Size-conditional smolting and the response of Carmel River steelhead to two decades of conservation efforts
Fig 2
The Carmel River system showing passable dams and sites of juvenile sampling.
The Monterey Peninsula Water Management District estimated juvenile abundance and size distributions at the 9 sites from 1996 to present. Counts of migratory adults returning from the ocean to spawn were made at a fish ladder on San Clemente Dam. In summer, large sections of the river between the Garland site and the ocean were routinely dewatered by groundwater extraction; juvenile fish rescued from these sections were either transferred to an off-channel rearing facility (“captively reared”) or simply moved to another part of the river with perennial surface flows (“translocated”).