California WaterBlog is a long-running outreach project from the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, a research center dedicated to interdisciplinary study of water challenges, particularly in California. We focus on environmentally and economically sustainable solutions for managing rivers, lakes, groundwater, and estuaries. This week, for UC Davis Give Day (April 19-20) we’re sharing a little about the Center and the work we do. I’m Karrigan Bork, the Center’s Interim Director, helping out while Director Andrew Rypel is on sabbatical, and I’ll be your guide for this brief tour through the “Shed”. If you would like to donate to help the Center continue important work, I’ve shared our giving link below.
Students sampling the Tuolumne River as part of an Ecogeomorphology trip.
The Center for Watershed Sciences has always been about moving beyond single-issue and single-species approaches to water management. Geologist Jeffrey Mount and fish biologist Peter Moyle founded the Center in 1998, and it really got going with the addition of agricultural economist Richard Howitt, civil and environmental engineer Jay Lund, and hydrologist Thomas Harter. We remain a place where biologists, geologists, hydrologists, engineers, economists, legal scholars and others work together to help understand and solve California’s complex water problems.
Today, the Center is home to a team of Professional Researchers who pursue projects to fund their own labs at the Shed, employing teams of students, post docs, and specialists to conduct a wide array impactful research. We also offer physical, intellectual, and institutional space for faculty in various departments across campus who are pursuing interdisciplinary work within UC Davis, across the UC system, and with other research organizations around the world. The Center’s work is designed to be problem-focused and immediately relevant, pointing to better ways to manage water, species, and habitat in California and beyond. Our research is nonpartisan and focused on good science, not easy answers.
CWS specialists pull an otter trawl. PC Mette Lampcov / The GuardianPicking through aquatic vegetation pulled up in an otter trawl. PC Mette Lampcov / The Guardian
The Center is a productive place; in 2022-2023, Center-affiliated research produced almost 60 publications, mostly in peer reviewed journals, but also in books and law reviews. We’ve pioneered groundbreaking work on salmonid floodplain use, thiamine deficiency as a major cause of Central Valley salmon mortality, minimum flow protections, process-based meadow restoration techniques, and tracking salmon habitat use through isotopes in their otoliths and eyeballs. We also conduct a monthly sampling program for fish and invertebrates that has been going on for more than three decades! It’s really incredible research that informs management decisions.
I’d like to highlight just a few areas of ongoing work at the Center:
Rafting down the Tuolumne River for an Ecogeomorphology class experiential learning expedition.
The Center is very active in education and outreach, through UC Davis classes like Ecogeomorphology and engagement with high school, junior high, and elementary schools like salmon in the classroom as well as our work to bring environmental education into underserved schools. Our DEI committee works to help us live our philosophy of “providing a welcoming and supportive environment for all people.”
We receive funding from a diverse portfolio of sources, including foundations, public agencies, and conservation groups. Most work is funded by grants for particular projects, which helps the Center to do really interesting and significant work, but which generally doesn’t fund some basic and more innovative and pioneering needs. It can also be difficult to fund research and engagement travel for graduate students, vital for developing engaged scientists. Funding educational opportunities like our famous Ecogeomorphology class is always a challenge, especially for students of limited financial means.
A graduate student sorts through zooplankton samples. PC Caroline Newell.
Water and environmental innovation in California requires gifts from individuals and foundations, beyond more staid and traditional agency-funded research. Some of our biggest historic contributions to California water and ecosystem management have come from such funding, seeding new ideas and extending applications from other work. If you’re excited about the Center’s work, getting students and academics engaged in California’s water and environmental problems, and if you enjoy this blog, we hope you’ll donate in support of our mission. The link below allows donations directly to the Center for Watershed Sciences.
Fig. 1. Boardwalk leading to Julie Partansky Pond, Davis, CA. March 2024.
Each morning is similar, but different. As we approach the pond on the wooden catwalk, you can hear the birds calling, eventually you start to smell the freshness of the ecosystem, the glitters and splashing ahead gives some indication of bird activity on the water. Sometimes an alligator lizard scoots past along the floorwork – occasionally even two. Steam rises from my coffee cup, to varying degrees, depending on how quickly we got out the door. And then there are my three kids, also ever changing. Each day, one to three are in-tow, usually chatting it up about geology, Egypt, space, or the day’s most pressing sports news.
And so it goes on most mornings, ideally when the mist is still fresh or the winter fog lingering, the Rypel family ventures to the “the duck pond” aka Julie Partansky Pond in north Davis. The routine is partly about draining excess energy from the young kids while enjoying time with them. Yet I’ve also come to deeply value the chance to just be in nature every day, even if it’s fleetingly brief. Accomplishing that can be difficult with young kids, perhaps even more so inside the heavily developed northern California metroplex. On most days though, the fastest and most efficient escape, is to the pond.
The wildlife is better than one might think (Fig. 2). Because the pond goes bone dry in the summer, the fish are not usually the star of the show, although there are some seasonal aquatic biota (turtles, dragonflies, Sierra chorus frogs, even zooplankton). It is difficult for this fish professor to admit, but I’ve come to take great comfort in getting to know and learn the birds here. The ducks and Canadian geese are the regulars, but there have been some special visitors from time to time. A swamp sparrow last winter caused much ruckus among the birders. We watched that little bird for a solid week – its tiny legs hopping amongst the sticks and snags on the water’s edge. I’ve seen hooded mergansers, likely transients from the nearby Sacramento River. There are almost always woodpeckers and scrub jays present. At nighttime, there are owls. Last year, I encountered a coyote (young male of course) several times over the course of a month. The morning of writing this, I smelt and finally spotted a skunk lumbering through the shrubbery.
Fig. 2. Sampler of wildlife and views from Partansky Pond, Davis, CA.
The somewhat abundant wildlife here is yet another example of the power of water and wetlands to activate nature in a semi-arid region like California. During the dry season, when there is little water, there are also far fewer birds or wildlife. When it floods in the fall, the whole ecosystem comes alive. Seeing this is a daily reminder that we are on the right track when thinking about flooding wetlands and rice fields for birds and fish, and hopefully also snakes, turtles, bats, beavers, and bugs. It is just one small pond in the middle of a suburban community, but I can’t help think what many more of these ponds might do for our struggling wildlife communities. And of course, the reverse is also true – wetland losses continue to threaten biodiversity at all scales.
It is also incredible how rapidly the pond can (to use a Calvin and Hobbs term) transmogrify me back to my childhood, and to my Dad. Dad was a lifelong duck hunter and a huge supporter of Ducks Unlimited. Though he never lived in California, he was a fierce defender of wetlands, and understood the importance of conserving these habitats. And while he has been gone for 20 years now, each morning, when I see ducks, invariably I think of him. I can almost immediately smell the wax that he used on the back porch at “the cabin” to clean ducks in the fall. And I can feel the tippyness of the skift as we sat, father and son, motionless in a bed of semi-frozen cattails at dawn in October. It’s amazing how nature and water can so quickly re-animate these old and lucid memories.
Every day is similar, but different in nature. Something about experiencing that daily constitution must be good for the human condition. Thus, it is with astonishment that we so openly cede our rights to recover and be with nature, often to economic forces that benefit just the few. Even still, it is observable how resilient nature can be in its ability to bounce back once given a chance. The pond seems to teach this lesson every morning. It also makes me consider daily those who don’t have access to any nature – people whose lives are dominated by concrete, war, or are without time to slow down and think. Everyone should have public access to natural places. On the best mornings, I can see how novel ecosystems like these could propagate, and create interesting new landscapes where human structures blend into natural ones that are well-managed. I think of the great possibilities of new habitat for fish and wildlife within our idiosyncratic human cities. On other mornings, I just hope that the dew will last a little while longer, and that the kids refrain from screaming long enough to absorb a little more.
