Carson Jeffres

Speaker

UC Davis

Carson Jeffres, Researcher, Center for Watershed Sciences, UC Davis

Carson Jeffres' research interest is how juvenile salmonids utilize and benefit from restored habitats. His research focuses on how physical processes within a watershed create ecologically important conditions favorable to a productive food web and include sampling water quality, hydrologic conditions, primary producers (plants), invertebrates, and fish. This whole system approach has been valuable in determining limiting factors and prioritizing restoration actions for the recovery of threatened salmonid populations.

He is currently directing the Nigiri project and expanding to other floodplain systems in Northern California to gain a better understanding of how these unique environments function and how best to protect and restore them.

Positions and Roles:

Administration
Field and Lab Director
Research Staff

Research Interests:

Fish Ecology

Content by Carson Jeffres

Cosumnes

Time

2:15 - 3:45

Track

Central Valley

Small enough to be manageable, but large enough to be meaningful best describes the thirty-plus years of scientific insights that have emerged from the ecosystem science conducted along the lower Cosumnes River. In partnership with a consortium of agencies and non-governmental organization that serve as the land owners and land managers within the Cosumnes River Preserve, scientists have participated in a long-running, multi-disciplinary endeavor to better understand the natural flow regime, floodplain dynamics, and process-based restoration as it benefits riparian forests and wildlife, ephemeral aquatic ecosystems, and other components of a tightly coupled hydrological system that benefits from access to floodplains. Singularly, it has been the experimental nature of levee failures, levee breaches, and levee setbacks along the lower Cosumnes River corridor that have provided three decades of insights about natural flood frequencies, floodplain inundation, geomorphic dynamism, hydrochorous dispersal and establishment, carbon sequestration, groundwater recharge, freshwater primary productivity, food web structure and dynamics, native fish and bird population recovery, as well as coupled natural-human systems. These insights, showing that dynamic fluvial processes are necessary to create and maintain floodplain riparian ecosystems, now serve as the basis for many restoration efforts throughout California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River watershed and beyond.

Organizer

Judah Grossman

Ballroom A

Speakers