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California WaterBlog

Previous Posts

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  • Support our Students and Engagement at the Center for Watershed Sciences

    California WaterBlog is a long-running outreach project from the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, a research center dedicated to interdisciplinary study of water challenges, particularly in California. We focus on environmentally and economically sustainable solutions for managing rivers, lakes, groundwater, and estuaries. This week, for UC Davis Give Day (April 19-20) we’re sharing a…

  • Mornings at the Duck Pond

    By Andrew L. Rypel Each morning is similar, but different. As we approach the pond on the wooden catwalk, you can hear the birds calling, eventually you start to smell the freshness of the ecosystem, the glitters and splashing ahead gives some indication of bird activity on the water. Sometimes an alligator lizard scoots past…

  • Spinning Salmon in the Classroom

    by Abigail Ward and Peggy Harte Salmon face many stressors that significantly reduce their survival. Persistent challenges include habitat degradation, predation, pollution, and climate change that threaten already at-risk populations. Conservation efforts in California engage with the complexity of these stressors, yet in recent years, a new threat has emerged to salmon restoration in the…

  • Manifesting Successful Aquatic Restoration

    by E.J. Baybe-Mahn Successful aquatic restoration traditionally comes from extensive research and knowledge of the system, collaboration among stakeholders, and thorough planning. But what if there was another way to ensure restorations are creating the results we want to see? With increasing effects of climate change, urbanization, and other anthropogenic factors, aquatic organisms, especially ones…

  • California’s March Water Madness

    by Jay Lund March is usually the last month in California’s mostly unpredictable wet season.  A dry March can make a promising water year disappointing.  A very wet March can make a potentially critically dry year be only mildly dry, like the “Miracle March” of 1991 (with three times average March precipitation).  Unlike basketball, nobody…

  • Love Alpaugh: Celebrating the life and legacy of Sandra Meraz

    By Kristin Dobbin “Some people say Alpaugh is the stepchild of Tulare County; I say we’re the forgotten ones. Rural families are an endangered species.” – Sandra Meraz, Dec 2014 in the LA Times When Alexandrina “Sandra” Meraz arrived in Alpaugh in the Spring of 1963 at the age of 22, one of the first…

  • A Functional Flows approach for Environmental Flows in Chile

    by Sarah Yarnell, Diego Rivera Salazar, Camila Boettiger, and Jay Lund Countries, regions, and river basins globally are struggling to provide and manage flows in rivers for ecosystems.  One approach, of many, is a Functional Flows approach, because it seeks to provide a range of streamflows over the year and between years to support fundamental…

  • Some curious things about water management

    By Jay R. Lund *This is a repost of a blog originally published in 2012. Water management is often very different from what we think intuitively, or what we have been taught. Here are some examples. 1. Most water decisions are local. Water policy and management discussions often seem to assume that state and federal…

  • Minimum Flow Laws in California and Chile

    By Camila Boettiger, Karrigan Börk, Roberto Ponce Oliva, Diego Rivera, Jay Lund, and Sarah Yarnell California and Chile share a history of water allocation with little regard for instream uses of water, especially environmental uses. In California, for example, many water rights were obtained with no consideration of the environmental impacts of the water use,…

  • Can large dams help feed downstream ecosystems?

    By Francisco J. Bellido-Leiva, Nicholas Corline, and Robert A. Lusardi About 1,500 dams obstruct, modify, and regulate flow in all but one of California’s major rivers. These dams provide Californians with reliable drinking and irrigation water, flood protection for low-lying communities, and hydropower for our electrical grid. But dams also threaten downstream ecosystems by severely disrupting…

  • Seven conservation lessons I learned in government work

    By Andrew L. Rypel *this is a repost of a blog originally published in 2020. Before joining the faculty at UC Davis, I spent the previous five years as a research scientist at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in Madison, Wisconsin. Apparently this experience is somewhat rare among academics. A peer even once described…

  • Green Sturgeon aren’t Salmon: Updated life cycle models for management

    by Erin E Tracy, Jon A. Walter, Karrigan Bork, Anna Steel, Francisco J Bellido-Leiva, Scott Colborne, Sarah Yarnell Over 65 million years ago, as Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the great plains, green sturgeon (Acipenser medirostris) were already roaming the world’s waters. While these ancient fish survived the fall of dinosaurs, they are now in danger of…

  • Even when most of California is dry doesn’t mean we can’t have floods

    by Jay Lund Every water year is different in California, and in any water year, local and regional experiences often differ.  California is a large state, far larger than most storm systems and atmospheric rivers with large topographic differences, so some parts of California are usually wetter or drier than others.  Part of the rationale…

  • How’s California’s water year developing? – January 2024

    by Jay Lund The first few months of California’s water year, which started in October 2023, have been pretty dry. We never know what to expect of California’s wet season until it ends, usually in late March.  This year is no exception.  Precipitation in California is almost uncorrelated from year to year (even with El…

  • Dam-Failure Flood Risk in California: How to Manage Low-Probability Hazards

    by Kallee Bareket-Shavit, Ryan Miller, and Nicholas Pinter Every year, damaging floods strike somewhere around the world, including sometimes in California like during winter 2022-23. Even a house with just a 1% chance of flooding each year (by the so-called “100-year flood”) has a 26% chance of inundation over a 30-year mortgage. Other natural hazards…

  • A Functional Flows approach to implementing Flood-MAR

    by Bronwen Stanford, Julie Zimmerman, Kris Taniguchi-Quan, Ted Grantham, Sarah Yarnell, Alyssa Obester, Eric Stein, Jessi Ayers, Alex Milward As recent droughts have highlighted, groundwater overuse is a serious problem in California. Overdraft is drying shallower domestic and municipal wells, dewatering groundwater dependent ecosystems (Rohde et al. 2021), and necessitating expensive infrastructure repairs. As climate…

  • A Functional Flows approach to implementing Flood-MAR

    by Bronwen Stanford, Julie Zimmerman, Kris Taniguchi-Quan, Ted Grantham, Sarah Yarnell, Alyssa Obester, Eric Stein, Jessi Ayers, Alex Milward As recent droughts have highlighted, groundwater overuse is a serious problem in California. Overdraft is drying shallower domestic and municipal wells, dewatering groundwater dependent ecosystems (Rohde et al. 2021), and necessitating expensive infrastructure repairs. As climate…

  • 2023 WaterBlog “Wrapped”

    By Christine A. Parisek The wait is over. Your 2023 WaterBlog Wrapped is here. As we wrap up our 12th year, and 2023, we thank all our readers, partners, authors, and friends who have supported the Center for Watershed Sciences and CaliforniaWaterBlog. CaliforniaWaterBlog’s mission is to provide thought-provoking and useful (at least interesting) commentary and…

  • How the Grinch Saved the Creek: A Collection of California Water Fables

    By Scrooge Jones Did you know the Grinch played a crucial role in the return of salmon to Putah Creek? It was actually a pretty big deal. And if it wasn’t for Charlie Brown and the gang, who knows what the state of economic-engineering optimization models for California water management would be today? ‘Tis the…

  • Science seen from different perspectives

    by Jay Lund The awe-inspiring Phil Isenberg used to talk about differences in culture between science and policy as being akin to the two cultures of scholarship discussed by C.P. Snow – science and humanities. It is hard for one mind to deeply appreciate the variety and importance of many ways of thinking, and more…

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