Salmon face many stressors that significantly reduce their survival. Persistent challenges include habitat degradation, predation, pollution, and climate change that threaten already at-risk populations. Conservation efforts in California engage with the complexity of these stressors, yet in recent years, a new threat has emerged to salmon restoration in the Central Valley. The absence of a seemingly inconspicuous nutrient, vitamin B1 or thiamine, has been impeding restoration. The gravity of this situation becomes apparent when considering the analogous struggles of salmon populations in the Baltic Sea and Great Lakes regions, emphasizing the global ramifications of this emerging threat (Balk et al., 2016).
Thiamine deficiency complex (TDC) was first documented in California salmon in 2020 when hatcheries in the Central Valley began noticing apparent lethargy, corkscrew swimming, and high mortality rates in their juvenile Chinook (Mantua et al., 2021). As researchers from UC Davis, NOAA, CDFW, and beyond sought to understand the causes and impacts of this vitamin deficiency, we saw an opportunity to engage youth in authentic scientific research.
In fall 2021 the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences began collaborating with the Center for Community and Citizen Science (CCCS) to launch our Spinning Salmon in the Classroom program, where high school students in Glenn, Tehama, and Colusa counties joined a 50+ member research team working to understand how TDC affects California’s Central Valley salmon. This program has since expanded to five counties, engaging over 1,800 high school students and their teachers. This collaboration has led to many educational and scientific opportunities, allowing students to participate in collecting high quality data for scientific studies, teachers to receive professional development support, and promoting direct interaction between students and university and agency scientists.
Building the Program
As researchers across the United States investigated the emergence of thiamine deficiency in California, a team from the Center for Watershed Sciences and Center for Community and Citizen Science at UC Davis, NOAA Fisheries, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, developed an observation protocol and lesson sequence for the CDFW Classroom Aquarium Education Program. This program was developed to help gather data on thiamine deficiency during early salmon life stages. Students’ data is used to quantify thiamine dependent early life stage mortality to calculate the concentration responsible for acute mortality in California Chinook salmon. Data submitted by students in this program is vital to understanding the effective concentration (EC50) of thiamine needed for fall run juvenile Chinook in the Central Valley, information not previously known (Fig. 1).
Figure 1. (A) Distribution of thiamine concentrations in families of eggs raised by classrooms in 2021 and 2022, with the percent survival of fry from each family group color coded. (B) A conceptual dose-response relating concentration of thiamine to survival of fry. Dashed line shows EC-50 value, i.e., concentration where survival is at 50%. Data from subplot A will be used with other data to fit a dose-response curve for thiamine-dependent fry survival in the Central Valley.
Each participating classroom receives an aquarium and 30-35 fall run Chinook salmon eggs from Feather River hatchery untreated with thiamine supplementation. The classrooms then submit regular observations on mortality and behavior related to the symptomatic expression of TDC as the fish develop (Fig. 2). This mirrors thiamine-dependent mortality experiments at UC Davis, attempting to understand this same concept for our other salmon runs in the Central Valley. Throughout the program, students learn about the scientific method, data collection, and experimental design as they engage with the scientific practices aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). In addition to lessons in the program, students receive hands-on learning experiences through field trips, including the final release of the fish into the local watershed at the end of the program (Fig. 3).
Figure 2. Tanks are set up in classrooms for students to record weekly observations about mortality, behavior, and water quality.
Figure 3. Students make observations about the salmon and record environmental conditions before releasing them back into the river.
Engagement with Researchers
After the pilot year of this program, we realized the great benefits of connecting students to scientific researchers on our team. Introducing students to a scientific community helped them realize the importance of interdisciplinary science and allowed them to ask questions and receive real time answers. Their questions helped show that science is not done alone when answers often had to be given by several researchers, each with a different area of expertise. While participating in this program, students and teachers communicate with researchers through email Q&A, classroom visits, and field trips (Fig. 3 & 3). Each classroom is assigned a specific researcher with applicable backgrounds and expertise pertaining to their taught subjects. This allows for direct and open communication while also removing barriers between the classroom and researchers. The benefits of engagement often go both ways, with students’ insightful questions sparking new lines of scientific inquiry for researchers.
Figure 4. Rachel Johnson, NOAA Southwest Fisheries fisheries biologist and UC Davis affiliate, leads a field trip as each classroom gets connected to a researcher.
A Focus on Underserved Youth
During the pilot year, classrooms were recruited from College Opportunity Program GEAR UP, servicing first generation college bound students. In years 2-3 the program expanded to additional counties to engage students in continuation high schools, juvenile halls and deaf-hard of hearing programs. Resources for classroom engagement (https://sites.google.com/ucdavis.edu/salmonintheclassroomresources/home) centered on creating access for students often underserved by participatory science programs. We aim to explore ways professional development for educators and youth education programming could improve STEM learning and deepen students’ exploration of a range of college and career paths.
Community and Citizen Science focuses on how people who wouldn’t traditionally qualify as “scientists” are taking up tools of science to address environmental problems, locally, regionally, and globally. Traditional power structures in science need to be disrupted to include more voices, more sources of knowledge, more ways of thinking about environmental problems, no more so than youth. CCCS has recruited teachers working with student populations who are often the least likely to have had authentic environmental stewardship programming and have worked over the last year to refine and revise student and teacher supports for these populations. We built in additional opportunities for student voice to be brought to the forefront by designing resources and opportunities for outreach. Engaging under-resourced students and systems in our region, this program focused on lessons using Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to support students as they begin to see themselves as having power to advocate within their own community.
Next Steps
Year three of our Spinning Salmon in the Classroom program was completed at the end of February, with over 370 student observations and 120 student questions submitted. We seek to expand this program to new schools and classrooms forming novel and exciting ways of engagement and inclusion. The data collected by these students has given our research team a new understanding of thiamine dependent mortality in California Chinook and their data will soon be published within our juvenile mortality model in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) (Fig. 1). We are excited for the future of this program and to learn more of how engagement in scientific research can benefit students in the Central Valley.
Author affiliations: Abigail Ward, Assistant Specialist, UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences; Peggy Harte, M.Ed., Youth Education Program Manager, UC Davis Center for Community and Citizen Science
Further Readings
Balk, L., Hägerroth, PÅ., Gustavsson, H. et al. Widespread episodic thiamine deficiency in Northern Hemisphere wildlife. Sci Rep 6, 38821 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/srep38821
Mantua, N., R. Johnson, J. Field, S. Lindley, T. Williams, A. Todgham, N. Fangue, C. Jeffres, H. Bell, D. Cocherell, J. Rinchard, D. Tillitt, B. Finney, D. Honeyfield, T. Lipscomb, S. Foott, K. Kwak, M. Adkison, B. Kormos, S. Litvin, and I. Ruiz-Cooley. 2021. Mechanisms, impacts, and mitigation for thiamine deficiency and early life stage mortality in California’s Central Valley Chinook salmon. N. Pac. Anadr. Fish Comm. Tech. Rep. 17: 92–93. https://doi.org/10.23849/npafctr17/92.93.
Successful aquatic restoration traditionally comes from extensive research and knowledge of the system, collaboration among stakeholders, and thorough planning. But what if there was another way to ensure restorations are creating the results we want to see? With increasing effects of climate change, urbanization, and other anthropogenic factors, aquatic organisms, especially ones that are endangered, need successful restorations more than ever to aid in their survival. One Ph.D. student at UC Davis, Madeline Eugenia Fallowfield— or Madge, says she’s studying the “power of positive thinking” to improve the success of aquatic restoration projects.
