| Bay-Delta
Working Group
The Bay-Delta Working Group (BDWG), a collaboration between the Environmental Defense Fund, The Bay Institute of San Francisco, and CSRD, was formed to continue the work initiated during two workshops focusing on ecological indicators in the San Francisco Bay-Delta-River system. These two workshops, funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency and the CalFed Bay-Delta Program (the CalFed Program), were held in October 1995 and January 1996 to develop (i) a conceptual framework for the core structural and functional attributes of the San Francisco Bay-Delta-River system classified according to its key landscape, zonal and habitat scales, and (ii) a provisional list of ecological indicators by structure, function and scale for the system. Workshop findings were published in the June 1996 report, Restoration of the San Francisco Bay-Delta-River System: Choosing Indicators of Ecological Integrity (prepared by Levy, Young, Fujita and Alevizon on behalf of the Environmental Defense Fund, The Bay Institute of San Francisco, and the UC Berkeley Center for Sustainable Resource Development). The report defined ecological integrity in an operational way and made an initial identification of appropriate indicators for measuring that integrity. Its conclusions have been used by the CalFed Program in its deliberations and may help to focus CalFed’s adaptive management plans. The BDWG provided the CalFed Program with a detailed project proposal to refine the workshop findings. The goal of the proposed project was to build upon the workshops and other related efforts to provide the CalFed Program, by January of 1997, a refined suite of ecological indicators of manageable size that would have broad support from the scientific community and be of immediate practical use to environmental planners and resource managers working at the scale of the larger ecological units (biomes/landscape) that comprise this system. Proposals Developing a Refined List of Ecological Indicators for the Bay-Delta System |