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California WaterBlog

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  • Jobs per drop irrigating California crops

    By Josué Medellín-Azuara, Jay Lund and Richard Howitt Some of the most popular drought stories lately have been on the amount of what water needed to produce food from California, as a consumer sees it — a single almond, a head of lettuce or a glass of wine. The stories are often illustrated with pictures of common…

  • Food prices and the California drought

    By Daniel A. Sumner California’s drought has been tough on farms and especially painful for farm workers in the Central Valley. But consumers of California-produced food have been spared large price increases. Despite the severity of the drought and California’s dominant market shares in many foods – especially fruits, vegetables and tree nuts – consumers…

  • Dollars and drops per California crop

    By Josué Medellín-Azuara and Jay Lund When it comes to water, California’s irrigated agriculture is always under the public magnifying glass because it is the largest managed water use in the state and the economic base for many rural areas. During a prolonged drought like the current one, however, crop water comes under a microscope.…

  • Making every drop count in drought – and deluge

    By Joshua Viers and Graham Fogg A little publicized but highly curious part of the emergency drought legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last month advances hundreds of millions of dollars to shore up and replace aging levees in flood prone areas of the state. Drought relief through better flood control? Really? As it turns…

  • Exotic animals deployed as Delta ‘weed whackers’

    By Nestle J. Frobish Visitors to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are doing double takes lately as they encounter some newly introduced “biological controls” to keep a fast-spreading waterweed from damaging boat propellers and choking off waterways. Working with state water officials, UC Davis scientists last month released a herd or “bloat” of hippopotamuses from Botswana…

  • The California Drought of 2015: A preview

    By Jay Lund This fourth year of drought is severe, but not yet the driest ever. The drought’s impacts are worsened by record heat, which has dried out soils and raised the demands for irrigation, and the historical high levels of California’s population, economy, and agricultural production, and historical low levels of native fish species. There is…

  • Water giveaways during a drought invite conflict

                                                    This article first ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 20, 2015. By Jay Lund and Peter Moyle When labor is scarce, people move to better jobs with higher wages.…

  • Prepare for extinction of delta smelt

    By Peter Moyle I saw my first delta smelt in 1972, during my first fall as an assistant professor at UC Davis. I was on a California Department of Fish and Wildlife trawl survey to learn about the fishes of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The survey then targeted young striped bass, but the trawl towed…

  • Salmon finding a home in my backyard – Could it be?

    By Peter Moyle The sound of splashing drew me to the stream. A dark finned back cut the surface. Salmon? The fish came into view and its snout was a giveaway, maroon-hued and curved like a hook. This was a spawning male Chinook salmon. It alternated between chasing another hooknose and two jacks, small males…

  • Creating effective groundwater sustainability plans

    Jay Lund, Thomas Harter, Robert Gailey, Graham Fogg, Richard Frank, Helen Dahlke, Timothy Ginn, Sam Sandoval Solis, Thomas Young — UC Davis Andrew Fisher, Ruth Langridge — UC Santa Cruz Joshua Viers, Thomas Harmon — UC Merced Patricia Holden, Arturo Keller — UC Santa Barbara Michael Kiparsky — UC Berkeley Todd Greene, Steffen Mehl —…

  • The California Drought of 2015: March

    By Jay Lund Droughts are strange, and this one is becoming scarier. February began with a nice few stormy days, but has since looked like this January – very dry. And so far, the March forecast is not wet. At the beginning of March, the Northern Sierra (Sacramento Valley) Precipitation Index was down to 88%…

  • Dutch lessons on levee design and prioritization for California

    This is the second of an intermittent series of articles on the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. By Jay Lund In any lowland, levees define how humans live and how they disrupt native habitats. This is as true for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as it is for coastal Louisiana, Vietnam and the Netherlands. Flood…

  • 21st Century Delta: Reconciling the desired with the possible

    This is this first in an intermittent series of articles on the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. By Steven Culberson Estuaries are hard places to understand and even harder to explain. Estuarine scientists, myself included, have struggled to learn how changes in the San Francisco Estuary led to declining fish populations and waning productivity,…

  • The romance of rain barrels

    By Jay Lund Imagine capturing some of the heavy rain that has been draining off Northern California roofs lately to water yards this summer, for what will likely be a fourth year of drought. The drought has generated interest in household cisterns commonly known as “rain barrels” that collect and store rooftop runoff for when…

  • The California Drought of 2015: February

    Feb. 4, 2015 drought update on Capital Public Radio By Jay Lund Odds are exceedingly good that February will top January’s contribution to precipitation in California. It’s hard to be drier than what was essentially zero rain and snowfall last month. The state’s driest January on record dropped the Northern Sierra Precipitation Index down from…

  • How dam operators can breathe more life into rivers

    By Sarah Yarnell Dams are no friend to biodiversity. Once impounded, a river answers first and foremost to human needs, be it water supply, energy production or flood protection. Releases are measured and timed to satisfy these demands. As a result, the river downstream loses much of its natural variability in timing, volume and spread of…

  • A salmon success story during the California drought

    Looking back on 2014, it’s hard not to feel despair for California salmon. With drought-stricken rivers running dangerously warm and slow for spring migration, the government was giving millions of young hatchery salmon a lift to the Pacific by truck and barge. Come August, several streams in the Central Valley were drying up. Native fish…

  • The California Drought of 2015: January

    By Jay Lund The California Department of Water Resources does a great job assembling data that can give insights on water conditions during the ongoing drought. They update the information daily (which can be addictive for some of us) on the California Data Exchange Center website. Here are highlights of water conditions as of January…

  • Drought a ghost of Christmas past — and present

    By Peter Moyle I love this cartoon because it says so much about water and droughts in California. Alan Marciochi drew this during the 1976-77 drought. He knew what he was drawing. A farm boy from Los Banos with a degree in biology, Alan worked for me studying endangered Modoc suckers in remote northeastern corner of…

  • New environmentalism needed for California water

    By Jay Lund California needs a new environmentalism to set a more effective and sustainable green bar for the nation and even the world. For decades, we have taken a “just say no” approach to stop, prevent or blunt human encroachments onto the natural world – often rightly so. Early environmentalism needed lines in the…

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