“Well researched work plans and highly detailed designs that include the input of many stakeholders isn’t enough anymore. We need positive thoughts and wishful thinking.” Madge says. “It’s really upsetting to sit in on a restoration planning meeting and not see a single vision board.” But that’s something Madge is hoping to change with her dissertation based on novel approaches to aquatic restoration.
Madge first became interested in the “power of positive thinking” after watching daytime television. “I was 10 years old and thought it was the greatest discovery ever,” Madge reminisces. Since then, Madge has been using the “power of positive thinking” to navigate life. “There can be a lot of pessimism around the state of our environment and ongoing efforts to restore habitat, and that’s when it occurred to me that I should bring the “power of positive thinking” to my graduate studies on restoration efforts,” she states.
Part of Madge’s study is to compare restoration projects that utilize the “power of positive thinking” against those that don’t. She expects to see very clear results between the two groups. Restoration designs that harness this power will employ several tactics to manifest success. Madge states the first step is to start each planning meeting with thirty minutes of thought work. “We’ll all sit in the room, or over video call, together and think really, really hard about how much we want this to work.” Madge goes on to explain that a main tenet of the “power of positive thinking” is that our thoughts create real energy and that energy travels out into the universe and collects and eventually manifests into reality. Madge states that each session should focus on a different aspect of the restoration that needs to be successful.
Another important aspect is the use of vision boards to think about what needs to be manifested. “Take my delta smelt vision board for the Lookout Slough Restoration in the Delta for example.” Madge explains, “I’m putting all the things delta smelt would need to be successful in hopes of manifesting it. It’s got pictures of ice for cool water, some pictures of dirty water for increased turbidity, and lots of pictures of zooplankton so they have plenty of food. It’s like fifty-percent zooplankton on that board, I’m serious about that part.” Madge recommends vision boards with rushing water, gravel, and the molecule thiamine for restoration designed for Chinook salmon. For sturgeon restoration, Madge says images of dam removal and cool water are ideal.
Madge wants to take things even further with the next chapter of her study. “We also need to work on the fish,” she says. “They also have to believe that things are going to be okay.” Madge recommends that fish in the restorations be spoken words of affirmation by biologists but adds that motivational podcasts on loop can work if people aren’t around all the time. Madge explains that just like our thoughts, our words create energy, and we can pass that energy onto the fish. Madge expects increased growth rates and reduced mortality for fish in treated restorations. “We supplement vital nutrients to fish with deficiencies, I don’t see how this is any different,” Madge says.
While she has a positive outlook on her studies, not everyone is receptive of Madge’s manifestation work. She claims people accuse of her peddling pseudoscience and wasting precious resources like grant funding, but Madge counters that at least she’s trying everything possible to improve restoration efforts. “Sometimes I’ll just sit at restoration sites and spend hours working to manifest successful restoration. It can be really hard sitting in the sun for all day, but that’s how dedicated I am.”
Figure 2 – Ph.D. student Madge in the field manifesting.
March is usually the last month in California’s mostly unpredictable wet season. A dry March can make a promising water year disappointing. A very wet March can make a potentially critically dry year be only mildly dry, like the “Miracle March” of 1991 (with three times average March precipitation).
Unlike basketball, nobody prevails in California’s annual March Water Madness. The outcome is usually a combination, rather than unmitigated win or loss. Below is a bracket for March 2024, where the outcome for the water year consolidates with time, with diminishing room for surprises.
Marches past and present
The distribution of March precipitation for northern California appears below. It averages about 6 inches per year and ranges from 0.5 inches (1923) to 23 inches (1995), big enough for floods. The “Miracle March” of 1991, the 4th year of drought, was only 18 inches, but three times average March precipitation. Last year (2023), was drier in northern California than in the San Joaquin Valley, but had 17 inches in March. 2017, the wettest water year on record for norther California, had only 17 inches precipitation in March.
Historically, there is only a 5% correlation between February and March precipitation, so we go into March as the last wet month hoping for the best, but not very confident of any predictions. Beware the guides of March.
March this year
We are long enough into March to see that this March’s precipitation is unusually average, about 6 inches. And for northern California, water year precipitation is also about average, with a little better than average snowpack. The San Joaquin Valley is about 80% of average precipitation, with snowpack doing a little better, but slightly less than average, so far. Southern California has had a wet water year, with floods. California is too big and diverse to usually experience the same water year.
For 2024, no outcome has prevailed statewide. We have outcomes that are average, a bit wetter than average, and a bit drier than average. This is the hand we have been delt, which fortunately also included excellent reservoir storage left over from last year.
The major state and federal water projects announced an increase in allocations this week, doubtlessly satisfying to those with higher-priority contracts and disappointing those with lower-priority contracts.
“Some people say Alpaugh is the stepchild of Tulare County; I say we’re the forgotten ones. Rural families are an endangered species.” – Sandra Meraz, Dec 2014 in the LA Times
Sandra (bottom right) at a community march for safe water marking the visit of the UN special rapporteur on the human right to water to Tulare County. Photo Credit: Bear Guerra, Community Water Center
When Alexandrina “Sandra” Meraz arrived in Alpaugh in the Spring of 1963 at the age of 22, one of the first things she noticed was the water. It didn’t smell right. Sandra was a self-professed reluctant “pioneer” [1]. As a young mom, living in the tiny unincorporated community in Southeast Tulare County far from the Cabezon Reservation where she was born and raised wasn’t easy. In time, however, leaving would become out of the question. Over the next 60 years Sandra gave everything she had to Alpaugh, transforming the small, out of the way forgotten place as it did her. Along the way, she changed California.
In 1998, with grown kids and time on her hands Sandra landed on the Tulare County Waterworks District #1, one of three locally elected boards that controlled drinking water provision in the town at the time. She didn’t know anything about water, but she asked questions and she learned. Four years later in 2002, Alpaugh’s only drinking water well failed, forcing the town into a crisis that would take years to resolve. Not only did the town have no water, but Sandra discovered that the water they had been relying on was heavily contaminated with arsenic with levels far above the federal MCL of 50 parts per billion. Lobbying local politicians and leveraging the media, Sandra helped secure corporate donations to set up and fill a 5,000-gallon community water tank from which Sandra and other volunteers rationed 25 gallons per household per week. Then she and others turned her sights on securing the emergency grants needed to replace and upgrade Alpaugh’s infrastructure. In January 2004 at a ceremony in Visalia, Sandra signed the check for a $1.5 million grant for Alpaugh’s water system.
For a few years residents enjoyed reliable water that met state and federal standards, but this victory was fleeting and the safety of the water far from clear. After years of research and rulemaking, in 2001 the federal Environmental Protection Agency had announced that the arsenic standard for drinking water would be lowered to 10 parts per billion. Water systems had until 2006 to comply. Alpaugh’s new well did not meet that standard. Despite this fact, around the same time a proposal was circulated to raise monthly water rates by $20. Working with the Committee for a Better Alpaugh, the community-based organization that Sandra co-founded in 2000 in part to engage Spanish-speaking and low-income residents in the local decision-making, Sandra fought the rate increase on the board and as a community member. Ultimately a compromise $10 increase was approved, but their water was still not drinkable.
In a town where “everything is political” [2], Sandra was adamant about being a different type of leader. In 2021 she told me “I have a voice. If I choose to use it, I have to use it in the right way. I don’t just go in there and throw my weight around because I speak English” [3]. This is exactly the leadership style she brought to the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board when she was appointed to her first term by then Governor Schwarzenegger in 2007. Sandra was the first Disadvantaged Community resident, first low-income woman, and first Native American woman to serve on the board in any capacity. She never forgot the weight of that responsibility.
