Pete Kauhanen

The California Ocean Protection Council (OPC), in close partnership with the State Water Board, has recognized the importance of standard methods for trash monitoring and has funded this project. The Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (SCCWRP) and San Francisco Bay Estuary Institute (SFEI) have partnered up to test multiple trash monitoring methods with a goal of developing a library of methods with known levels of precision, accuracy, and cross-comparability of results, and linking these methods to specific management questions.

Satellite remote sensing will aid the State of California in assessing cyanobacterial bloom threats to animal and human health across the state’s numerous large lakes. 

Smoking has long been known to lead to tobacco-related diseases and harmful health outcomes, including heightened risk of cancer, stroke, and heart disease. Not only is tobacco harmful to individual health outcomes, but it also harmful to the environment. Cigarette butts are the most common form of litter and an estimated 4.5 trillion butts are improperly discarded every year worldwide. Cigarette butts contain at least 4,000 chemicals, and about 50 of these are carcinogenic.

SFEI is coordinating the mapping for two inventories of surface waters, wetlands and other aquatic resources in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and along California’s coast. Both efforts will apply the California Aquatic Resource Inventory (CARI) standardized mapping methods and the final map will be integrated into EcoAtlas and made publicly available.

DARI is the Delta Aquatic Resources Inventory of surface waters, wetlands and other aquatic resources in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Delta). The goal of the DARI project is to develop a geospatial inventory of aquatic resources that will be used as a common base map for the Delta. A similar mapping approach used to create the California Aquatic Resource Inventory (CARI) will be applied to provide a map of the aquatic resources and their associated attributes.

The Coyote Creek Native Ecosystem Enhancement Tool (CCNEET, neet. ecoatlas.org) is an online decision-support tool to identify opportunities to improve ecological conditions. CCNEET was inspired by the need for a watershed approach to environmental resource management. Available ecological and environmental information is synthesized by objectives, management questions, and enhancement actions to identify and justify potential habitat improvements along the creek corridor. The overarching goal of CCNEET is to help coordinate habitat conservation and enhancement along so that multiple projects and limited funding can result in meaningful ecological improvement.

As sea levels rise and extreme storms become more frequent, communities are developing climate adaptation plans to protect housing, jobs, ecosystems, and infrastructure from flooding. However, these plans often neglect an important potential flood hazard – emergent groundwater. Shallow groundwater in coastal communities will rise as sea levels rise, increasing the risk of flooding communities from below. The threat of rising groundwater levels was identified by the Coastal Hazards Adaptation and Resiliency Group as a critical data gap in regional climate resilience planning.

Tools for the creation of a resilient Silicon Valley ecosystem.

The Riparian Zone Estimator Tool (RipZET) is a decision support tool developed by the San Francisco Estuary Institute and Aquatic Science Center for the California Riparian Habitat Joint Venture and the California Water Resources Control Board to assist in the visualization and characterization of riparian areas in the watershed context.

The South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project is the largest tidal wetland restoration project on the West Coast. When complete, the project will restore 15,100 acres of industrial salt ponds to a rich mosaic of tidal wetlands and other habitats.

SFEI is developing an online interactive map to support regional planning and assessment given accelerated sea level rise around the Bay.

The Montezuma wetland restoration project is returning ~2,000 acres of diked baylands to tidal, seasonal, and managed wetlands in an eastern portion of Suisun Bay near the town of Collinsville, California in Solano County.

As a continuation of our collaboration with BCDC and the Adapting to Rising Tides (ART) team, the technical team at SFEI has developed a new version of the sea-level rise visualization tool which focuses on East Contra Costa and the Delta. The East Contra Costa Shoreline Flood Explorer incorporates regionally specific data that takes into account inundation and flooding information as a product of riverine flooding and sea-level rise.  The map visualizes these data in conjunction with storm events and makes it available to the public, businesses, and policymakers so that they can assess and prepare for potential impacts to communities.

SFEI’s Environmental Informatics team has designed and developed the Bay Area Flood Explorer for the Bay Conservation and Development Commission's (BCDC) Adapting to Rising Tides (ART) program. The project is designed to highlight threats posed by sea level rise. The map displays sea-level-rise data created by AECOM, which was developed with support from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the Bay Area Toll Authority, and the greenhouse gas reduction funds.

SFEI’s Wetland Science Focus Area’s Director, Josh Collins, is a leader in the coordination of statewide science advisory teams and acquiring funding to develop monitoring and assessment tools that support the State’s Wetland and Riparian Area Protection Policy.

The San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) is one of California’s premier aquatic and ecosystem science institutes. Our mission: provide scientific support and tools for decision- making and communication through collaborative efforts. We provide independent science to assess and improve the health of the waters, wetlands, wildlife and landscapes of San Francisco Bay, the California Delta and beyond. 

An accurate basemap is fundamental to watershed planning and assessments. The California Aquatic Resources Inventory, or CARI, offers such a basemap for aquatic resource identification and classification. But to keep it current and enhance its details, SFEI-ASC must leverage local knowledge. The new CARI Editor promotes regional stewardship and allows users to submit updates, deletions or new features for streams and wetlands.

The Santa Rosa Plain WRAMP project demonstrated the use of the State’s standardized monitoring and assessment tools in a North Coast watershed setting and described how the results can support watershed based management and planning decisions to protect and manage the state’s wetlands at a landscape scale. 

This project reconstructs the historical hydrology and ecology of the Petaluma River watershed prior to major Euro-American modification. It demonstrates the efficacy of historical hydrology and ecology in identifying and prioritizing multi-benefit restoration opportunities.

The Adapting to Rising Tides program of the SF Bay Conservation & Development Commission (ART BCDC), Delta Stewardship Council (DSC) and the San Francisco Estuary Institute / Aquatic Science Center (SFEI) are unveiling the East Contra Costa Shoreline Flood Explorer. SFEI developed the new explorer as a complementary tool to the Bay Shoreline Flood Explorer to allow government organizations and communities in East Contra Costa County to access interactive online maps of local flood risks due to rising sea levels and storm events. These tools help to both highlight what our region could look like without intervention, and to encourage local and regional adaptive plans to minimize flood risks.