinions by statute are required to look at just the effects of CBP and SWP actions on the species and just talk about mitigating those effects specifically, it is just not helpful to only talk about that without looking at the entirety of the species stressors and the effects and what needs to be cured. The CBP and SWP are large supply projects. They've had a tremendous effect on the ecosystem of aquatic ecosystems of the state, but they're not the only thing. And I would, as a date, well, I don't have any quantification for this, but I would imagine that there are things like land use changes in levees and agriculture practices and other things that may have a larger effect on the species that we just want the context for. And so it would be very helpful to know, you know, as a water user, you certainly were interested to know what our effects are so we can say that, you know, here's our effect and we're going to mitigate for our effect, but just know the water users are also out there collectively working to find solutions to meet the needs, the ambitious goals of restoration for these species separate from just what is my fair share and having that context of dire importance. So with that, I conclude. Thank you, Chef. Thank you. Almost there. Probably hearing very, a lot of recurring themes here. So I'll try to keep it short here. Again, my name is Chandrashana Guri. I'm with Stavart Contractors and we have it here interesting making sure that the data ecosystem is functioning and the species are recovering so that we have the resilience of state order project deliveries. So let me jump into what we would expect on this committee. First of all, thank you. This is an insurmountable job to untangle this thing. So thank you for volunteering. So I would start off by saying to the best of your ability on all these requests, these provide recommendations that are actually implementable. Small request. So the biological opinions and instant lay equipment that Stavart Project has or my career, I've been noticing that they've been continuously improving based on the best available science. The staff at the Department of Border Resources Bureau of Reclamation and the fishery agencies both state and federal, they have done a tremendous job in actually recognizing, you know, incorporating best available science as they improve these different generations of place. There may be already efforts underway as it relates to what I am going to specifically ask you to weigh in on. So this is nothing against the word that's already underway. So with that said, just a few have heard from others about the biological opinions and the instant lay permits and what they are in sport. And they're simply there are two things. One is they have constraints on water operations to minimize the effects of the species. And then there is a second component, which is whatever remaining effect you mediate it without coming straight with the other actions. So the charge you have is mostly on the like the OMR, for example, as the minimization measure all x2, for example, or some of all that direction, that's probably you can consider that as a mitigation measure. So one of the things often, especially the constraints, they're often focused on individuals, the usual species rather than trying to understand whether that constraint has any meaningful population level effect. You have heard that a couple of times already. I'll go into a couple of examples. One is, for example, there is a different literature that suggests that the current monitoring programs don't actually fully capture the range of the long fence melt in the beta delta. Yet the export constraints for the long fence melt protection are often prescribed based on only taking into account the incomplete monitoring data. And as a result, it is unclear whether such OMR restrictions actually have any meaningful population level or providing meaningful population level protections. Similarly, it is unclear if the mitigation that is being assigned to the projects is coming straight to the level of effect and we don't know the actual population. So like you're doing on these, you know, how do we formulate these constraints taking direct on the full population or actions that would have meaningful effect on the overall population. And then similarly for some other species, you will hear this tomorrow morning on the OMR presentation. Most of the OMR restrictions are based on how many fish we catch. Again, I think I already covered it pretty well. Those are, and we have thresholds listed in those permits that are static. There is obviously a moment in the right direction to make them more recognize, making them recognize the population on the given year. I think we need to continue to move in that direction. So again, taking an export cut based on how many fish we salvage, which doesn't reflect how much the population actually is for that year is not very helpful. I think Lenny covered this morning, we currently are dealing with a steel head issue where we, I think, exceeded the threshold of salvage allowed. They're doing everything they can to minimize that, but we don't even know what percent of steel head there that we are in training because there is no estimate out there on the actual population size of the state. The second topic I'd like you to weigh in on is the consideration of the scientific uncertainty in training these operational constraints. Based on how the uncertainty is accounted, there can be huge trade-offs with especially the water supply for other species, like the cold water species upstream or for the water supply for the people and farms, of course. Several constraints that are in the permit or current permits are based on statistical regressions with significant uncertainty without a clear understanding of mechanisms. So for example, I think this came up at the last meeting, I've covered this a little bit, the spring out, spring out of your requirement