Flooded rice fields appear capable of serving as substitutes for now-depleted wetlands and helping California’s Chinook salmon population recover, researchers have concluded.<\/p>\n
In a report submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the researchers said salmon raised in replicated rice fields near Sacramento as part of their experiments were the fattest and fastest-growing salmon ever documented in freshwater in the state.<\/p>\n
“We’re finding that land managers and regulatory agencies can use these agricultural fields to mimic natural processes,” study co-author Carson Jeffries, field and laboratory director of the University of California, Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences, said in a news release on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The state Department of Water Resources and a nonprofit called California Trout also participated in the report, which is dated Oct. 1.<\/p>\n
Juvenile Chinook salmon in California’s Central Valley have traditionally been reared in wetlands, where they fatten up before heading off to the ocean. A salmon’s size is an indicator of its likelihood of returning to spawn as an adult, according to the study.<\/p>\n
The goal of the researchers’ experiment was to determine whether rice fields flooded between harvests could stand in for the wetlands that once filled the area.<\/p>\n
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