ARCHIVE
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A Water Right for the Environment
by Brian Gray, Leon Szeptycki, and Barton “Buzz” Thompson California’s management of water for is not working for anyone. Environmental advocates argue that state and federal regulators have set water quality and flow standards that do not adequately protect fish and wildlife, and have not enforced these requirements when they are most needed. Farm and…
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A Tale of Two Fires: How Wildfires Can Both Help and Harm Our Water Supply
by Gabrielle Boisramé Now that summer is over and rain has returned to California, it appears that the dramatic 2017 fire season is finally behind us. The effects of fire season can linger, however, with the possibilities of erosion and polluted runoff from burned areas. Napa County has even issued suggestions for how to protect…
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Duel Conveyance: Delta Tunnel Dilemmas
by Jay Lund A new option has entered public discussion of Delta water supplies, having only one cross-Delta tunnel instead of two. The official State WaterFix proposal is for two tunnels (totaling 9,000 cfs capacity) under-crossing the Delta for 35 miles to allow up to 60% of Delta water exports to be directly from the…
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Moving Salmon over Dams with Two-Way Trap and Haul
by Peter Moyle and Robert Lusardi Removing Shasta Dam is the single best action we can take to save California’s wild salmon. Not possible, you say? Then there are two alternatives. One is to provide plenty of cold water and diverse, highly managed habitat below dams. The other is to transport fish to now-inaccessible habitat…
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The Spawning Dead: Why Zombie Fish are the Anti-Apocalypse
by Mollie Ogaz Imagine you are on the bank of a river or stream in California’s Central Valley. It is just past sunset, leaves rustle overhead, and you feel a tingling along your spine. Suddenly a zombie fish leaps past you, patches of decomposed flesh visible as it streaks by. It’s a thing of…
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Facing Rollbacks, California Must Protect Drinking Water, Wetlands
by Richard Frank This article originally appeared on Water Deeply. You can find the original here. Californians strongly support action by state and federal agencies to ensure that the water in our streams and the water we drink are free of dangerous contaminants, and that our precious wetlands are preserved. Unfortunately, the Trump administration and…
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Meet Dr. Andrew Rypel, our new fish squeezer
This year, we have the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Andrew Rypel to UC Davis and the Center for Watershed Sciences to his appointment as the new Peter B. Moyle and California Trout Endowed Chair in Coldwater Fishes. Dr. Rypel shares some of this thoughts about fish, science, and his new position: 1. How does it feel to be the new Peter B. Moyle and California Trout Endowed…
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Accounting for groundwater movement between subbasins under SGMA
by Christina Buck, Jim Blanke, Reza Namvar, and Thomas Harter The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) presents many new challenges and opportunities. One challenge is accounting for ‘interbasin flow,’ or subsurface groundwater movement between subbasins, a piece of the overall water budget required in Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSPs). The Department of Water Resources is tasked…
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20 Years Ago a Pretty Good Idea: The UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences
by Jeffrey Mount The UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences turns 20 years old this month. I am the first Director of the Center. The current Director — Jay Lund — asked me to write an account of the origins of the Center, including some reflection on any key lessons. The Center was and remains…
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Evolutionary genomics informs salmon conservation
by Tasha Thompson, Michael Miller, Daniel Prince and Sean O’Rourke Spring Chinook and summer steelhead (premature migrators) have been extirpated or are in decline across most of their range while fall Chinook and winter steelhead populations (mature migrators) remain relatively healthy. Because premature migrating fish are closely related to mature migrating fish within the same river,…
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Groundwater Nitrate Sources and Contamination in the Central Valley
by Katherine Ransom and Thomas Harter In California’s Central Valley, many communities depend significantly or entirely on groundwater as their drinking water supply. Studies estimate the number of private wells in the Central Valley to be on the order of 100,000 to 150,000 (Viers et al., 2012; Johnson and Belitz, 2015). Elevated nitrate concentrations in…
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Floodplains in California’s Future
by Peter Moyle, Jeff Opperman, Amber Manfree, Eric Larson, and Joan Florshiem The flooding in Houston is a reminder of the great damages that floods can cause when the defenses of an urban area are overwhelmed. It is hard to imagine a flood system that could have effectively contained the historic amount of rain that…
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The Little Shasta River: A model for sustaining our national heritage
by Ann Willis, Rob Lusardi, Alex Hart, Susan Hart, Blair Hart, Andrew Braugh, Amy Campbell, Ada Fowler Rancher: farms. Conservationist: fish. Researcher: science. Too often, identity is used to divide us. Stereotypes are used to stake out conflicting positions. It’s a zero-sum approach that ignores the commonality of our natural – and national – heritage.…
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Preliminary Analysis of Hurricane Harvey Flooding in Harris County, Texas
by Nicholas Pinter, Nicholas Santos, and Rui Hui Located in Harris County, Texas, Houston is the 4th most populous city in the US. The flooding now unfolding in the Houston area is a human and economic disaster likely to rank with Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy among the worst in US history. At the present moment,…
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Trump Killed Obama’s Flood Protection Rule Two Weeks Ago
by Nicholas Pinter This post was originally published as an op-ed in Fortune. Whether or not you like President Donald Trump, the current administration has not been gifted with great timing. Just 10 days before Hurricane Harvey made landfall, the White House rescinded one of the most progressive flood-risk management tools on the books, an…
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We hold our convenient truths to be self-evident – Dangerous ideas in California water
by Jay Lund Success in water management requires broad agreement and coalitions. But people often seem to group themselves into communities of interests and ideology, which see complex water problems differently. Each group tends to hold different truths to be self-evident, as outlined below. These beliefs, when firmly held, do not stand up to scientific…
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Habitat Preferences of various Delta species
Like fish, the different human professions involved in the Delta have different habitat preferences: Lawyers: high turbidity and fear, complex egosystems, either high and cynical levels of expectation, abundant funds Engineers: high clarity, data-rich nutrient sources, high expectation concentrations, abundant funds Biologists: thrives on uncertainty and inconclusiveness, extreme biodiversity, highly dynamic ecosystems with complex structure,…
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California WaterFix and Delta Smelt
by Peter Moyle and James Hobbs The delta smelt is on a trajectory towards extinction in the wild. Heading into 2017, the spawning adult population was at an all-time low although this past wet winter has apparently seen a small resurgence. However, increasingly warm summer temperatures in the Delta may dampen any upswing. Given the…
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Small, self-sufficient water systems continue to battle a hidden drought
by Amanda Fencl and Meghan Klasic California’s drought appears over, at least above ground. As of April 2017, reservoirs were around 2 million acre feet above normal with record breaking snowpack . This is great news for the 75% of Californians that get their drinking water from large, urban surface water suppliers. Groundwater, however, takes longer to…
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Fish, flows, and 5937 – legal challenges on the Santa Maria River
by Karrigan Bork, JD, PhD Driving down the 101, you cross a half-mile long bridge over the Santa Maria River into the city of Santa Maria, California. It’s a large bridge, with big levees to constrain the river on either end. But the Santa Maria River, like many southern California rivers, is dry throughout much…