Recent Efforts to Monitor Anadromous 'Oncorhynchus' Species in the California Coastal Region: A Compilation of Metadata Technical memo

摘要

In the coastal zone of California, recent efforts to monitor salmon and steelhead populations are insufficient for assessing extinction risk, which by law must be done at the scale of entire ESUs (Evolutionarily Significant Units). Recent efforts tend to be conducted at a smaller scale, and are not useful for assessing risk because (1) they are not co-ordinated with one another, and (2) they are designed for other purposes. To assess risk, it is necessary to make and implement a monitoring plan; and to make a plan, it is useful to have an understanding of where these recent efforts are taking place, what data they are collecting, and why. Therefore, we collected this information. We identified recent monitoring efforts, and collected descriptive information (metadata) for 270 monitoring efforts, where a unit 'effort' is defined as a data-collection effort conducted on a particular ESU by a particular organization using a consistent study design for each life stage monitored. As expected, recent monitoring efforts are quite diverse in design and intent. Notably, geographic consistency is quite low-some basins get monitored intensively, whereas for many others data gets collected sporadically (opportunistically) or not at all. Randomized-sampling-necessary for statistical inference-was popular at the reach scale (i.e., habitat units within reaches), but not at the basin scale (i.e., reaches within basins). Study designs tended to fall into two categories-'snapshots' in which a large number of basins are concurrently monitored for 1 or 2 years (usually with low-density, non-random sampling within basins); and 'time-series' in which a basin is chosen for logistical reasons or to address a specific management concern, and then monitored over the long term. Overall, the diversity of sampling designs and field methods is likely problematic for ESU-scale risk assessment. We provide a list of the 270 efforts, and maps of where they are being conducted, as a resource for stakeholders interested in recent efforts to monitor salmon and steelhead in the coastal zone.