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California WaterBlog

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  • 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…

  • California water ideas that deserve more attention

    By Peter B. Moyle, Karrigan Börk, Christine A. Parisek, Fabian A. Bombardelli, Jay Lund, and Andrew L. Rypel A panel blog Water systems run on ideas, among many other things. Water ideas are frequently discussed for improving and adapting California management to meet current and future challenges. Some ideas seem to receive too much attention,…

  • Retirement – an optimal stopping problem

    by Jay Lund By age 66, one realizes that, empirically, the great ride of life and a career will likely end within a few decades.  One recounts the longevity (or not) of one’s relatives.  Major long-term commitments look riskier.  One observes examples of people who prepared well and poorly for their decline and passing.  One…

  • California’s Amazing Terminal Lakes

    By Peter B. Moyle When Californians talk of lakes, they usually mean reservoirs, the 1500 or so artificial bodies of water behind dams. Alternately, they may be referring to the 4,000 or so natural lakes in the Sierra Nevada or to one of the few large natural lakes in the state, such as Lake Tahoe…

  • Schooling Fish: Behind the Scenes of Putah Creek Fish Sampling

    By Christine A. Parisek, Peter B. Moyle, Joshua Porter, and Andrew L. Rypel It’s a curious thing, teaching a classroom of future fish conservationists about revitalizing degraded ecosystems. Putah Creek was an unconventional place to teach ecology. After the creek turned bad, it stayed that way for decades – deteriorated habitat, nonexistent flow, garbage, rusted cars,…

  • Crawdads: Naturalized Californians

    By Peter Moyle *this is a repost of a blog originally published in June 2020. Crayfish, crawdads, crawfish: whatever you call them, they are everywhere in California’s waters and are as tasty as their lobster relatives. They are especially familiar to anglers who peer into the maw of a bass or pikeminnow or flush their…

  • Reallocating Environmental Risk

    By Karrigan Bork & Keith Hirokawa [X-posted from Environmental Law Prof Blog] Living the good life has often meant finding ways to allow for growth and construction while ostensibly protecting the natural environment on which we depend. Want to build a housing development, but there’s a wetland in the way? Mitigate the harm by building…

  • Dispatches From the Deep Pacific

    By: Sophie R. Sanchez, Christine A. Parisek, Andrew L. Rypel Monsters are lurking… Off the coast of California, down in the chilly depths of the Pacific Ocean, there lie the most unsettling denizens that appear summoned from the nightmares of Mira Grant. Here in the inky blackness, where nature spawned these most otherworldly configurations, inhabitants…

  • California Enacts Major Water Law Reform Legislation–But More Changes Are Needed

    By Richard M. Frank Note: this blog is a cross-post first published on Legal Planet. The California Legislature has enacted and Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed into law SB 389, an important water law reform measure authored by State Senator Ben Allen. California has one of the most antiquated and outdated water rights systems of…

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