Between 2008 and 2012 Sandra, a long-time member and founder of the AGUA (Asociación de Gente Unida por el Agua) coalition, played a key role in the historic campaign to pass California’s Human Right to Water law, AB 685. Sandra made trips up and down Highway 99 between Sacramento and Alpaugh to speak at legislative committees, attend rallies and talk to the media. And like all the organizers behind that push, she knew AB 685 was a beginning rather than an end. Sandra continued to make trips to Sacramento into her late 70s to support critical follow-up legislation, most notably what became SB 200 or the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience Program passed in 2019 (you can read an op-ed published in the Hanford Sentinel by Sandra in September 2017 about these needed investments here).
Sandra (foreground with walker) and other Central Valley residents meet with SB 200 author Monning at the State Capitol in April 2017. Photo credit: Kristin Dobbin
In a true testament to her efforts, when Sandra died on January 20, 2023, Alpaugh finally had safe water. Just over a year prior, the town’s newly constructed arsenic treatment plant was brought online, delivering safe drinking water to residents for the first time. She had followed the project’s progress religiously, attending multiple meetings per month and advising other residents to support the rate increases they needed to operate it [4]. But Sandra would be the first to tell us her work is not done. The re-emergence of Tulare Lake brought with it a swarm of mosquitos that terrorized the region all summer. Groundwater levels continue to decline threatening drinking water supplies. And most people’s water bills are far higher than they can afford. Sandra never stopped imploring us to love Alpaugh like she did, and it is past time to listen. We still have a lot of work to do.
And in many ways, Sandra is still very present in that work. Even with all her experience, Sandra always said she didn’t speak well. That isn’t true but I know what she meant, she didn’t have the education she badly wanted, she didn’t have the resources or opportunities she should have had to thrive in place. But changing that for the next generation, not just for Alpaugh’s kids, but also several generations of organizers and community leaders from throughout the San Joaquin Valley, drove her fight until she died. Sandra’s commitment and lessons live on in me and so many others she mentored over her many decades of service and advocacy including Martha Guzman Aceves, regional administrator for EPA region 9, Laurel Firestone, member of the State Water Resources Control Board, Susana De Anda, Executive Director of Community Water Center and Denise Kadara, her successor on the Regional Water Quality Control Board from the town of Allensworth. Afterall, as Sandra told me the summer before she died, “sometimes a voice carries” [5].
Sandra Meraz (center) with her letter of appointment to the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board with Community Water Center co-founders Laurel Firestone (left) and Susana De Anda (right). Photo credit: Community Water Center
AUTHOR
Kristin Dobbin is an assistant professor of cooperative extension in water justice policy and planning at UC Berkeley. She is always looking for ways to make Sandra proud.
[4] It’s worth noting that Sandra saw the arsenic treatment plant as a necessity and supported the rate increases to ensure that the community would be able to operate it but was adamant that rates were already too high for many in the community and vowed to fight future increases proposed by the Board she retired from in 2012.
by Sarah Yarnell, Diego Rivera Salazar, Camila Boettiger, and Jay Lund
Countries, regions, and river basins globally are struggling to provide and manage flows in rivers for ecosystems. One approach, of many, is a Functional Flows approach, because it seeks to provide a range of streamflows over the year and between years to support fundamental functions of river ecosystems and the ecosystem services for society. These streamflows include seasonal base flows that vary from wet to dry seasons and interannually across wet to dry years as well as short-term flood flows that mobilize and scour bed sediments, recreate aquatic, riparian, and floodplain habitat, and support seasonal wetlands. The approach also involves a process for balancing multiple human and ecological objectives for river systems through broad engagement of multiple interests. In their challenge to maintain riverine ecosystem services, Chile and California can benefit from this dynamic approach to managing instream flows.
Similar geography and activities
Figure 1. Rio Claro, Chile
Chile is in the Southern hemisphere on the Pacific Ocean west of the Andes mountains. Chile’s geography, climate, and ecology are similar to California. The most populous areas in both regions span latitudes from 32 – 38 degrees dominated by a strongly seasonal Mediterranean climate with cool wet winters and warm dry summers, as well strong interannual and decadal variability. Both regions are on the west coast of the Americas, with the Pacific Ocean to the west and large high-elevation mountains running north-south inland to the east. Both regions have smaller coastal mountains paralleling the ocean’s edge, with a ‘Central Valley’ between these mountain ranges. These Central Valleys have rich productive agricultural lands, including some of the finest vineyards exporting wines globally, within which large populations and communities are economically sustained. The geographic diversity of each region supports a rich and vulnerable biodiversity of native and endemic species, many of which rely on healthy freshwater ecosystems. Major geographic differences are the mirrored effect of being either north or south of the equator: Chile’s summer peaks in January-February and its most arid regions are to the north, while California’s summer temperatures are highest in July-August and aridity increases to the south (Figures 2 and 3).
With such similarities, it is not surprising that in both Chile and California, like most populous regions globally, the increased harnessing of river flows for agriculture, hydropower, industry, and urban water supply has led to economic growth and prosperity. However, human development sustained by surface water sources has drastically reduced freshwater biodiversity and ecosystem services, risking the sustainability of fresh water supplies.
A functional flows approach for instream flows
Environmental flows allocate some water for instream ecological purposes, supporting freshwater dependent ecosystems and improving river health (Horne et al., 2017). Implementing environmental flows has direct positive effects for biota in the river and can also improve water quality for recreation, drinking, and municipal uses. Instream flows do not attempt to restore the full “natural” or unimpaired flow of the river, rather they aim to support and maintain desired ecological conditions in regulated and diverted watercourses. Over time, the philosophy and practice of defining an environmental flow regime has advanced from static minimum instream flows protecting selected life history stages of specified aquatic species (e.g., Bovee, 1982) to environmental flow determinations that consider the natural variability of streamflows into which native species and ecosystems have evolved (e.g., Poff et al., 2010) and support river ecosystem functions (Palmer and Ruhi, 2019). In short, healthy river ecosystems provide a broad range of benefits to society, and environmental flows seek to maintain and support healthy streams.
One avenue for improving the ecosystem functionality of regulated rivers is a Functional Flows approach to river management (Yarnell et al., 2015; Stein et al., 2021). This approach focuses on identifying functional flow components, discrete aspects of the flow regime with documented importance for ecological, geomorphic or biogeochemical processes in riverine systems (Yarnell et al., 2015). Environmental flow management in regulated rivers then seeks to retain these key flow components, such as flooding overbank flows and spawning migration pulse flows to support biophysical processes needed to maintain a river’s ecological structure and function upon which native biological communities depend (Bestgen et al., 2020; Yarnell et al., 2020).
Figure 2. Functional flow components of a seasonal hydrograph for California. Blue line is median (50th percentile) daily discharge. Gray shading represents 90th to 10th percentiles of daily discharge over the period of record (modified from Yarnell et al., 2020).Figure 3. Mean monthly streamflow for different latitudes in Chile and comparison against minimum and maximum values. Figure 2.2 from Atlas del Agua, Chile https://snia.mop.gob.cl/repositoriodga/handle/20.500.13000/4371
In California, five functional flow components have been identified that support critical physical, biogeochemical, and biological functions that maintain river ecosystem health and satisfy life history requirements of native species (Figure 2):
Fall pulse flow: Following first major storm event at the end of dry season
Wet-season peak flow: Coincides with the largest storms in winter
Wet-season baseflow: Sustained by overland and shallow subsurface flows in the periods between winter storms
Spring recession flow: Represents the transition from the wet to dry season and is characterized by a steady decline of flows over a period of weeks to months
Dry-season baseflow: Sustained by groundwater inputs to rivers
Managing for these functional flow components preserves ecologically essential patterns of flow variability within and across seasons, but it does not require either full restoration of natural flows or maintenance of historical ecosystem conditions. These functional flow components can be quantified by a suite of functional flow metrics—statistical measures of the flow characteristics of each of the five functional flow components—that reflect the natural diversity in flow characteristics seasonally and across years.
