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California WaterBlog

Previous Posts

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  • 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…

  • Conserving California’s Freshwater Biodiversity Under Climate Change

    By Ted Sommer and Jeffrey Mount Introduction The conservation of freshwater biodiversity has emerged as a global challenge. The loss of habitat and the changing climate are reducing the viability of native freshwater species worldwide—and California is no exception to this. For decades the state has struggled to protect its native species.  Today, roughly half of California’s native…

  • Restoration of Tidal wetlands of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – Where are we at?

    By Rosemary Hartman, Matt Young, Dylan Chapple, Stacy Sherman, Dave Ayers, Emma Mendonsa, Elizabeth Brusati, and Louise Conrad Tidal wetlands in the Sacramento – San Joaquin Delta used to be vast. You may have seen artistic renditions of how the landscape may have looked with meandering channels weaving through a mosaic of land and water…

  • Amazing Invader: American Shad

    By Peter Moyle The California Fish Commission introduced American Shad into California in 1871 via milk crates shipped on the newly built transcontinental railroad (Dill and Cordone 1997). Shad, apparently the first non-native fish species (of 50) to become established in the state, were so well suited to California that in a few years, shad…

  • How well do you know California water?

    California has an extensive and complex water system. Can many people name all the waterways on this common California water map (with the names removed)? Give it a try. No cheating. (Unlike some map quizzes and the 1957 California Water Plan, this map has no imaginary features, except perhaps when some of the river channels run dry.)…

  • The Big Impact of Small Waters: Zooplankton Density Trends in the North Delta

    By Kim Luke & John Durand Zooplankton and their history in the San Francisco Estuary Zooplankton are tiny aquatic organisms unable to swim against currents; they include microscopic crustaceans, small jellyfish, and larval life stages of other organisms (Figure 1). Although zooplankton are small in size, they have a big impact on the food web…

  • Salmon and the Subsurface

    By David Dralle, Gabe Rossi, Phil Georgakakos, Jesse Hahm, Daniella Rempe, Monica Blanchard, Mary Power, Bill Dietrich, and Stephanie Carlson You’ve probably noticed that some streams flow year-round while others are seasonally dry, despite receiving similar amounts of rainfall. Through a recent NSF-funded effort (“Eel River Critical Zone Observatory”), we learned several things about how…

  • Adaptive Management Wheels

    by Jay Lund In practice, adaptive management wheels have squarish corners. In ideal adaptive management, there is a steady or periodic process for gathering performance and environmental data, analyzing that data in the context of an integrative computer model, discussions based on the analysis to determine the most promising adaptations of management to reflect this…

  • Water Right Exactions

    By Karrigan Börk Water right exactions are a proposed tool to mitigate costs associated with water rights and water infrastructure that would also help users make better decisions about how much water to use. But first, what are exactions? Exactions are a land use permitting tool used by cities and other permitting agencies to ensure developers…

  • Bill Bennett: friend of fish and fisheries in the San Francisco Estuary

    by Peter Moyle William A. Bennett (1955-2024)  was a top-notch scientist/biologist who spent much of his career improving our understanding of the ecology and management of native and non-native fishes in the SF Estuary (SFE) especially delta smelt and striped bass.  Those of us who had the good fortune to work with him knew Bill as an insightful…

  • Book Review: Seek Higher Ground

    by Peter Moyle Seek Higher Ground: The Natural Solution to Our Urgent Flooding Crisis, by Tim Palmer. University of California Press 2024.                                             Flooding is a natural phenomenon that we humans keep assuming can be controlled with enough effort and engineering.  But this simply is not possible, as floods across the globe repeatedly demonstrate. People continue to…

  • How to incentivize better groundwater use

    by Ellen Bruno, Molly Bruce, and Katrina Jessoe For more than a century, parts of California have been using groundwater faster than the resource can be replenished. As a result, aquifers are dwindling—a mounting challenge for irrigators, communities, and ecosystems.  The negative impacts of over-extraction include subsidence, shallower wells running dry, and water-quality deterioration. If overextraction remains…

  • Roaches of California: Hidden Biodiversity in a Native Minnow

    by Peter B. Moyle *This is a repost of a blog originally published in 2019. If you inspect small streams in northern California, including those that seem too small or warm for any fish, you will often see minnows swimming in the clear water. Chances are you are seeing a very distinctive native Californian, usually…

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