R23AC00196

1. Award Purpose - Reclamation operates and maintains the Central Valley Project (CVP) for the purposes of navigation and flood control, fish and wildlife mitigation, protection, restoration, and enhancement, agricultural and municipal and industrial water supply, power generation, and recreation. Measuring the response of the ecosystem, including native fish populations and their food resources (i.e., lower trophic food resources, phytoplankton) in response to the operation of the CVP can assist in meeting these purposes. Monitoring and science objectives can be organized into two categories: (i) real-time operations and (ii) status and trend monitoring.

2. Activities to be Performed - Under this new 2.5-year agreement, Reclamation funding will be used to continue monitoring focused on documenting the abundance and distribution of fish assemblages and the aquatic invertebrate community of the Bay-Delta. This agreement will continue to include that CDFW work closely with an external monitoring design expert and a 6-agency governance group consisting of Reclamation, DWR, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, CDFW, National Marine Fisheries Service, and the State Water Resources Control Board to develop and implement an improved monitoring design for estimating fish abundance and distribution during the winter-spring and summer-fall periods. Another initiative continued under this agreement will be to investigate the use of new imaging technology for identifying and enumerating zooplankton samples. Funds will also be used for program management, data management, and CDFW participation in data analyses. Data analyses are either as identified in the scope of work or will be developed collaboratively between CDFW and Reclamation. The work to be carried out under this agreement is organized into 11 tasks, some of which include two or more sub-tasks. One task (Task 10) is included to ease tracking of supply purchases and does not have a labor cost associated with it. The table below summarizes these tasks and the principal deliverables each task provides.

3. Expected Deliverable or Outcome - The work to be performed under this agreement may be divided into the following general categories: (i) real-time operations monitoring, (ii) secondary productivity (zooplankton), (iii) fish and macro-invertebrate assemblages, (iv) administration and fleet support.

4. Intended Beneficiary(ies) - This agreement will benefit the public by providing fisheries and aquatic resources data that are used to assess the status of the ecosystem and document trends, structured decision-making support, and data stewardship. These data are also used for planning efforts and as system-level baseline data for adaptive management experiments and for restoration actions focused on the recovery of fish populations listed under the Endangered Species Act. Results of data analyses will also be available for operational and management decisions affecting the Central Valley Project.

5. Subrecipient Activities - There are no subrecipient activities for this agreement.

California Department Of Fish & Wildlife

15.512 - Central Valley Improvement Act, Title XXXIV

USBR California-Great Basin Region, Sacramento CA (MP) [DOI - USBR]

California United States

State-Wide

R-R-CGB-23-011

Amendment Since initial award the End Date has been extended from 10/31/25 to 06/30/26 and the total obligations have increased 403% from $5,510,000 to $27,721,146.