for long thin smelt. It is based on a statistically significant elevation between outflow and long thin smelt developments. However, it is unclear what is the process or mechanism. Is it hydrological? Is it physical? Is it biological? No one knows. It has a significant water cost and the question is how certain are we that maintaining the outflow ensures the process or the function that is affecting the evidence. Similarly, how certain are we that, for example, releasing stored water from the upstream reservoir is a superpolyx requirement for delta smelt is actually for very limited. So these uncertainties I think requires to answer meaningful off-ramps for these actions. You can weigh on those off-ramps versus off-ramps could be considered as part of these permit restrictions or mitigation requirements that would be helpful. Last item would be, you have heard a lot from the area, although it was very brief. It's this morning about the modeling and usually the effects analysis framework that we use in the system. One of the things is that we have developed a ton of tools on the isolating the effects of the projects or specifically understanding the effects of the projects, but we have very little understanding of what the other factors are. How do we discern the effects of those factors on those species? For example, we can do everything we can with the projects done by a restored that sufficient, especially when we know that there are water temperatures rising in the delta. Even in the wet test year, for example, in 2019, one of the hypothesis of delta smelt suffering is because of the water temperatures. So if you're focused exclusively on the export constraints, I don't know that we will get to the point where we need to park in the right actions. I would like you to weigh in on how do we discern those other factors, especially when they're rapidly changing like water temperatures or changes in the hydrology or food availability? I know it is a delicate balance to operate the water projects to go for Californians while protecting the species to the best of our ability. Finding this balance is even more difficult when other environmental conditions that water projects can control are changing simultaneously and rapidly. So I know we are doing our best. The projects are doing their best, but we are asking how to improve it. So I appreciate again your time and thoughtfulness on this. Thank you. Well, I think I really am lost in line, which means I'm keeping you off on the bus. I want to sort of talk about this from a slightly different direction. We've been talking a lot about trees and growths of trees, but I just want to come back and leave you with some thoughts about the forest, the whole problem that we face here. And I'm going to start with the fact that the Delta is supposed to be managed to meet co-equal goals, which I'm not sure is very good English, but that's the phrase they use, as identified in the Delta Format 2009. The Act directed the resource agencies to achieve the two co-equal goals of providing them all reliable water supply on you and protecting, restoring and enhancing the Delta ecosystem. An easy task. And the latter has been interpreted as enhancing the Delta ecosystem to focus on conserving and recovering two species listed under the federal California law. So I don't think there's been much concern in this about destroying the whole ecosystem. It's been very focused, because you can define that in all sorts of different ways. It's been very focused on, based on customs and law, some law protection. But I think that, you know, if you look at that requirement, you have to come to the conclusion that Delta, the management of the Delta or those managing the Delta have achieved neither of those two goals. So we haven't got a moral supply and we're not doing very well on these. And I'm not just blaming the Delta because I think the multiple decisions that have been mentioned earlier have a lot to do with that. But it is true. I mean, if you start thinking about it, and those two goals aren't bad for us all to remember, even if we're sort of more biased towards the human people. Because frankly, if LA is short of water, the Delta, who cares? That's where the population is. That's where the political power is. And we have to recognize that going in. We do have a bright population in California. Some of the other sources of water that we have from the Colorado and dropping. So this is, we need to look at this sort of in a high level way. And if you look back again, the populations of listed fish and the Delta are undoubtedly declining precipitously. We've apparently lost the Delta smelter, I don't know what it means to it. And everything is, and we spent billions of dollars trying to preserve them through the federal agencies and everything. Billions of dollars. And we've had no success on that. And California's water supply has been severely curtailed. And again, staggering costs to agriculture and urban, which is the urban population, because so much of the water that was going to them has been diverted for these fish or the listed fish or the fish protected by law. And at the same time, in habitat restoration efforts, control efforts, targeting invasive species, best practices for salmon, hatcheries and harvest management, plus other potential conservation actions that would be expected to help empanel fish have been largely ignored because they're viewed to be politically unpalatable, hard to fund, and too challenging to execute. And just as a sort of follow up thought process on that, it's much easier, it's been much easier for the regulators to take water from one group of people that's usually been urban in agriculture and give it to the environment, because it doesn't cost them any more. If they're going to restore the part of the ecosystem, they've got to come up with dollars. That's a totally different process. So this has been a very sort of strange political