Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta White Sturgeon Acoustic Telemetry, 2010-2021

This dataset is the product of merging and QAQC'ing three separate White Sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) acoustic tagging and monitoring efforts in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Estuary system. These include 92 adult White Sturgeon tagged and released in the Yolo Bypass, 155 adult and sub-adult White Sturgeon tagged and released in Grizzly Bay, Suisun Bay, or San Pablo Bay, and 91 adult and sub-adult White Sturgeon tagged and released in the San Joaquin River. Collectively the three datasets span over a decade in time and a substantial portion of the San Francisco Estuary system in space.

The dataset includes the tagging, deployment, detections, and grouped detections tables in four R Data Serialization (.rds) files, each containing one `data.frame` table. There are also two .csvs: one of metadata with documentation for each field in each table, and one included for visibility on how receiver locations were grouped in the grouped detections table. There are a total of 338 adult and sub-adult White Sturgeon in the dataset, all tagged between 2010 and 2018. A total of 330 of these individuals were detected during the time period the dataset covers, which spans from August 2010 to May 2021. The sturgeon were detected on a subset of the full array of 724 69kHz Vemco/Innovasea acoustic receivers, which were in place to varying degrees of consistency across the study period.

The raw data has undergone extensive cleaning, QAQC, formatting, and merging to get to this point. The goal of providing it in its current format was to allow other researchers to hit the ground running, without having to link each detection with its deployment record, group receiver locations, or track down data omissions and errors. We have supported this goal to the best of our ability; however, as with any large dataset touched by many hands, errors almost certainly lurk (or may have been generated in the cleaning process). The full data cleaning and preparation process is visible in the associated github repository; it is also reproducible via makefile with the raw data, which is available upon request for those who wish to begin from there.

This synthesis effort was funded through a contract awarded by the Delta Stewardship Council.