CalTrout’s science-based approach to grow fish food on floodplains, as part of our Integrate Wild Fish and Working Landscapes initiative, is featured in a new paper in the publication Ecosphere by Ecology Society of America. The article, Understanding community assembly rules in managed floodplain food webs, was authored by members of UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences and California Trout. In summary, it demonstrated that long duration inundation in all types of off-channel floodplain habitat in the Central Valley (bypasses, rice fields, wetlands, flooded ground from levee breaches) consistently results in predictable and rapid set-up of abundant zooplankton assemblages that are high quality forage for native fish species.
This study is the first to determine community assembly rules in floodplain-river ecosystems that will assist managers in providing floodplain food-web benefits to native fish and wildlife species at the landscape scale.
