Carson Jeffres, field and laboratory director for the UC Davis Center for Watershed Science, will discuss recent research on use of harvested rice fields as potential salmon nurseries. Frequently inundated large floodplains are functionally extinct in the Central Valley; many of the ecological benefits have been lost to riverine species. Since 2012 Jeffres has been studying whether flooded post-harvest rice fields can act as a surrogate for this lost habitat. Jeffres found that juvenile Chinook salmon on flooded rice fields grow at some of the fastest freshwater growth rates (.95mm/day) of juvenile salmon ever found in California. This talk will focus on what makes this surrogate floodplain productive and how inter-annual variation in weather dictates when and where conditions are suitable for the rearing juvenile Chinook salmon.
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