In the long and narrow country of Chile (mean width of 180 km and a length of 4270 km (from 18 ° to 56°S), rivers are short. Most start at the Andes flowing westward over steep slopes, across the flat lower gradient Central Valley, and finally through the Coastal Range to reach the Pacific Ocean. Agriculture, cities, and industries are mainly located in the Central Valley, accounting for 88% of the extracted water. From North to South, climate and landscapes change from arid to semi-arid Mediterranean to wet. Changes in precipitation patterns shape the streamflow regimes. Rivers in Central Chile (32-36°S) reach minimum flows from January to May, with winter peaks from rainfall and spring peaks from snow and glacier melt from June to September. The relative magnitude of the spring snowmelt decreases southward, as the Southern region (36 – 44 °S) receives more rainfall but less snow as the altitude of The Andes decreases.
In both Chile and California, the geography, climate, and landscape shape the streamflow regimes, such that an understanding of these interacting factors is necessary to determine how the river ecosystem functions. Retaining key seasonal flow signatures, both baseflows and peak flows, along with space for the river to move and create riparian habitat, is necessary to support river functioning and ecosystem health.
A Functional Flows approach does not require the high density and range of data needed to develop flow ecology relationships as in more mechanistic methods (e.g., Poff et al., 2010) but rather considers how the natural flow regime interacts with basic physical channel conditions, floodplains, sediment regimes, thermal regimes and biologic and biogeochemical processes to support critical ecosystem functions. By protecting underlying functions and variability patterns that sustain river ecosystems, this approach is likely to deliver broad benefits for freshwater biota, including threatened fish species and their supporting ecosystem, as well as valued ecosystem services, such as clean water, fisheries, and recreation.
A traditional focus on single species (even single life history stages of single species) has tended to favor static environmental flow requirements that vary little within seasons and across years. However, native freshwater biota in Mediterranean climates, such as California and Chile, are adapted to the high natural seasonal and interannual variability in river flows. A Functional Flows approach preserves particular elements of natural flow variations upon which native species depend. Natural fluctuations in flows across time and space interact with the surrounding landscape to drive ecosystem processes, such as movement of organic matter and nutrients, scour and erosion of sediment, and hydrological connectivity enabling vegetation growth or fish migration (Palmer & Ruhi, 2019; Yarnell et al., 2015). Disrupting ecological functions from stabilization of flow regimes and fragmentation of habitat in time and space, reduces long-term resiliency and biodiversity of river systems.
Using a Functional Flows approach, environmental flow allocations can be targeted to components of the flow regime that most directly support ecological functions, while allowing diversions for human uses during other times (e.g., most winter high flow periods) (Stein et al. 2022). Over longer timescales, the approach also provides flexibility to adjust environmental water allocations in different water year types, maximizing allocations in wet years to enhance ecosystem conditions and limiting allocations in drought years to those needed to avoid catastrophic ecosystem impacts. This provides the ability to ‘design’ or tailor implementation to local conditions and needs. Flexible approaches that aim to maximize ecosystem functionality, especially during wetter years, will help build the resiliency of ecosystems to future droughts. Such proactive, long-term approaches are becoming more important as global temperatures rise and the intensity and spatial extent of drought increases in much of the western hemisphere.
3. Flowing forward
Current regulation related to minimum flows in Chile relies on streamflow data provided from government agencies and should consider the local characteristics and conditions of the watercourse. Discussion often focuses on the feasibility of applying certain methods to determine a fixed minimum flow, instead of discussing a more holistic approach that considers interactions with other variables and the expected environmental outcomes of such flows. The Functional Flows approach is promising for Chile’s water management, as it requires a focus on functionality and outcomes rather than extensive detailed parametrization.
In California, technical guidance for implementing a Functional Flows approach is provided in the California Environmental Flows Framework (CEFF), developed by a broad range of academic, agency, and non-governmental researchers (ceff.ucdavis.edu). CEFF provides a way to holistically incorporate functional flows, ecosystem goals, local requirements, and regulation. It provides guidance on balancing multiple management objectives via a stakeholder or community-driven process and advocates for monitoring and adaptive management programs. In the third blog of this series, we will discuss lessons from the California Environmental Flows Framework (CEFF) that might guide development of a Chilean Environmental Flows Framework, (ChEFF).
Arismendi I & B Penaluna. 2009. Peces nativos en aguas continentales del Sur de Chile / Native inland fishes of Southern Chile, funded by the Millenium Scienti!c Initiate through the FORECOS Nucleus Millenium P04-065-F of Mideplan.
Bovee, K. D. (1982). A Guide to Stream Habitat Analysis Using the Instream Flow Incremental Methodology. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Report no. Instream Flow Inf. Pap. 12.
Sarah Yarnell is a Senior Research Hydrologist at the Center for Watershed Sciences. Diego Rivera Salazar is a Professor in the School of Engineering & Center for Resources Management, Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile, Centro de Recursos Hídricos para la Agricultura y la Minería (ANID/FONDAP) (PI).
This blog post is the second of three posts resulting from an international collaboration on environmental flows between Chile’s Universidad del Desarrollo and Universidad de Talca, and the University of California, Davis (ANID Project FOVI 220188) law, engineering, economics, hydrology, and ecology researchers. The first post explained a bit about minimum flow regulations in California and Chile. This post provides an overview of functional flows for implementing environmental flows in Chile. The third post will look at lessons from the California Environmental Flows Framework (CEFF) that might guide development of a Chilean Environmental Flows Framework, (ChEFF). Project FOVI 220188 “Minimum flows and information of water uses in surface waters: experiences and challenges in Chile and California” is funded by Chile’s National Agency of Research and Development (ANID).
Chicken photo courtesy of Jose Maria Plazaola, Wikimedia Commons user.
*This is a repost of a blog originally published in 2012.
Water management is often very different from what we think intuitively, or what we have been taught. Here are some examples.
1. Most water decisions are local. Water policy and management discussions often seem to assume that state and federal government decisions and funding are the most important aspects of water management. This is not nearly true. Historically, culturally, and practically, most water management in California and the U.S. is local. There might be a dozen or more state and federal agencies, but there are thousands of local water, drainage, sanitation, and irrigation districts and millions of households and businesses. Local demand, supply, and operating decisions are the most important parts of water management, and where most innovations in water management originate. Due to the substantial build-out of large water projects, lack of water policy consensus, and debilitating state and federal budget deficits, local decisions, funding, innovations, and leadership are likely to become still more important in California and the U.S. Table 1 below illustrates this situation well.
