For the year ahead the Program will continue with both short and long-term monitoring projects. Long-term monitoring projects include,
- outmigrant monitoring (tracking the number and size of young fish heading out to sea)
- adult escapement monitoring (tracking the number and size of adult fish returning from the sea).
Shorter duration studies to examine the flow changes include;
- acoustic monitoring of rock movement,
- tracking the development of periphyton (algae) on newly inundated floodplains,
- and investigating the benthic macroinvertebrate (fish food) response to the flows.
Also, this year we will wrap up a review of our long-term monitoring and modeling efforts and bring recommendations forward on how to better measure our progress.
Through this year we will complete the adult Chinook limiting factors analysis, which should give us insights regarding what factors are limiting the return of adult Chinook salmon along with gaming the associated scenarios to help us understand how to improve the use of our tools. Lastly, we will continue to support the development of a new approach to long-term operations of the Trinity River Division, which should give us better protection of river temperatures in drought years and give us more flexibility with managing environmental flows.
Publications to look out for in 2026
- Lindke, K. T., Video monitoring of fish passage at Willow Creek weir: feasibility of validating mark-recapture run size estimates. [Final edits]
- Bridegum, J., D. Goodman, T. Daley, R. Smit, J. Boyce, O. Black, J. Alvarez, and K. De Juilio. The Effects of Restoration Actions on Juvenile Salmonid Rearing Habitat in the Trinity River Restoration Reach at an Index Streamflow, 2009 to 2017. [Final edits]
- Martel, C. J. Alvare, Z. Reinstein, and K. T. Lindke, Fall Chinook Redd Environmental Conditions and Egg Survival to Emergence in the Trinity River. [Peer Review]
- Gaeuman, D., K. De Juilio, and C. Laskodi. Efficacy of two-dimensional modeling for assessing spatial variability in stream temperatures. [Peer Review]