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Join the Discussion: A 2-Day Workshop in February to Shape the 2025 Delta Science Plan
The Delta Science Program is currently working on the third iteration of the Delta Science Plan. Recommended within the Delta Plan, the Delta Science Plan is developed collaboratively with the Delta science community. Its purpose is to provide a clear vision, guiding principles, and effective approaches for coordinating Delta science efforts, as well as communicating the outcomes of scientific activities and their management implications to decision-makers.
For the 2025 Delta Science Plan, DSP intends to take a more strategic and forward-looking approach by centering the Plan around specific “grand challenges.” These challenges represent major scientific problems that, through coordination and collaboration, can advance shared goals and accelerate scientific understanding and informed decision-making. This focused direction aims to make the 2025 Delta Science Plan more proactive and impactful. By addressing key issues through collective effort, the updated Plan seeks to enhance Delta science coordination and catalyze scientific progress in the region.
A presentation at the November meeting of the Delta Stewardship Council summarized the progress to date and the next steps, which include a two-day hybrid workshop scheduled for February 20-21. Tricia Lee, Senior Environmental Scientist with the Delta Science Program, gave the update.
Delta Science Strategy
The Delta Science Plan is part of an overall Delta Science Strategy consisting of three key components:
- Delta Science Plan: The Plan provides a roadmap for doing science in the Delta. It is intended to strengthen, organize, and communicate science to provide relevant, credible, and legitimate decision-support for policy and management actions. The Plan is developed through an open, transparent, and inclusive process informed by and for the greater Delta science community. The 2019 Delta Science Plan included 26 methods to address six collaboratively developed objectives. Click here for the 2019 Delta Science Plan.
- Science Action Agenda: This document prioritizes and aligns science actions to inform management decisions. It identifies major gaps in knowledge, promotes collaborative science, and builds science infrastructure. It is updated roughly every five years and is utilized to guide funding calls by the Delta Science Program, other agencies, and other funding entities. View the 2022-2026 Science Action Agenda.
- State of Bay-Delta Science: This collection of papers represents a comprehensive synthesis of the current scientific understanding of the Delta. The papers highlight significant progress made on key research questions over the past decade and identify areas where knowledge gaps persist. The 2022 edition features seven articles exploring the theme of “ecosystem services and disservices of Bay-Delta primary producers: how plants and algae affect ecosystems and respond to management of the estuary and its watershed.” Explore the 2022 version at the State of Bay Delta Science website.
The 2025 Delta Science Plan Update
The 2019 Delta Science Plan emphasized shared mechanisms to inform policy and management, methods to modernize, integrate, and build the Delta science infrastructure to support effective decision-making through science-based adaptive management and decision support tools, and methods to collectively support the Delta Science Plan implementation.
“We’ve really seen that the Delta Science Plan can be a mechanism to drive innovative changes in the way we do science,” said Tricia Lee. “Some examples of the success of the 2019 Delta Science Plan include the development of the Social Science Task Force in 2020 and the Delta Residents Survey in 2023. We also saw the first annual cross-cut budget, which was something that the 2019 Delta Science Plan called for, as well as the Delta Science Tracker.”
During the review of the 2019 Delta Science Plan, the Delta Independent Science Board memo asked for the science plan to be bolder, more flexible, and more strategic. “So we really took that to heart as we began to develop the 2025 Delta Science Plan,” said Ms. Lee. “The approach of making the Delta Science Plan oriented around grand challenges really helps us meet those asks by the Delta Independent Science Board to be bolder and more strategic.”
The Delta Science Program proposes that the next Delta Science Plan not only identify the necessary tools, resources, and new approaches to address grand challenges in Delta science but also focus on making the 2025 update more effective, relevant, and responsive to emerging challenges, with the ultimate goal of delivering the best possible science for decision-making and advancing the State’s coequal goals for the Delta.
Defining the Grand Challenges
To define the grand challenges, they reviewed Delta-specific visionary literature that addressed larger, overarching issues and were published since 2007 when the Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force laid the foundation for the Delta Reform Act. The review identified 125 candidates for Grand Challenges.
The National Research Council defines a grand challenge as one that is a major scientific task that is compelling for both intellectual and practical reasons, offers potential for major breakthroughs based on recent developments in science and technology, and is feasible given current capabilities and assuming a significant infusion of resources.
Using that criteria, they whittled the 125 candidates down to 17 remaining challenges, which were then distilled into the final four grand challenges:
- Grand Challenge #1 – Scientists and managers must anticipate a world in which environmental conditions and regulations may be fundamentally different from those faced today.
- Grand Challenge #2 – Environmental change is outpacing the traditional pace of science.
- Grand Challenge #3 – Flows of scientific information remain decentralized and poorly connected to communities and decision-makers.
- Grand Challenge #4 – Other ways of knowing, especially Traditional Knowledge, remain siloed from decision-making.
Delta Science Program staff wanted to ensure that the Delta science community felt that the grand challenges identified adequately reflected the grand challenges to their work. So, the staff has been doing a lot of outreach over the past year, including targeted outreach with the Delta Independent Science Board and circulating an essay on the grand challenges for comment over the summer.
The final Grand Challenges essay has been released, and the Delta Science Program is moving forward with the Grand Challenges as the framework for the next Delta Science Plan.
Next Steps
Development of the update of the Delta Science Plan will continue into 2025 with the Delta Science Program hosting a hybrid workshop on February 20-21, 2025. The goal of the workshop is to engage with the Delta science community to develop and identify strategies and tools to address the grand challenges and to determine what can be done in a five-year timeline to make progress in addressing the grand challenges.
The draft Delta Science Plan is expected to be released for public input and a presentation to the Council in Fall 2025.