Table 1: Estimated Annual Water Spending by Governments in California (c. 2008, Delta Stewardship Council Plan draft #5, August 2011)
2. Changes in technology change optimal management institutions. In early times, it became clear that local institutions were needed to construct and maintain local water management systems (Pisani 1984; Kelley 1989). In the late 1800s, irrigation districts, reclamation districts, and local water utilities emerged to fill these functions more efficiently than individuals or private firms. When larger regional and statewide water systems involving major reservoirs and conveyance systems spanning the state became needed (or at least desired) in the early 1900s, state and federal agencies were developed to manage the planning, construction, and operation of such systems. Today, major storage and conveyance systems are largely built, and innovative water management is dominated by, water conservation, water markets, conjunctive use, water recycling, and other techniques where local agencies have comparative advantages, and state and federal agencies have different and largely diminished roles (Hanak et al. 2011). Institutions should change to make best use of the most economical and appropriate mix of technologies for managing a system. In California, this means that local agency efforts need incentives to be better coordinated and better serve some regional and statewide objectives. Outside of this, state and federal agencies have diminishing roles following the age of large-scale infrastructure construction.
3. Studies forever, are sometimes cheaper and more politically convenient than action or technically serious work. For example, there is a common and political perception that new reservoirs are needed. Most elected and business officials grew up in an era when if you needed more water, you went to the nearest watershed, built a dam, and diverted water to where you wanted it. Today, most of the technical community is lukewarm on the idea of expanding reservoirs, for economic, technical, and environmental reasons. Constructing new reservoirs also taps an immense reserve of controversy. So consider the choices:
A) Build a reservoir costing $2 billion, or $100 million/year for a long time at 5% annual interest
B) Study building a reservoir, costing $1 million/year, perhaps for a very long time
The least controversial and most politic and economical choice here is to study the problem for a long time and rarely release substantial reports on the subject. This neatly dampens most of the controversy, while keeping agencies and consultants well funded and out of trouble. However, studying the problem forever has a financial cost, and arguably greater costs from dissipating analytical expertise, avoiding more serious discussions, and loss of technical integrity in government agencies.
4. Self-optimizing systems. Water users adapt to long-term management, and tend to make optimal any given long-term infrastructure and operations. Controlling floods with reservoirs and levees for some years leads people to settle more in floodplains (White 1945). Such encroachment sometimes can make it more difficult to use the official flood channel capacity and can further constrain water system operations. Outside of California, another example is the tendency of inland thermal power plants to build cooling water intakes at the lowest historical regulated water level. During a drought, this inflexible high-value demand for water elevation now requires awkward releases of scarce water from upstream. The power plants don’t need the water, just the water elevation. A similar effect occurs with boat ramps on reservoirs during droughts. The recreational drought is often not so much a lack of water or lake surface area, but insufficiently long boat ramps for drought conditions. Smart water users adapt to any operations, and force us to retain long-standing operations, which might not have been optimal initially. This implies costs for making transitions and responding to unusual drought or flood conditions. Water management is not just on the supply side; the reactions and long-term decisions of water users are just as important.
5. Small shortages sometimes create disproportionately large costs, with disturbing implications. Usually we assume, and it is often the case, that larger shortages lead to ever-increasing water shortage costs. Doubling a shortage more than doubles shortage costs. This is true for most water demands that are well-managed and experienced with shortages, since only a fool would short higher valued crops or functions first.
However, for urban and small commercial water users, even small shortages impose a significant “hassle cost”, requiring the users to figure out how to deal with the shortage, and distracting them from other valued activities. In economic theory terms, this means the first units of shortage are more expensive than the later ones (non-convex shortage costs). You can see glimmers of this behavior in some attempted contingent valuation studies of urban water shortages (Barakat & Chamberblin 1994).
If shortage costs begin small and gradually increase for everyone (convex shortage costs), as is commonly-assumed, then it is optimal (and fair) to spread the shortage across all customers. However, if there is a high initial hassle cost for dealing with a shortage (making shortage costs non-convex, Figure 1), then the economically optimal allocation of shortages is very different. Given a high initial cost for shortage and a slower increase in shortage costs afterwards, the best way to minimize overall shortage costs to all customers overall is to concentrate shortages with as few customers as possible. This allocates as much shortage as possible to the fewest number of people, minimizing hassle overall, but concentrating it among a few. For small shortages, this saves the society a lot of cost. Those shorted could be selected randomly, or to those with the least hassle. Sometimes economically optimal is not fair. (Seen another way, fairness sometimes has a cost – which hardly seems fair.)
Ideally, those shorted would be compensated by others who are spared the shortage and hassle costs (but when did you last see this happen?)
Figure 1: Hypothetical shortage costs with and without initial hassle
6. Chicken and cooperation in regional water management. We like to think that if everyone can be shown a win-win alternative, that all stakeholders will jump on board in support. But frequently this does not happen. Why?
Often, one or more stakeholders will stall such an agreement to improve their share of win-win benefits. The strategy here is to deny they would be better off with the win-win solution and then ask for more. When enough stakeholders have incentive for this behavior, a “chicken game” results where everyone is getting worse off while bargaining to do better for themselves (Madani and Lund, 2012).
7. How to manage and plan with fading federal and state presence and initiative? We often assume that federal and state leadership can help solve problems, and this was quite true during the era of water infrastructure development. However, federal and state agencies are fading as: most innovations (water conservation, water markets, conjunctive use, and reuse) are led and implemented locally; federal and state funding is in sharp decline; state and federal policy consensus is lacking; and many state and federal agencies suffer from bureaucratic sclerosis. How can regional collaboration be stimulated without state and federal funds or political support? How can regional collaborations make best use of the remaining advantages of state and federal governments? Will regional chicken games worsen? This is perhaps our greatest challenge for water management and policy. (Hanak et al. 2011)
Acknowledgements
This essay is adapted from part of the acceptance speech for the American Society of Civil Engineer’s 2011 Julian Hinds Award.
Lund, J.R., “Most Excellent Integrated Water Management from California,” Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Operations Management, ASCE, Reston, VA, August 2006.
Lund, J.R., “Self-Optimization in Water Resource Systems,” in M. Domenica (ed.) Proceedings of the 1995 Water Resources Planning and Management Division Conference, ASCE, N.Y., pp. 820-823, May 1995.
By Camila Boettiger, Karrigan Börk, Roberto Ponce Oliva, Diego Rivera, Jay Lund, and Sarah Yarnell
California and Chile share a history of water allocation with little regard for instream uses of water, especially environmental uses. In California, for example, many water rights were obtained with no consideration of the environmental impacts of the water use, often because few environmental laws existed or were enforced when users obtained the rights. Similarly, in Chile, environmental considerations in the granting and exercise of water rights weren’t expressly included in the Water Code until 2005. More broadly, both places traditionally required diversion and use as key elements of water rights, making it difficult or impossible to use water rights to keep water instream. As a result, both Chile and California struggle to protect the minimum instream flows needed for ecosystems and other instream uses.
Both places have used laws to require instream flows in some watersheds, but these laws are often unenforced. When these laws are enforced, development of the instream flow standards is expensive and time consuming, so the benefits of instream flows may take decades to become apparent and effective. Finally, even when they protect minimum flows, the static minimum flow approach has proved insufficient to protect many instream water uses and functions. Protecting aquatic ecosystems and the species they support requires a functional flows approach, which provides some of the same functions as a natural flow regime, rather than a simple minimum flow year-round.
This blog post is the first of several posts resulting from an International Research Collaboration between Chile’s Universidad del Desarrollo and Universidad de Talca, and the University of California, Davis. The collaborative research project brings together academics from Law, Engineering, Economics, Hydrology, and Ecology, and we’re sharing some of our findings through these blog posts. This first post explains a bit about minimum flow regulations in California and Chile. The second post will provide an overview of how functional flows could be used to implement environmental flows in Chile (toward development of a Chilean Environmental Flows Framework, termed ChEFF), and the third post will look at lessons from the California Environmental Flows Framework (CEFF) that might guide implementation of ChEFF.