deal. And I think sort of most striking in this for me is not the failure, but the failure to acknowledge that we are failing. In my experience, if you don't admit failure, you don't really come back and concentrate on changing what you're doing, you keep doing what you're doing, you're being successful. To admit failure means you have to change, and we are not admitting that we are failing. In fact, I'm the first person to say the word failure here, but I was in business and I've had a lot of failures, I know what it's like. But they're usually a learning opportunity, sometimes unpleasant, sometimes more pleasant, but a learning opportunity. And I think we need to think the same way. So the sort of basic thing about management that one needs is sort of a clear management structure. There's some accountability and this is the basic element. If you're thinking even about your departments or something else, your organization, you need some structure and you need some accountability, and you probably need transparency. The thickets of institutional entities and their different prerogatives, US Fish and Wildlife Service does not have the same instructions as California Department of Fish and Wildlife. They have slightly different instructions which enables them to keep slightly different exhausts and staff slightly different organizations. And so even under the best of conditions, having a decent organization and decent structure is pretty tough. And I would just like to show you one picture, which I think illustrates the difference that we have in this. And this is one of my favorite pictures ever. It comes from a state publication. I didn't make it up. It would be too difficult for me to do it. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Now some of you have seen this, right? But you can take this back to your universities, take it to your business or any organizational thing and ask how you can control and staff and make something work where you have an organization chart of groups like this, right? And when you think about all the groups in this organization, they're all having regular meetings. They're having meetings to coordinate with other groups, right? In fact, sort of the hot air created by this is probably warming the Delta water. What I'm really saying to you is that I think that one of the things that you should be thinking about as you go through this process is how do we get some sort of semblance of order to this, right? And there's every one of these organizations has their own silo. None of these organizations want to lose any of their responsibility or people, right? None of them. And yet we're asking you to provide advice that can be properly and clearly executed when we're stuck with an organization like this. In fact, I was thinking of posting this on X or something and offering a small prize if anyone could do better. So I mean, it's a question. Who's accountable? Who's in charge? I don't know. I know there are a lot of people who are and a lot of people who have things. I mean, so what is the solution to this? I mean, part of it is do we have some very much sort of focused processes that they all go through? Do we try and get some quality control so that many of these agencies are forced to do good work, disciplined work with the right thing? I'm not really sure. But I think that this is part of what you, this is background anyway to all the things that you're going to be thinking about. And I'm just going to add one other thing that I think is important is that I'm a decision maker or I was a decision maker the moment I, and I never, I don't think I ever make a decision without thinking about the dollars, right? If I'm going to buy a cup of coffee, whether I go to Starbucks or take it from home, I'm thinking how much more Starbucks is going to cost me. Maybe you're all different from that. But that's what I do. And yet, on all these lots and lots of these discussions, there's no dollars, there's no cost benefit analysis. There's no analysis of what the action is costing. And I think that's extraordinary. And I don't see how that can go on. And so I think that that is something that really needs to be inserted into decision making with the Delta. I'm not saying the dollars are the only thing, right? There's all sorts of other things that goes into it. But we got to have some idea of the dollars. You know, when you take an action, where 600,000 acre feet goes out to the sea, and the value of that water with very little monitoring, if any, the hypothesis behind it is questionable. This is the X2 thing, right? And it costs you nearly half a billion dollars in one year. I think you should have thought of the dollars when we took the action. So those are my somewhat gloomy thoughts to me, if you will. Thank you. We will, I will put my thoughts on paper and give you references so you can see publications that our group has put out and dogs they put out. And anyone would be pleased to help you and their names and values will be on the website for that. So thank you all very much for your patience. Thank you, William. And thanks for those words of wisdom. And I certainly concur. We learned from our mistakes and I've also had an excellent education. So I think what we'll do is we have reached five o'clock and I know there will be a lot of questions. So what I mean to suggest is we stop the formal part of the meeting now and it will give the committee members an opportunity perhaps to catch the panelists on the way out. But I would like to thank all of you for coming and sharing your thoughts about how this effort of the National Academy can be most effective and we really appreciate that and we certainly appreciate any comments for those of you who didn't leave us with the PowerPoint. So if we could give all of the panelists a round of applause. So meeting adjourned. We'll start tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. with open middle river magnets.