Biography - Charles (Si) Simenstad

Prof. Simenstad has studied estuarine and coastal marine ecosystems throughout Puget Sound, the Washington coast, San Francisco Bay and Alaska for over thirty years. Much of this research has focused on the functional role of estuarine and coastal habitats to support juvenile Pacific salmon and other fish and wildlife, and the associated ecological interactions that are responsible for enhancing their production and life history diversity.
His research concerns primarily natural ecosystem-, community- and habitat-level interactions, with emphasis on predator-prey relationships, the sources, organization and flow of organic matter through food webs, and landscape-scale interactions between estuarine circulation and ecological processes. Recent research has integrated such ecosystem interactions with applied issues such as restoration, creation and enhancement of estuarine and coastal wetland ecosystems, and ecological approaches to evaluating the success of coastal wetland restoration at ecosystem and landscape scales.
Among his recent or current research activities, he: led the NSF-supported Columbia River Estuarine Turbidity Maxima (CRETM) Land-Margin Ecosystem Research (LMER) program, for over a decade; is Principal Investigator of the CALFED Category III "BREACH" research projects, which are designed to evaluate the prospect and timeframe for restoration of reflooded wetland in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay; is co-investigator of the WA-OR Sea Grant and NMFS studies of juvenile salmon rearing in restoring marshes of the Salmon River estuary, coastal Oregon, and the Columbia River estuary; one of the investigators assessing the role of the development impacts of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and Locks, and modification of Puget Sound shorelines, on juvenile fall chinook salmon that have been recently listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA); and a principal member of the Nearshore Science Team (NST) of the Puget Sound Nearshore Ecosystem Research Program (PSNERP) developing a feasibility plan for large-scale restoration of estuarine and nearshore ecosystems of Puget Sound.