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Fish Swim Superhighway

Desk-bound researchers and decisionmakers can now find exactly where smelt, salmon, striped bass and over 40 other fish species have been in the Estuary's rivers and channels over the past few days without ever climbing into a boat. With just a few computer key strokes onto the information superhighway and the home page of Cal Fish & Game's Bay Delta & Special Water Projects Division they can click on items such as the recent daily average catch of different fish species per acre-foot at nine sampling sites throughout the Estuary.

"We're collecting fishery data out in the field and getting it to the world in one day," says Cal Fish & Game's Chuck Armor, who helped design the new "real-time monitoring" system. Real-time refers to what's actually happening in the water at any given time. The hope is that if Bay-Delta managers know within a matter of hours that a school of salmon was reported headed for the water export pumps (which gobble fish), they can change or temporarily halt pumping accordingly.

Armor says as soon as the daily field reports come in, they're entered in the computer, summarized and faxed to the new CALFED Operations Group (set up under the December 15 Bay-Delta accord). The summaries and information on emerging trends are then placed on the home page. Other newly accessible data include bar charts showing the last seven days' catch for salmon and smelt, and thus when fish pulses come and go, and a running total of how many "T&Es" have been picked up to date. T&Es are government shorthand for threatened and endangered species, says Armor, of which only a certain amount can be caught for scientific and management purposes. Armor says the speed at which they now get this particular information not only helps them adjust T&E takes immediately if they overstep their limit, but also helps watchdogs make sure the researchers are complying.

The new real-time data are already showing the effects of an unusually wet winter - the Delta smelt are hanging out much further downstream, and splittail (a species proposed for a T&E;type listing) are thriving in the Southern Delta. By next year, Armor says the monitoring system could be sophisticated enough to tell people not only where the fish are in the Estuary, but also what the freshwater flows were at the time.

Contact: Chuck Armor (209)948-7800 or http://www.delta.dfg.ca.gov

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