fisheries

In California’s Sacramento Valley, farms and cities will receive 100 percent of their contracted federal water this year, but farmers farther west in the San Joaquin Valley will only see 5 percent of their promised water, reports the Los Angeles Times.

Accurate data on the number of fish hauled aboard fishing ships is vital for management of fish stocks, writes former U.S. senator Slade Gorton, in criticizing the approach now used by the government - putting observers on a limited number of boats.

The West coast summer sardine population is expected to fall 93 percent from to its 2007 peak, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Only 3 percent of juvenile Chinook salmon survived the 2015 spawning season in California’s Sacramento River, said the National Marine Fisheries Service on Monday. With drought haunting the state, there wasn’t enough cold water in the river. The fish “were cooked to death,” says The Sacramento Bee.

A new study that incorporates the impact of subsistence, small-scale and illegal fishing into estimates of commercial fishing draws a dire conclusion, says the Guardian.

Over the past 15 years, California 'has upended nearly every aspect of its fisheries management" to create 124 marine protected areas covering 850 square miles, more than 16 percent of its ocean holdings, where fishing is banned or severely curtailed, writes avid angler and author Paul Greenberg in California Sunday magazine.

The White House unveiled 15 recommendations against so-called pirate fishing - seafood fraud and the illegal, unreported and unregulated catch of fish - as a way to protect fishery stocks and bolster the income of legal harvesters.

China Tuna Industry Group Holdings has withdrawn its application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange to become a publicly traded company because of adverse publicity, says Undercurrent News.

Farmed salmon "may contain as little as half the amount of omega-3s than it did a decade ago," says a Civil Eats story that also appears at Time.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization says greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, forestry and fisheries "have nearly doubled over the past 50 years and could increase an additional 30% by 2050," says Feedstuffs.