A. Minimum flow regulation in Chile
A flowing river in Chile.
Beginning in the 1990’s, Chilean authorities began requiring a minimum “ecological flow” at a water right’s intake point. In 2005, an amendment to the Water Code formalized this instrument, setting the ecological flow as the minimum required to be left instream for environmental preservation. This ecological flow was to be set in consideration of the waterway’s natural conditions, but it was limited by law to a maximum 20% of the average flow; the Water Code allows the ecological flow to reach up to 40% in exceptional cases, but authorities have never used this provision.
Chile also uses a second instrument, to protect “environmental flow.” The environmental flow is required as a mitigation measure within the Environmental Impact Assessment System (SEIA), not the Water Code, as part of the permitting process. The environmental flow is supposed to be determined holistically, considering the different uses and functionality of the reach where the extraction is authorized.
Unfortunately, both mechanisms for minimum flow protection focus solely on stream conditions at intake points, not throughout the entire system, leaving significant lengths of many waterways unprotected and subject to dewatering. The ecological flow approach also uses hydrological averages, which defines in abstract the amount of water necessary to prevent the deterioration of the environment, less considering the water source and its unique ecosystem dynamics and water use setting. Both mechanisms also have struggled to impose restrictions on pre-existing water rights or uses.
Chile’s instruments also have struggled through several court challenges. First, water users argued that water rights could not be restricted to provide ecological flows, but the Chilean Supreme Court ruled several times between 2000 and 2004 that Chile’s constitutional environmental protection mandate provided a legal basis for that limitation. However, the ecological flow requirements could only be applied to new water rights, not to pre-existing rights. Conversely, environmental flows apply to any environmental permits that require SEIA, including infrastructure like water diversions and dam projects, and so it reaches more waters, although it does not reach uses like agriculture and industry that don’t generally have to submit to impact analysis.
This results in a harsh reality: most rivers in Chile lack effective real instream flow protection, and, in the central valleys of Chile, many rivers lack adequate flows to maintain their fluvial ecosystems (DGA Report 2008).
Updates to the Water Code in 2022 offer new approaches. The new instruments allow reservation of water for ecosystem preservation, recognize water rights’ exercise in non-extractive uses, and ban new water rights in protected areas. Their success will depend on how they are interpreted and applied, and how they work with the existing ecological and environmental flow provisions.
As Chile continues to build its regulatory and enforcement framework for flow protection, it can learn from California’s failures to protect its own instream flows.
B. Lessons From California’s Failures
1. Laws are Not Enough
Photo of low winter flows on the Eel River in 1920.
Although California does not have a single law that requires minimum flow protection for all waterways in the state, California and federal law together create a sort of portfolio approach to minimum flow regulation in the state. Many of these laws have existed for more than 70 years, and some date from the 19th and early 20th Centuries. California examples include Fish and Game Code Section 5937, passed in 1915 to protect flows below dams; Water Code Section 1243.5, passed in 1969 to require consideration of instream water uses; the state endangered species and water quality laws passed in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the state public trust doctrine and constitutional unreasonable use requirements. Federal examples include the Federal Endangered Species Act, providing for the protection of listed species, which may include restricting water use; the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hydropower licensing laws, requiring licenses for non-federal hydropower projects, which often contain significant protections for fish and wildlife and the flows they require; and tribal fishing rights, which secure fishing rights for indigenous groups and implicitly require flow to support fish populations. Despite these and other laws, California has historically failed to protect instream flows across the state, and many stream ecosystems lack rudimentary protections.
The reasons for the historical lack of enforcement are myriad, from a State Water Board that failed to consider instream water uses in appropriation decisions to anemic enforcement by state agencies. The result was that California’s waterways have been bled dry. Water rights in California had a century of essentially unregulated growth that established unsustainable water use patterns. California instream flow law lags far behind water use in the state and has a lot of catching up to do. Few California rivers and streams have established minimum flow requirements. Insufficient flow and misalignment of flow with ecosystem needs threatens ecosystems across the state and is a major threat to native fish populations, including economically valuable and culturally vital species like salmon and steelhead.
The enforcement of minimum flow standards only began to take effect in the early 1980s. California Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in National Audubon v. Superior Court made clear that the State Water Board had to consider instream uses of water in its water allocation decisions, under the public trust doctrine. National Audubon and other cases in the 1980s made clear that private individuals and nonprofit organizations could file suit to enforce public trust protections, including state laws protecting trust interests. The federal government began to get involved through its suite of federal environmental laws, mentioned above, nearly all of which were passed in the 1970s. Many federal laws, including the ESA and NEPA, contain citizen suit provisions, which means that federal agencies, private citizens, and nonprofits began to take significant enforcement roles under federal law in the 1980s.
It wasn’t until development of this healthy “enforcement ecosystem,” a multilayered system of environmental law well populated with a range of would-be enforcers (state agencies, federal agencies, private citizens and nonprofits enforcing state and federal law), that the state began to make real progress on minimum flow protection. Since then, parts of many rivers across the state have achieved a measure of instream flow protection (including the San Joaquin, the Owens River, the tributary streams to Mono Lake, the American River, and several others), nearly all instigated by private litigation, but much work remains to be done. Putting all enforcement responsibility on individual state or federal agencies is a recipe for long term failure; adequate enforcement of the law requires a healthy enforcement ecosystem.
2. Conflict Motivates Collaboration
The dry riverbed of the San Joaquin before litigation succeeded in restoring flows to the river.
Emergence of a robust environmental enforcement ecosystem has also increased conflicts around water rights and water projects, because it has given the environment a stronger seat at the table. This conflict, however, seems to be essential to motivate cooperation and negotiation. On the lower American River, for example, the parties negotiated a robust framework for environmental flows. When those flows proved inadequate during drought conditions, the parties returned to negotiate a new framework. But these negotiations occurred against a backdrop of thirty years of litigation. Without that threat of continued conflict, it is unlikely that the parties would have been able to find common ground. Similarly, the federal ESA often creates conditions conducive to negotiation, given its sometimes draconian penalties. In many cases, threatened or ongoing litigation seems to be the primary driver of compromise solutions. Litigation is expensive, and solutions imposed by a court are often risky and fall short of the flexibility and efficiency that parties can work out on their own. But the threat of a poor legal outcome seems necessary to get all Major parties to negotiate seriously. Absent an active enforcement ecosystem, the status quo continues and environmental water uses tend to get short shrift. Conflict motivates collaboration.
C. A Shared Challenge: Implementing Instream Flows
In both Chile and California, in cases where some mechanism has led to implementing minimum flows, difficulties in determining appropriate instream flows often delay the process for years or even decades. Data may be insufficient, the parties involved may drag their heels or argue for more study, or the bureaucratic apparatus may simply take time. These delays can slow the enforcement of otherwise clear laws and operate to the benefit of water users who would otherwise have to give up water to support instream uses. It is all too easy for those studying aquatic ecosystems and risk-averse regulators to agree that more study is required to establish minimum flows, but the delay means that the aquatic systems don’t benefit in the interim.
Enforcement tends to be faster when private parties or the federal government files lawsuits and a court implements flows, but there are too many watercourses in California to depend entirely on private enforcement. The end result is that enforcement by the state of instream flow requirements on all California and Chilean watersheds would take centuries at current rates. Ultimately, we need to establish flows quickly, even if the flows aren’t perfect, even if they are slightly over or under protective. Also, we need to develop a set of instruments to ensure those volumes of water with the collaboration of all the stakeholders involved in each river. As we discuss in our next two blogs, the Functional environmental flows framework could provide just such a methodology.
