Conservation & Management

Elkhorn Slough RTEP | 2025-05-12

“Education, if it means anything, should not take people away from the land, but instill in them even more respect for it, because educated people are in a position to understand what is being lost. The future of the planet concerns all of us, and all of us should do what we can to protect it. As I told the foresters, and the women, you don’t need a diploma to plant a tree.”

Wangari Maathai | Unbowed (2008)

Conservation Strategies

  • Removal of dams / Flow Management in RABO habitat
  • Augmentation / Translocation
  • Watershed protection
  • Stream Habitat and Nonnative Species Management
  • Watershed Scale Management
  • Population and Habitat Monitoring
  • Improve gene flow & connectivity

Excavation and Bioturbation

Breeding shifted upstream…but

also observed 81 clutches in lamprey redds

Eggmasses in redds benefit from:

  • ⬇︎ depth without exposure to ⬆︎ velocity
  • ⬇ mortality due to stranding

“Animals don’t go extinct because someone shoots the last one, or a bulldozer scrapes away the last habitat. They go extinct because the web of relationships that sustain them unravels…”

Jim Lichatowitch | (2013)

Dam Removal

Population increased when dam was no longer operated.
Deconstruction did not have a long-lasting impact.

Dam Removal

And…

Control vs. Impact

Alternative hypothesis:

Intense recreation impairs survival of tadpoles, metamorphs

Release from stressor detectable with 3-yr lag

Augment threatened populations

  • Cresta Reach of NF Feather
  • PG&E license boating releases
  • Surveyed by Garcia and Associates (2002-2021)
  • Historically, > 30 egg masses / yr
  • Only 4 in 2016, 2 in 2017
  • Management changed, population not recovering
  • Introduced predators (bass, crayfish)

Augmentation

Head starting of tadpoles

  • pilot project 2017, expanded 2018-2020
  • rescue eggs from stranding & restore gene flow by sourcing eggs from a different reach
  • w/o intervention, 1 - 4% survival to metamorphosis
  • With baskets 13.6% of cohort released as metamorphs
  • large size because food supplementation, warm temp