Larry Brown (Former Employee)

Many advances in the field of bioassessment have focused on approaches for objectively selecting the pool of reference sites used to establish expectations for healthy waterbodies, but little emphasis has been placed on ways to evaluate the suitability of the reference-site pool for its intended applications (e.g., compliance assessment vs ambient monitoring). These evaluations are...

After more than 50 years of extensive water diversion for urban and agriculture use, a major settlement was reached among the U.S. Departments of the Interior and Commerce, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Friant Water Users Authority in an effort to restore the San Joaquin River. The settlement received Federal court approval in October 2006 and established the San Joaquin...

Predictive models have been used to determine fish species that occur less frequently than expected (decreasers) and those that occur more frequently than expected (increasers) in streams in the eastern U.S. Coupling life history traits with 51 decreaser and 38 increaser fish species provided the opportunity to examine potential mechanisms associated with predicted changes in fish...

We used boosted regression trees (BRT) to model stream biological condition as measured by benthic macroinvertebrate taxonomic completeness, the ratio of observed to expected (O/E) taxa. Models were developed with and without exclusion of rare taxa at a site. BRT models are robust, requiring few assumptions compared with traditional modeling techniques such as multiple linear regression...

The main purpose of this report is to provide an up-to-date assessment and conceptual model of factors affecting Delta Smelt (Hypomesus transpacificus) throughout its primarily annual life cycle and to demonstrate how this conceptual model can be used for scientific and management purposes. The Delta Smelt is a small estuarine fish that only occurs in the San Francisco Estuary. Once...

Tidal marsh restoration is an important management issue in the San Francisco Estuary (estuary). Restoration of large areas of tidal marsh is ongoing or planned in the lower estuary (up to 6,000 ha, Callaway et al. 2011). Large areas are proposed for restoration in the upper estuary under the Endangered Species Act biological opinions (3,237 ha) and the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (26...