Juvenile Monitoring and Sampling Metadata

SacPAS Process

SacPAS downloads the datasets from their various online sources and imports them into the SacPAS database. Updates are acquired as they become available: DJFMP sampling (beach seines and trawls) are updated daily, Red Bluff Diversion Dam passage estimates are updated every 2 weeks, and individual rotary screw traps (RSTs) are updated daily to every 2 weeks.

Data for the Delta Juvenile Fish Monitoring Program (DJFMP) comes from the official EDI source and thereafter the USFWS webservice to the present. Data from the webservice is preliminary and could change as data is revised and finalized.

For products that display Water Temperature and Flow associated with juvenile monitoring locations: Bend Bridge (BND), Colousa (COL), Wilkins Slough (WLK), Hood (SRH), Freeport (FPT), and Vernalis (VNS) are courtesty of CDEC.

Frank Fisher length-at-date (LAD) models for Sacramento River and modified for the Delta surveys provided to SacPAS as a courtesy by DWR.

Site Specific Notes

Red Bluff Diversion Dam

Data Courtesy of USFWS, Red Bluff Fish & Wildlife Office. Updates made publicly available weekly.

Methods

Brood Years 2004-2019 and All Passage Estimates accessed prior to 2025-10-31

Historically, the USFWS, Red Bluff Fish & Wildlife Office used a Normal Linear Model to predict the daily combined capture efficiency of four 8’ diameter rotary screw traps (RSTs) under an assumption of homogenous capture efficiencies among RSTs. Parametric 90% confidence intervals from Student’s t-distribution were calculated.

Brood Years 2020 to the present

The USFWS, Red Bluff Fish & Wildlife Office developed a new method, a set of five Binomial Generalized Linear Models, to predict the daily capture efficiencies of four 5’ and one 8’ diameter RSTs individually for brood years 2020–present and accommodates heterogenous capture efficiencies in sampling with any number of 5’ and 8’ diameter RSTs. Non-parametric 95% CI’s from empirical bootstrap distributions are calculated.

The history of juvenile monitoring at Red Bluff and the development of the new method is documented in the annual report (Poytress and McCraney 2025).

Poytress, W.R and W.T. McCraney. 2025. 2022 & 2023 Red Bluff Diversion Dam Rotary Trap Juvenile Anadromous Fish Abundance Estimates. Report of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Sacramento, CA. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.29983.47527.

Data

Brood Years 2004-2019 and All Passage Estimates accessed prior to 2025-10-31

• USFWS Data Note from Primary Source PDFs

  Preliminary estimates of passage by brood-year (BY) and run for unmarked juvenile Chinook salmon and steelhead trout captured by rotary-screw traps at Red Bluff Diversion Dam (RK391), Sacramento River, CA.
  
  Biweekly totals may be greater than the sum of the daily estimates presented in this table if sampling was not conducted on each day of the biweekly period. A dash (-) denotes those dates. To estimate daily passage for days that were not sampled, we impute missed sample days with the weekly mean value of days sampled within the week."

• 2011-01-01 to 2022-02-25: Data extracted from primary source USFWS distributed PDFs did not capture published values for “Biweekly Total”. Columbia Basin Research (CBR) calculated the value from the published values for Lower and Upper 90% CI. The CBR calculated value for Biweekly Total was not rounded.
• 2013-10-01 to 2013-10-17: Winter Chinook Salmon passage value interpolated using a monthly mean for the period due to government shutdown.
• Since October 2017, length-at-date criteria used for field run assignment have been validated using genetic analyses. Passage estimates are and have been genetically-corrected for winter and spring Chinook between October 16 and December 1 of each year. Real-time estimates displayed during this period were preliminary and subject to revisions, typically in December or January of each year.
• 2020-03-25 to 2020-06-30. The rotary-trapping/juvenile fish monitoring operations at the Red Bluff Diversion Dam were suspended to protect employee health and safety resulting from the Coronavirus/COVID-19 global pandemic.

Brood Years 2020 to present

• 2025-10-31: Brood years 2020-2024 fully revised using new Binomial Generalized Linear Models method and non-parametric 95% CI’s from empirical bootstrap distributions were calculated.
  Prior to 2025-10-31, all previously accessed passage estimates for BY2020-BY2024 should be considered obsolete.
• Passage estimates are and have been genetically-corrected for winter and spring Chinook between October 16 and December 1 of each year since 2017. Real-time estimates displayed during this period are preliminary and subject to revisions, typically in December or January of each year.

Sacramento Trawls, Sacramento Beach Seines, Chipps Island Trawls, and Mossdale Trawls

Data Courtesy of USFWS, Lodi and EDI Data Portal. Updates made publicly available approximately every day.

• 20 March 2020: Sampling at Sacramento Beach Seines and Mossdale Trawls concluded early for water year 2020; sampling at the sites deemed "non-essential" during COVID-19 response.
• 2 March 2017: The method to calculate the number of samples/tows for Chipps Island was corrected.
• 16 February 2017: An oversight related to the inclusion of marked fish in the reporting of "unmarked" fish was addressed.

Information and Data Sources

• Central Valley Monitoring, CalFish
  • Lower American River RST Monitoring
  • Lower Feather River RST Monitoring
  • Lower Sacramento River RST Monitoring
  • Middle Sacramento River Salmon and Steelhead Monitoring
    • Tisdale Weir
    • Knights Landing RST
  • San Joaquin River Mossdale Kodiak Trawl
  • Stanislaus River (Caswell) RST Monitoring
• Delta Juvenile Fish Monitoring Program
  • Delta Juvenile Fish Monitoring Program (DJFMP), Interagency Ecological Program (IEP) Monitoring Programs
  • Delta Juvenile Fish Monitoring Program, Interagency Ecological Program: Over four decades of juvenile fish monitoring data from the San Francisco Estuary, collected by the Delta Juvenile Fish Monitoring Program for the finalized dataset
  • Delta Juvenile Fish Monitoring Program, USFWS
• Juvenile salmonid rotary screw trap data from Battle and Clear Creeks, Shasta and Tehama Counties, California EDI Data Portal
• Monitoring juvenile Chinook salmon outmigration using rotary screw traps on the Sacramento River at Knights Landing EDI Data Portal
• Red Bluff Diversion Dam Fish Monitoring, USFWS

Metadata Documents from Primary Sources

• EDI Data Portal, click to package summary and then metadata
  • Delta Juvenile Fish Monitoring Program
  • Juvenile salmonid rotary screw trap data from Battle and Clear Creeks, Shasta and Tehama Counties, California
  • Monitoring juvenile Chinook salmon outmigration using rotary screw traps on the Sacramento River at Knights Landing