“Innovative Management for Central Valley Native Fish.” California Trout, 13 Dec. 2021, https://caltrout.org/news/innovative-management-for-central-valley-native-fish
Innovative management for central valley native fish has been studied in late 2021 into 2022, only 5% of central valley for flood plains remain intact and three or four native chinook salmon runs are endangered or threatened. In the past starving salmon and smelt populations of today were thriving in the central valley where every part of the central valley was essentially a floodplain. The studies done this year we’re on chinook salmon that were placed in floodplains canals and rivers. After two weeks The floodplain salmon is twice the size or even three times the size as the canal and river salmon. Therefore it is clear that the flood plains are a much healthier environment than the canal or rivers. Therefore the habitat restoration and the Sacramento Valley is very necessary. Strategies include providing access to foraging and rearing habitat on the floodplains. And exporting the productivity to inundated floodplains on the dry side. projects such as the Nguri project are doing just that with success.
It is incredible that the entire central valley used to be a floodplain, and rather depressing that so much of it is lost 95% essentially. I wonder how efficient these strategies are in terms of saving water, and if it’s really worth it for the species to be saved, and it is not necessarily saving the species either but rather helping their species become more healthy and growing efficiently. I think there needs to be more done in order to study the floodplains and the possibility of this management for central valley fish. At the end of the day restoring habitats to the way they used to be, when the fish were thriving in the first place is one of the best strategies in my opinion, I think altering the habitats and trying to create new habitats is a dangerous game to play and therefore restoring floodplain saw they were 100 years ago is not a bad idea at all.
I thought this article was very interesting because I never knew that the entire central valley in California used to be a floodplain. Seeing how its absence is affecting the lives of the floodplain salmon, do you think the fully restoring floodplains will be the answer to saving these creatures? Or is there a better alternative?
Thanks for the comment, it is somewhat unrealistic to fully restore the entire floodplain, the amount of water we would need is really large, and therefore we are at a point where partial restoration is the best option. Outside of restoration there really isn’t a better way to help these species survive.
This is an interesting article, and I also had no idea that the entire central valley was a floodplain at one point. However, I am not sure that restoring the floodplains is the best way to allocate our money, as it could be spent on other more pressing issues. What do you think we should be focusing our money on?
Thanks for the comment, to be honest restoring these plains is in my opinion a good way to spend money as a state. Not only is it restoring keystone species, but there are other positives when it comes to restoring ecosystems, whether it be increasing biodiversity of an area, helping the area with carbon sequestration, and other positives.