by Al Donner, Sacramento FWO

The Sacramento Fish and Wildlife Office (SFWO) website has proven itself to be the resource for information about federal actions to help the ESA-protected delta smelt, a major water issue in California.

The SFWO website was confirmed as the go-to resource by a monstrous 10-fold increase in visitor hits to the site over a two-day period when a delta smelt biological opinion (BO) was released on Dec. 15, 2008.   Prepared by SFWO biologists, the opinion written for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation addresses effects of the coordinated operation of the Federal Central Valley Project and State Water Project export pumps on the threatened delta smelt.

The site had 6,614 hits on Dec. 12, 2008.  Then on Dec. 15, when the BO was posted on the SFWO home page, visits soared to 26,694 hits and climbed to 28,052 on Dec. 16.

Nearly 4,000 separate visitors logged on over 3 days and access remained high for a week, due to the easy availability of the opinion and numerous related documents on the SFWO website. In addition to viewing delta smelt web pages, visitors accessed PDF documents about the issue 48,398 times.

The positive outreach culminated more than a year of planning and outreach. In 2007 the Sacramento External Affairs staff recognized that there would be strong public interest in the smelt, which is a icon for the health of the Bay-Delta ecosystem and which impacts a wide range of California interests. So webmaster Harry Mossman developed a "Delta in the Spotlight" box on the home page to make it easy for the public to stay current on the topic. As the year progressed, the office posted all relevant public documents about the complex subject on the site. Interested parties soon found they could rely on it for the latest information.

When the smelt BO was delivered to the applicants, it was immediately posted on the "Delta in the Spotlight" site (as well as other locales), and the soaring level of visitors proved that the SFWO website indeed served a valuable public service.

A secondary benefit, important to the short-handed FWS office, was the virtual absence of individual requests to Service staff for information.  The overwhelming portion of the public that needed information found it easily on the SFWO website, reducing the staff time that otherwise would have been expended in filling information requests.