UC Berkeley's Freshwater Research Group
Congrats to Emily Chen, who delivered her finishing talk today to a packed audience! Her talk covered an overview of the different elements of her dissertation research, including dimensions focused on all four runs of Chinook in California’s Central Valley. Emily is on track to finish this summer and will then begin a postdoc exploring factors influencing the dynamics of Chinook salmon in the Klamath Basin. (PC: Rachael Ryan)
FishBio covered our recent work exploring the Central Valley hatchery steelhead portfolio, led by former student Eric Huber (now with the US Fish & Wildlife Service) and including contributions from Rachael Ryan and Stephanie along with our partners with UC Davis and NOAA-Fisheries. Similar to our earlier work with hatchery Chinook (Huber and Carlson 2015), we found a simplification of the Central Valley steelhead hatchery portfolio through time. You can find the blog post here: https://fishbio.com/enhancing-diversity-to-promote-steelhead-resilience/
Huge congratulations to Amy Fingerle on her new California Sea Grant Graduate Student Fellowship! You can learn more about this important collaboration and research here: “Collaborative Conservation of Ishyâat in a Spring-Run Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) Stronghold“.
A new PNAS study led by ESPM professor Albert Ruhi and grad student Kyle Leathers suggests that drought may reshape California’s mountain waterways—and the ecosystems that depend on them—by the end of the century. Read more in this Berkeley News press release.
Stephanie and Gabe Rossi joined Curtis Knight, the Executive Director of California Trout, on CalTrout’s “Fish Water People” podcast for a fun and rambling conversation about the importance of science in salmon recovery efforts. You can listen to the full episode here: https://caltrout.org/podcast
Yes it does! Read our recent publication in the North American Journal of Fisheries Management led by Gabe Rossi: Flow augmentation from off-channel storage improves salmonid habitat and survival.
The Collaboratory for Equity in Water Allocations (COEQWAL) project was launched in the fall. To learn more about the project, visit coeqwal.berkeley.edu and read this Q+A article with Maven’s Notebook journalist Janet Byron.
A conversation with Stephanie was recently featured by the Wild Salmon Center, where Stephanie currently serves on the Science Advisory Board. Through the conversation, Stephanie highlights the importance of habitat mosaics, including “stop over” sites, for supporting a diversity of salmon migratory tactics and life histories. You can find the full conversation here!
Great job Jessie Moravek on publishing the paper ‘Restored off-channel pond habitats create thermal regime diversity and refuges within a Mediterranean-climate watershed‘ in Restoration Ecology! Check it out if you’re interested in water and air temperature modeling — you can access the paper here.
Rausser College faculty are shaping the next era of wildlife and conservation research.