A view of the dry San Juan Creek in Shandon, California on April 29th, 2015, taken by Kelly M. Grow/ California Department of Water Resources.
Herrera, M., Candia, C., Rivera, D., Aitken, D., Brieba, D., Boettiger, C., Donoso, G., & Godoy-Faúndez, A. (2019). Understanding water disputes in Chile with text and data mining tools. Water International, 44(3), 302-320. https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2019.1599774
Rivera, D., Godoy-Faúndez, A., Lillo, M., Alvez, A., Delgado, V., Gonzalo-Martín, C., Menasalvas, E., Costumero, R., & García-Pedrero, Á. (2016). Legal disputes as a proxy for regional conflicts over water rights in Chile. Journal of Hydrology, 535, 36-45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2016.01.057
Camila Boettiger is an Associate Professor at the School of Law, Universidad del Desarrollo (Chile). A Lawyer, she holds a Master’s in Juridical Science and a Ph.D. in Law from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her main courses are Environmental and Natural Resources Law, focusing her research in Water Law, currently executing several projects on instruments and regulations for conservation and sustainable management of water resources.
UC Davis Acting Professor of Law Karrigan Börk’s publications run the gamut from the definitive text on the history and application of California minimum streamflow requirements to a hatchery and genetic management plan for the reintroduction of spring-run Chinook salmon in the San Joaquin River. Professor Börk graduated with Distinction and Pro Bono Distinction from Stanford Law School in 2009 and completed his Ph.D. dissertation in Ecology at UC Davis in September 2011. He works on legal and ethical issues in ecological restoration, including local governance issues in ecosystem management. His current work focuses on Western water law.
This blog post is the first of three posts resulting from an international collaboration on environmental flows between Chile’s Universidad del Desarrollo and Universidad de Talca, and the University of California, Davis (ANID Project FOVI 220188) law, engineering, economics, hydrology, and ecology researchers. Project FOVI 220188 “Minimum flows and information of water uses in surface waters: experiences and challenges in Chile and California” is funded by Chile’s National Agency of Research and Development (ANID).
By Francisco J. Bellido-Leiva, Nicholas Corline, and Robert A. Lusardi
About 1,500 dams obstruct, modify, and regulate flow in all but one of California’s major rivers. These dams provide Californians with reliable drinking and irrigation water, flood protection for low-lying communities, and hydropower for our electrical grid. But dams also threaten downstream ecosystems by severely disrupting natural processes with potentially dire consequences for native species. Dams affect ecosystems (both upstream and downstream) in many ways, including eliminating habitat inundated by reservoirs, reducing connectivity for migratory and resident fishes, and altering natural flow, sediment, temperature, and nutrient regimes. While several “deadbeat” dams are now being removed, many will continue to play a critically important role in California’s water infrastructure.
In response, alternative management strategies for dam operations are being developed, to reinstate key ecosystem processes. One approach is the California Environmental Flows Framework (CEFF), which focuses on mimicking key parts of the annual hydrograph, and their historical ranges, to regain important ecosystem processes and create biophysical conditions that benefit native species. Previous posts (here, here, and here) and a case study implementation are included in further readings (Yarnell et al. 2024).
Like flow management, downstream water temperatures can also be controlled to mimic historical thermal regimes or create conditions favorable for native species in novel environments (Olden and Naiman, 2010). The ability of dam managers to control downstream temperatures relies on reservoir thermal stratification (i.e., warm water near the surface and cold water at deeper depths) and infrastructure, such as selective withdrawal devices (SWD). SWDs allow dam operators to release and mix water of different temperatures from multiple depths. California has several of these structures. The largest SWD is at Shasta Dam, which helps provide suitable water temperatures for endangered winter-run Chinook salmon spawning and egg incubation, downstream of Keswick Reservoir.
Do SWDs subsidize downstream food-webs?
While taking monthly samples of aquatic invertebrates downstream of Keswick Dam (Redding, CA) in the Sacramento River, we found high abundances of pelagic zooplankton. Typically, we would not expect zooplankton production in this part of the Sacramento River due to high turbulence and water velocity. We speculated this prevalence of zooplankton must originate upstream from lentic habitats (i.e. Shasta Reservoir). As such, we started to ask a series of questions: What is exported from Shasta Reservoir? Do export concentrations vary through time? And, does the SWD at Shasta Reservoir control downstream exports to the Sacramento River?
Figure 1: (a) Zooplankton sample taken from the Sacramento River, downstream of Keswick Dam; (b) schematic of the SWD at Shasta Dam.
To answer these questions, we developed a pilot study that measured food-web resources downstream of Keswick Dam including zooplankton, chlorophyll-a (a proxy for phytoplankton), and nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus. This monthly sampling (Fig. 2) represented a good cross-section of gate operations and conditions in Shasta Reservoir from fully-mixed to a strongly stratified reservoir.
Critical nutrients associated with ecosystem productivity were released from Shasta Reservoir throughout the year. Exported nutrient concentrations were comparable to highly productive spring-fed systems in the area that receive nutrient-rich groundwater (Lusardi et al. 2016, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2023). Such high nutrient subsidies may enhance primary and secondary production downstream of Keswick Dam. Increases in nutrient concentration exports correlated strongly with the operation of the SWD’s lower gates at Shasta Dam. Nutrients accumulate deep in reservoirs during stratified conditions in summer and are exported to the Sacramento River during operation of deeper gates in fall.
Food-web resources were continuously exported downstream, including phytoplankton and zooplankton, with distinct peaks in April and January corresponding to reservoir mixing and vertical transport of nutrients to the photic zone. During this study, we estimated that 95 metric tons of zooplankton carbon was exported from the reservoir during the 12-month study period, mostly during April and January. Strikingly, most of this subsidy was utilized within five river kilometers downstream of Keswick Dam.
Figure 2: Nutrient concentration (nitrogen and phosphorous), chlorophyll-a and zooplankton biomass samples in the Sacramento River during the study. The lower subplot shows Shasta Lake’s SWD operation (shaded rectangles), stratification and mixing dynamics during the study period (adapted from Corline et al., 2023).
Food-web subsidies from large reservoirs
Shasta Reservoir resembles a multilayered cake, where different layers of food web resources (i.e., nutrients and plankton) could be preferentially exported using gate operation and timing to benefit the Sacramento River. The following diagram shows the dynamics observed from our sampling below the Shasta/Keswick complex, in which using the shallower gates during high productivity periods facilitated food-web exports (e.g., zooplankton), while using lower gates during stratified conditions enabled nutrient export.
Figure 3: Conceptual diagram showing the interrelation of the reservoir’s internal productivity dynamics and export content depending on SWD operation (from Corline et al. 2023).
Could the SWD help manage downstream food webs?
Although the primary objectives of the SWD are to maintain water exports, hydroelectric power generation, and cold-water releases for spawning winter-run Chinook salmon, Shasta Dam operations and internal reservoir conditions also control nutrient and food resource exports to the Sacramento River. Given that most habitats downstream of dams are highly altered, export subsidies could be another tool to manage these habitats for native species, particularly under a changing climate. Recent research points to a coupling of temperature and food availability in providing habitat heterogeneity and ecosystem productivity in stream environments (Lusardi et al. 2020; Armstrong et al. 2022). Is it possible to better operate SWDs to manage reservoir productivity to support downstream ecosystems? Our future research aims to quantify the importance of these subsidies to the downstream food web dynamics and understand how operation constraints might be balanced to enhance productivity in the Sacramento River.
Dr. Francisco J. Bellido-Leivais a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis.
Nicholas J. Corline is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation at Virginia Tech.
Dr. Robert A. Lusardi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology.
