As modern day California was developed, the Central Valley’s waterways were re-engineered and channelized to control the floods and divert water for human uses. Today, 95% of the Central Valley’s historical floodplains are cut off from the river by levees, preventing chinook salmon and other native species from accessing the abundant food resources of floodplains.At the 2021 Bay-Delta Science Conference, Jacob Montgomery, Central Valley Project Manager for CalTrout, presented a potential new management strategy for managing Central Valley chinook salmon.
CalTrout has developed several programs to reconnect salmon populations with floodplains. For the last decade, CalTrout’s wet-side programs have been working in the Yolo and Sutter Bypasses, which still flood occasionally and are accessible to fish. The new programs are called ‘dry side’ programs, which are conservation strategies to include all the flooded acreage existing outside the levee boundaries that still active floodplains but that fish don’t have access to.
Read more about our programs https://mavensnotebook.com/2021/11/10/bay-delta-science-conference-managed-floodplain-fish-food-bringing-dry-side-food-webs-to-wet-side-fish
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