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California WaterBlog

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  • Anticipating Increases in Flood Risk for Yolo County and its Native Fishes

    by Peter Moyle  Close relatives of mine live in Asheville, North  Carolina.  Retired professors, they chose to move there in part because of its pleasant climate. This quiet community was hit hard by Hurricane Helene, on September 27, 2024. The path the hurricane took through Asheville was unprecedented and heavy rains and flooding resulted in widespread treefalls,…

  • California Water under a Trump Administration, Part 2 of 2

    By Karrigan Börk Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series of blogs that examines how the incoming Trump Administration may—or may not—be able to change how water is managed in California.  The first blog covered three issues: the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), updates of the Bay-Delta Water Quality Plans, and major infrastructure projects. The…

  • California Water under a Trump Administration, Part 1 of 2

    By Karrigan Börk Editor’s note: Interim Director Karrigan Börk appeared on the NPR show AirTalk a few weeks ago to address California water policy under a Trump administration; the segment starts at 18:00. This blogpost is the first of a 2 part series exploring the topic from a nonpartisan perspective with a goal of predicting likely outcomes…

  • Delta Ecosystem Threatened by Another Nonnative Mollusk

    By Andrew Cohen and Peter Moyle One of the world’s most invasive freshwater mussels has arrived in North America. The Golden Mussel (Limnoperna fortunei), discovered in the California Delta in October, is a voracious plankton feeder and may further reduce the food supply for Delta Smelt and other plankton-feeding fishes in low salinity environments. It…

  • Happy Holidays! 🎊

    The blog is taking a holiday break, but we’ll return next Sunday!  Don’t forget that 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!

  • Dear Santa: A California Water Holiday Wish List

    by folks at UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences: Karrigan Börk, John Durand, Jay Lund, Christine Parisek, Andrew Rypel, Kathleen Schaefer, Jonathan Walter (authors listed alphabetically, and all are now PhDs. Congratulations to Doctors Parisek and Schaefer!) ‘Tis the season of gift-giving (and gift-seeking).  So we thought a California Water Holiday wish list might be…

  • Growing food for ducks and fish in seasonally flooded managed wetlands

    By Kyle Phillips, Alice Tung, Teejay O’Rear, John Durand In a recent publication in Freshwater Biology, UC Davis researchers found that waterfowl food-plants in managed wetlands of Suisun Marsh can boost plankton production by an order of magnitude compared to plants in open tidal habitats. Suisun Marsh is one of the largest tidal wetlands on the west coast…

  • Not All Flood Maps are Created Equal

    By Indumati Roychowdhury, Kallee Bareket-Shavit, Ryan Miller, and Nicholas Pinter For assessing flood risk in California, not all flood maps are created equal. We compared FEMA’s flood maps to independent modeling, including climate-informed flood risk. This comparison illustrates very different pictures of flood risk, depending on the map used and how those maps were created,…

  • 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…

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