Conservation of the species is a high priority.  The species is covered under the draft Bay Delta Conservation Plan and under the Central Valley Improvement Act, and some researchers have rated it conservation dependent and as threatened.

State Listings
California state species protection status listings are governed by the California Endangered Species Act (CESA).
- White Sturgeon are not listed under the California Endangered Species Act.

Federal Listings
Federal species protection status listings are governed by the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
- White sturgeon in California are not listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Critical Habitat
- Not applicable

White sturgeon range from Alaska to Baja California, are most-concentrated in the San Francisco Estuary, and spawn mostly in the Sacramento River. White sturgeon grow rapidly but mature at around 15 years of age, can live many decades, and long-living members may spawn several times but not annually. Young-of-the-year white sturgeon migrate down the Sacramento River to rear in the San Francisco Estuary and large numbers of those fish survive the migration only in years with nearly-flooding Sacramento River flows during both winter and spring.

Adult and subadult white sturgeon spend most of their lives in the San Francisco Estuary and the Delta. Unlike with green sturgeon, white sturgeon are not often observed in the ocean and few fish tagged in California have been recaptured in Oregon. White sturgeon spawn mostly in the mainstem Sacramento River upstream of Knights Landing, which means the Sacramento River is an important migratory corridor for juvenile sturgeon. White sturgeon in the San Francisco Estuary use the deepest holes, the shallowest of shallows, and everywhere in between.

White sturgeon and green sturgeon are California's only sturgeon. White sturgeon are vastly more common than green sturgeon, such that most anglers will never see a green sturgeon in the wild.

Sturgeon are among the largest and most ancient of bony fishes. They are highly specialized, containing such features as a heterocercal tail, fin structure, jaw structure, spiral valve intestine, and spiracle. They have a cartilaginous skeleton and possess several rows of large ossified plates, called scutes, instead of scales. Sturgeon are highly adapted for feeding on bottom-dwelling animals, which they detect using a row of extremely sensitive barbels on the underside of their snouts. Sturgeons also have electrical sensory organs on their snout, called Ampullae of Lorenzini, that help them detect prey in murky waters and perhaps guide them during their coastal migrations, as observed in hammerhead sharks (Klimley 1993). They can protrude their long and flexible mouths into the substrate to slurp up food.

Only two sturgeon species reside on the west coast of North America, the green sturgeon, Acipenser medirostris, and the white sturgeon, A. transmontanus (Moyle 2002). Green sturgeon were first described by Ayres (1854) from San Francisco Bay. Green sturgeon may be distinguished from the sympatric white sturgeon (Figure 1) by their olive green color, their barbells (which are closer to the mouth than the tip of their snout), a prominent green stripe on the lateral and ventral sides of their abdomen, the presence of relatively sharp scutes, differences in number of lateral scutes, the presence of one large scute behind the dorsal and anal fins (which is absent in white sturgeon), and the location of the vent (North et al. 2002).

References
Ayres, W. O. 1854. Descriptions of three new species of sturgeon San Francisco. Proceedings of the California Academy of Natural Sciences 1:14-15.

Klimley, A. P. 1993. Highly directional swimming by scalloped hammerhead sharks, Sphyrna lewini, and subsurface irradiance, temperature, bathymetry, and geomagnetic field. Marine Biology. 117:1-22.

Moyle, P.B. 2002. Inland Fishes of California. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. 502 pp.

North, J.A., R.A. Farr, and P. Vescei. 2002. A comparison of meristic and morphometric characters of green sturgeon Acipenser medirostris. J. Applied Ichthyology 18:234-239.

Research through both collaborative and independent efforts has been conducted on such topics as distribution, migration, spawning and feeding, habitat utilization, abundance estimates, genetic research. Some examples of this research include:

CDFW does a comprehensive population study which includes a mark-recapture element, indexing the abundance of age-0 fish, and use of data from Sturgeon Fishing Report Cards, Commercial Passenger Fishing Vessels, and creel surveys.

UC Davis conducts does genetic analysis, habitat partitioning between green sturgeon and white sturgeon, and telemetry studies in the Sacramento River and the San Francisco Bay Delta Estuary. Within its laboratories, research (e.g., temperature, salinity, contaminants, entrainment risk, etc.) is conducted on the early life stages.

USFWS conducts egg and larval/juvenile white sturgeon research in the San Joaquin River.

The species can easily be overfished even though it is relatively resilient.  The white sturgeon fisheries were (with minor exceptions) closed from 1901 through 1953 due to overfishing. Commercial harvest of white sturgeon is illegal and recreational harvest is managed through area closures, bag limits, size limits, and gear restrictions.  See 2018 Sturgeon Fishing Regulations