floodplains Archives ~ MAVEN'S NOTEBOOK

BAY DELTA SCIENCE CONFERENCE: Dark Carbon and a Return to Abundance: How Detrital Floodplain Food Webs Can Help Recover Endangered Fish

March 7, 2019 Maven Science Features

In the pre-development Central Valley, winter-spring flooding once created a vast mosaic of productive wetland habitats that teemed with fish and wildlife. A major driver of this wildlife abundance was terrestrial carbon made available to aquatic food webs when floodplains were inundated. Nineteenth and twentieth-century investments in drainage and a network of dams, canals, and levees transformed the Central Valley’s […]

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BROWN BAG SEMINAR: California floodplains and the fish that use them

June 18, 2018 Maven Science Features

How restoring functional flows to floodplains could help restore native fish Two centuries ago, the floor of the Central Valley was largely a marshy wetland. In the springtime, the snowpack would melt, swelling the rivers beyond their banks and casting the young fish out onto the floodplains. There they would stay for months, fattening up on the abundant zooplankton and […]

Farms as floodplains: A summary after five years of experimental flooding of agricultural land

August 25, 2016 Maven Best of the Notebook, Conferences and Seminars, Science Features

Studies show the rice-field fish are larger, healthier and more robust than those in the river at the same age One of the recent and notable success stories for California has been the ongoing studies in the Yolo Bypass to use flooded rice fields as habitat for young migrating salmon. The results from the five years of study show the […]

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3 comments Brown Bag Seminar, endangered species, floodplains, salmon, Yolo Bypass