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California WaterBlog

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  • Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃

    The blog is taking a break for the holiday, but we’ll be back next Sunday!  In exciting news, we’ve added a new Guest Submissions Page, making sharing your ideas with us easier. If you’ve been thinking about contributing a post to the California WaterBlog, now is the perfect time to check it out!  Enjoy the holiday!

  • Sacramento Perch: An Experiment in Unconventional Conservation? 

    By Lynette Williams Duman & Mason Rogers The forgotten panfish of the West Bluegill, redear sunfish, and largemouth bass: these species are familiar and, for many, elicit fond memories of fishing in warm waters on a hot summer’s day. It is for this reason, and others, that California has introduced these sportfishes, and a myriad…

  • Pathways to research: An interview with Jon Walter

    By Cathryn Lawrence This blog is the first in a series featuring interviews with scientists from the Center for Watershed Sciences to learn what sparked their passion to pursue a scientific research career. Kicking off the series we interview Jonathan Walter, a Senior Researcher and quantitative ecologist at CWS, who works on issues relating to the…

  • October is Over – What it means for this water year and some other musings

    by Jay R. Lund October 2024, the first month of the 2025 Water Year, has been dry, the 16th driest October in 103 years of Northern California precipitation records.  And the forecast for the next 10 days shows little for most of California. DWR has a nice map of this (see figure 1 to see…

  • Sό Semente – Only a Seed

    By Carson Jeffres, Gislene Torrente Vilara, Jansen Zuanon Seeds are often thought of as a start that will eventually grow into something larger than it originally started.  In this case, the seed was a seed grant from UC Davis Global Affairs to develop a collaborative project with international partners working with a migratory fish along the…

  • Got Blood? Unmasking a vampire fish

     By Emily L. Mensch “They’re strong, they’re fast, and they’re out for blood…..”  From the depths of a murky lake, a slimy eel-like creature emerges, slithering and writhing. With a gaping, circular mouth lined with rows of needle-sharp teeth spiraling inward, it locks in on its target prey: you! Soon this nightmarish creature is slinking…

  • Lessons from the California Environmental Flows Framework and Opportunities for Chile

    By Camila Boettiger, Karrigan Börk, Roberto Ponce Oliva, Diego Rivera, Jay Lund, and Sarah Yarnell Managing waterways for ecosystems with minimal loss to existing water uses is increasingly difficult. As we’ve discussed in the first two blogs in this series (here and here, now with Spanish language translations), California and Chile both struggle with this challenge. Both…

  • Black Bass Diversity in California

    By Peter B. Moyle and Andrew L. Rypel When both of us began studying the freshwater fishes of California, we independently discovered most fishes found in reservoirs and other highly altered habitats belonged to non-native species. Anglers and many fishery managers had pretty much accepted the reality that freshwater recreational fisheries are focused on non-native…

  • The foodscape – (re) connecting salmon to the productive capacity of their watersheds

    By Gabriel J. Rossi, J. Ryan Bellmore, Jonathan B. Armstrong, Carson Jeffres, Sean M. Naman, Stephanie M. Carlson, Theodore E. Grantham, Matthew J. Kaylor, Seth White, Jacob Katz, Mary E. Power In 1927, the famous ecologist Charles Elton (when he was 27 years old) set the stage for the modern ecological study when he published his…

  • Happy New Water Year 2025! – Wet, dry, or just plain weird?

    by Jay Lund and Alvar Escriva-Bou October 1 marks the beginning of the new Water Year in California. Water years here run from October 1 until September 30 of the next calendar year, and are named for the calendar year of the bulk of the water year (January-October).  It is a good time to reflect…

  • How Better Data is Helping to Improve Water Management in California

    By Spencer Cole Careful stewardship is key for managing California’s highly sought-after water resources, but a lack of reliable data hampers this goal. That’s beginning to change, however, thanks to two things: technological advances and the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which celebrates its 10th anniversary this month.  SGMA has made waves in the…

  • Ash in the Rivers: The Unexplored Consequences of Post-Wildfire Runoff on Freshwater Fish

    By Garfield Kwan & Christine Parisek Wildfires have become a hot topic. Although wildfires are a natural part of some ecosystems (e.g. the chaparral biome), megafires (fires that burn >100,000 acres of land) are becoming increasingly common as the climate continues to warm and droughts intensify. As of late, California’s fourth largest wildfire, the 2024 Park fire, charred…

  • Exploring Equity in California Water Rights: A Historical Perspective

    By Audrey Cho  This blog post highlights my undergraduate thesis at UC Davis titled Water, Land, and Power: The Legacy of Asian American Exclusion in the California Water Rights System. This blog post sheds light on historical injustices perpetuated by systems of state water management. Its content is informed by interviews with Japanese farmers as…

  • Watching native fishes vanish

    By Andrew L. Rypel and Peter B. Moyle It’s an odd, disturbing feeling – watching populations of native fish species collapse and then disappear. Sometimes it happens quickly, other times it’s a series of slowstep change events. The end result is the same though – smaller populations, extinctions, less biodiversity. We put up a little…

  • You’re invited to the Bay-Delta Science Conference from September 30-October 2, 2024 at the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center in downtown Sacramento

    by Miranda Bell-Tilcock The Bay-Delta Science Conference (BDSC) is just around the corner! The last BDSC was fully virtual in 2021, so we are very excited to see everyone at the first in-person conference since 2018. Just like in 2018, we will be at the Convention Center in downtown Sacramento, but it won’t be the…

  • Systematic assessments of non-native fishes in the San Francisco Estuary

    By Lynette Williams Duman, Elsie Platzer, and John Durand An invaded estuary There is widespread concern about the effect of introduced species on native species. The San Francisco Estuary (SFE) is a highly invaded system (Cohen and Carlton 1995), with a mix of native and introduced species that didn’t evolve together.  Humans introduced non-native species in a…

  • The Delta Smelt Controversy in Sociological Perspective

    By Caleb Scoville The Delta Smelt is a small, endangered fish that lives exclusively in the heart of the state’s water distribution system, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. At times, regulations to protect smelt affect conveyance of water to 35 million Californians and the state’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry. As Peter Moyle put it in a 2022 post,…

  • Tough Fish in a Harsh Place: Red Hills Roach

    by Peter B. Moyle *This is a repost of a blog originally published in 2019. Red Hills Roach are small (adults are 60-70 mm in total length) bronzy minnows that live in a challenging environment. They survive in a few small streams that start as seeps in a hot dry landscape, the serpentine outcrops of…

  • When Rivers Run Dry

    By Ted Grantham, Stephanie Carlson, and Albert Ruhi As we move into the full swing of summer, water managers are paying close attention to the remaining snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. Each year, water from melting snow flows into rivers, creating important environmental cues for native freshwater species and filling reservoirs, just as agricultural water demands peak…

  • 10 Lessons from a Collaborative Modeling Approach to discussing more adaptive Lake Powell and Lake Mead operations

    by David E. Rosenberg Water models serve a variety of purposes. Stakeholders and managers use models to simulate the effects of new possible management operations decades into the future. Models can quantify tradeoffs between stakeholder’s conflicting objectives. Models can also help stakeholders understand how their system works. In a recent study, I created a new…

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