Healthy watersheds support wildlife, recreation, and clean water for communities across California. From a public-health standpoint, we need to know if a river or stream is safe to swim or fish in. From the lens of wildlife support, in addition to being clean, a healthy aquatic habitat must sustain a whole food web. Knowing a stream’s health also indicates how resilient it is to adversities such as wildfires, land-use changes and agricultural runoff. … Now, researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have been awarded a $2.2 million grant from the program for a project based on a rising and effective monitoring tool: environmental DNA (eDNA). With the CDFW grant funding, UC Santa Cruz researchers will lead a project to extend their genomics-based biodiversity-monitoring platform to create an eDNA-based stream-health index. 

Other ecosystem news:

• ABC10 (Sacramento, Calif.): Beaver dam spotted along Dry Creek in Modesto highlights role of local wildlife in ecosystem
• Audubon: Blog: Planting native trees in the Colorado River Delta is bringing breeding birds back