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California WaterBlog

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  • Benefits of growing up in a spring stream

      Juvenile coho salmon feeding on invertebrates drifting in the water column.  The material floating down also consists of plant material that invertebrates use as a food resource. Video by Carson Jeffres   By Carson Jeffres and Jeffrey Mount When ecologists talk about improving habitat for native fishes, they often focus on enhancing food webs…

  • The future of Suisun Marsh

    By Peter Moyle If you have taken Amtrak from Sacramento to the Bay Area, you have seen Suisun Marsh.  Going west, as the train pulls out of Suisun City, you are suddenly riding through a huge wetland, with ponds full of waterfowl.  If you are lucky, you will see a flight of white pelicans taking…

  • Adaptive management means never having to say you’re sorry

    Jay R. Lund, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California – Davis Ellen Hanak, Public Policy Institute of California Brian Gray, University of California – Hastings, College of the Law   The words “adaptive management” appear in almost every planning and policy document for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.  Indeed, under state law, habitat…

  • An uncertain future for whitewater boating under climate change

    Scott Ligare, Graduate Student Researcher, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, UC Davis Joshua Viers, Associate Research Scientist, Department of Environmental Science & Policy, UC Davis Summer arrived belatedly in northern California and high snowmelt runoff is attracting adrenaline junkies seeking to raft and kayak Sierra Nevada rivers. With its many large rivers, the west slope…

  • Managing for multiple stressors in the Delta

    Ellen Hanak1, Jay Lund2, Peter Moyle3, Jeffrey Mount4, Brian Gray5 and Barton “Buzz” Thompson6   Across California, native fish populations are in sharp decline, despite decades of well-intentioned efforts to reverse the effects of harmful water and land management policies (Hanak et al., 2011). As more fish species have been listed under the federal and…

  • Woodman, spare that levee?

    Jay Lund, the Ray B. Krone Professor of Environmental Engineering, University of California – Davis   Policy debates sometimes seem to tragically miss the big picture.  The current debate on levee vegetation in California is an example.  Both sides assert noble and worthy causes—environmental and recreation interests favor trees and bushes on levees and public…

  • No going back for the Delta, but which way forward?

    Jay Lund, Professor of Environmental Engineering, University of California – Davis Peter Moyle, Professor of Fish Biology, University of California – Davis Ellen Hanak, Senior Fellow, Public Policy Institute of California, San Francisco Jeffrey Mount, Professor of Geology, University of California – Davis   “Restore” is a common cry for environmental problems.  For the Sacramento-San…

  • Suction dredging is bad for fish

    Peter B. Moyle, Professor of Fish Biology, UC Davis Suction dredging seems like a fairly innocent pastime.  A few folks go to a stream on a nice summer day with a portable device to suck tiny amounts of gold out of a stream bottom. The device basically is a floating sluice box equipped with a…

  • Can California further reduce urban water use?

    Jay Lund, the Ray B. Krone Professor of Environmental Engineering, UC Davis Ryan Cahill, graduate student, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Davis   Reducing urban water use has become a major long-term policy goal.  In 2009, California adopted a policy of further reducing urban water use by 20 percent per capita by 2020. …

  • Frolicking fat floodplain fish feeding furiously

    By Carson Jeffres Spring is here, temperatures are warming, and juvenile salmon have filled the floodplains—a link for them between the gravel bedded rivers where they hatched and the ocean where they will spend the next one to five years.  Although salmon may only use the floodplain for a month or two, this could mean…

  • The Delta, in 3-D

    Jay Lund, UC Davis Professor of Engineering   Time and tide wait for no man, and change in the Delta won’t wait for a computer model either. Continued land subsidence and sea level rise, increasing likelihood of a major earthquake, and rising chances of major floods all pose serious threats to subsided islands in the…

  • Water—Who uses how much?

    Whereas agriculture used to consume 80 percent of the state’s water supply, today 46 percent of  captured and stored water goes to environmental purposes, such as rebuilding wetlands. Meanwhile 43 percent goes to farming and 11 percent to municipal uses. — The Economist, October 2009 By Jeffrey Mount This excerpt is from an article that…

  • New Life for the Delta Ecosystem

    Peter Moyle, Professor of Fish Biology, University of California-Davis  The Delta and Suisun Marsh were once part of a continuous, enormously productive aquatic ecosystem that supported dense populations of fish from Sacramento perch to salmon, huge flocks of wintering waterfowl, and concentrations of mammals from beaver to tule elk. This amazing ecosystem is gone and…

  • What if the worst drought hit California today?

    “And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.” —  John Steinbeck Jay R. Lund, Ray B. Krone Professor of Environmental Engineering, University of California – Davis California has been…

  • Stressed Out—Dealing with the Delta’s non-native landscape

    Jay R. Lund, Ray B. Krone Professor of Environmental Engineering, University of California – Davis Peter Moyle, Professor of Fish Biology, University of California – Davis Jeffrey Mount, Professor of Geology, University of California – Davis Ellen Hanak, Public Policy Institute of California William Fleenor, Research Engineer, University of California – Davis   The Delta’s…

  • Blogs, blogs everywhere…

    This week’s blog is a compilation of recent stories you might have missed. BDCP parties agree to a peripheral bucket line around Delta – The 44 mile line would require 33,000 employees per shift, spaced 7 feet apart, and would have a capacity of 5 gallons per second.  A DWR spokesman said, “This approach will…

  • Dammed fish? Call 5937.

    Peter Moyle, Professor of Fish Biology, UC Davis Brian Gray, Professor of Law, UC Hastings School of Law “The owner of any dam shall allow sufficient water at all times to pass over, around, or through the dam, to keep in good condition any fish that may be planted or exist below the dam.” California…

  • Taking agricultural conservation seriously

    Jay Lund1, Ellen Hanak2, Richard Howitt3, Ariel Dinar4, Brian Gray5, Jeffrey Mount6, Peter Moyle7, Barton “Buzz” Thompson8     For decades, people have observed that human water use in California is largely devoted to irrigating farmland, and they have therefore assumed that farms are the obvious places to save water.  Our recent book, Managing California’s…

  • Sea level rise and Delta subsidence—the demise of subsided Delta islands

    Jay R. Lund, the Ray B. Krone Professor of Environmental Engineering, University of California – Davis Periodically, scientists point to the weaknesses of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.  The press and policy makers respond with astonishment, followed by local assertions of levee sustainability and pleas for greater subsidies.  This cycle has recurred several times…

  • Water to the sea isn’t wasted

    By Jeffrey Mount In December of 2010 we had a remarkable set of storms.  Relentless rain and snowfall hit both southern and northern California.  The news reports about these events followed a predictable pattern, including the inevitable articles that bemoan floodwaters as “wasted” because they discharge to the sea. This generalization about floodwaters or any…

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