Update on Small Tributaries Loading Strategy

1. Item #5 Update on Small Tributaries Loading Strategy Richard Looker, Chris Sommers, Arleen Feng, Jay Davis, and Lester McKee Sources Pathways and Loadings Workgroup December 8, 2008

2. Item #5 Impetus • Recommendation from the closed session of May 2008 Workgroup meeting • Consistent with development of other RMP strategies • Mercury strategy • Dioxin strategy • Modeling strategy • 07-11-08 meeting • 08-08-08 meeting

3. Item #5 Progress: 07-11-08 meeting highlights • Agreement to collaboratively write a long-term strategy document • Water Board agreed MRP monitoring requirements would be coordinated with STLS • An agreement on a high priority question: What is the relative contribution of each watershed to impairment in the Bay? • Acknowledgement of the need to understand hydrology, hydraulics, and landscape to guide monitoring and modeling efforts • Agreement that top priorities are: • Modeling at watershed and land use scale as it will be essential to answering management questions • Establishing long-term monitoring stations to support model development • A preliminary draft of a phased series of STLS development tasks, including information review for watershed prioritization

4. Item #5 08-08-08 Meeting Highlights • Water Board statement of information needs regarding small tributary loads • Plan for moving forward on several fronts

6. Item #5 RMP Strategy Format • Questions 2. Five-year Plan and Budget

7. Item #5 STLS Questions • Impairment: Which are the “high-leverage” small tributaries that contribute most to Bay impairment by pollutants of concern? • Loading: What are the average annual loads or concentrations of pollutants of concern from small tributaries to the Bay? • Trends: How are loads or concentrations of pollutants of concern from small tributaries changing on a decadal scale? • Support for Management Actions: What are the projected impacts of management actions on loads or concentrations of pollutants of concern from the high-leverage small tributaries and where should management actions be implemented in the region to have the greatest impact?

8. Five-year Plan and Budget: Example

9. Item #5 Desired Input • Comments on the existing questions • Are we missing anything important? • Comments on path forward

14. Item #5

15. Item #5 Comments received via email • Jim Kuwabara • Is there a reference that describes how the RMP quantifies “impairment” of an ecosystem. If so, it should be cited in Item 1 of this document • Strategies would be more easily evaluated if the existing problems and prioritization of those problems were defined • The assumption here [for this strategy] may be that decreased pollutant loading decreases impairment. That might be true for a limiting nutrient or bioavailable form of a toxicant • In the context of RMP goals how does load regulation and monitoring manage ecosystem impairment? For example, the load of dissolved methylmercury to the South Bay water column is some function of the repartitioning and transformation of mercury from the rivers and tributaries, along with benthic (internal) sources • Is the goal of reducing ecosystem impairment defined here as the management of riverine load, the total load, or how that total load finally gets transferred to sentinel species? That clarification would be useful