ARCHIVE
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Improving mandatory State cutbacks of urban water use for a 5th year of drought
By Jay R. Lund There is usually great uncertainty about when a drought will end, but certainty that longer droughts bring tougher economic and ecosystem conditions as water in aquifers and reservoirs is further depleted. Long droughts, like the current one, also bring opportunities to use water more efficiently, based on lessons from the drought so…
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California’s groundwater – basics, laws, and beyond
By Chris Austin Groundwater has been receiving a lot of attention lately, and for good reason. California is the heaviest groundwater user in the nation, and our use is increasing after recent, multiple dry years. The Sustainable Groundwater Supply Act of 2014 set a fundamentally new state water policy to manage and monitor the state’s…
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Rising to El Niño’s challenges – and opportunities
By Nicholas Pinter The much-anticipated El Niño has now arrived, with increased potential for heavy rain and snowfall, including the possibility of localized flooding, mudslides and other hazards. While extreme storms, flooding and other natural disasters challenge society to protect life and property from damage, they also present opportunities. Floods in particular often catalyze positive…
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Keep California’s water ‘Maven’ afloat
The nonprofit Maven’s Notebook has become the daily go-to place for the latest California water news and information, including meeting summaries, keynote speeches and digests of ponderous documents. It’s a one-person operation, and that person, Chris Austin (aka “Maven”), needs your donations to stay afloat. Helping Maven’s Notebook stay nonprofit helps everyone in California water policy and…
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Measuring the effectiveness of ‘environmental flows’
By Ann Willis and Andrew Nichols In the early fall of 2012, an unusually large number of Chinook salmon were returning to the Klamath River, straddling the California-Oregon border. Many of those fish were expected to swim upstream to the Shasta River, prompting emergency actions to increase stream flows in the upstream tributary. When Chinook…
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Finally, a one-stop shop for locating California’s fishes
By Nick Santos “Where?” The question is foundational to conservation biology and policy. To take a conservation action, you need to know where to act. And, yet, for decades stewards and researchers of aquatic fauna have been sorely lacking in tools to systematically collect, store and map data on where California’s freshwater fishes are located.…
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Watering up Halloween, California style
By Ghost Writer What better way to spook Californians this Halloween than to appear as a slobbering “Godzilla El Niño.” Or draped in a bedsheet as Godzilla’s opponent, “The Blob,” the amoeba-shaped patch of unusually warm Pacific water blocking storms in California. Too scary? Not to worry. Researchers at UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences…
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An update on California fishes of ‘special concern’
By Peter Moyle Three-fourths of California’s native fishes are now officially designated as being in trouble, or potentially so. The good news is that not all of these species – 93 of the total 123 native fishes today – have to go the way of winter-run Chinook salmon or delta smelt, which are verging on…
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Capturing El Niño for the underground
By Philip Bachand, Helen Dahlke, William Horwath, Thomas Harter and Toby O’Geen A much-anticipated “Godzilla” El Niño this winter may refill California’s drought-diminished reservoirs, but it won’t do much to restock the severely depleted aquifers we rely upon to get by during droughts. One reason for this is the sheer depth of California’s precipitation deficit…
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Urban water conservation for the birds
By Jay Lund People who save water like to know their conserving is doing some good, such as sustaining economic growth, building municipal reserves for longer droughts or supporting the environment. But many urban residents are concerned their water savings will go to uses they value less — such as supplying more wasteful customers, new…
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Time-lapse river videos expose nature in the raw
By Ryan Peek Thanks to its Mediterranean climate, California swings from one extreme to another — severe drought, raging wildfires, big floods. These forces often interact and amplify, as we saw all too well this past summer in the scorching of hundreds of thousands of extremely dry forested acres, with the loss of homes and lives.…
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The banality of California’s ‘1,200-year’ drought
By Jay Lund California’s ongoing drought will continue to break records and grab headlines, but it is unlikely to be especially rare from a water policy and management perspective. Estimates of the current drought’s rarity range from once in 15 years to once in 1,200 years (Griffin and Anchukaitis 2014), depending on the region and…
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How research programs stack up — a photo essay
By Jay Lund Riding into work the other day, I was thinking how our understanding of hard problems requires understanding a lot of pieces and how those pieces fit together – sort of like how a pile of bricks gets transformed into a habitable structure. If every research study is a brick in our understanding,…
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For a change in Delta perspective, move a few feet
By Jay Lund Each year my family takes a week’s vacation in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta on our old sailboat. We often follow some Delta veterans who show us new places. As an engineering professor working on California’s water problems, I research the Delta mainly as a water supply hub and a flood-prone landscape. Sailing…
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Delta smelt’s unsung cousin seems verging on extinction, too
By James Hobbs and Peter Moyle Another native fish of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta appears to be rivaling the cliffhanger status of the delta smelt. Relative to its historical abundance, the lesser-known longfin smelt has experienced an even bigger decline than delta smelt — and may be in bigger trouble — according to trawl surveys…
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Guidance for putting new groundwater law on the ground
By Thomas Harter, Vicki Kretsinger Grabert and Tim Parker A group that helps shape California groundwater policy has proposed several ideas for state consideration in implementing the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). The Contemporary Groundwater Issues Council of the Groundwater Association of California – comprised of various agency executives and influential water researchers and…
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Drought bites harder, but agriculture remains robust
Spanish version By Richard Howitt, Duncan MacEwan, Josué Medellín-Azuara and Jay Lund Today we release our second annual report estimating the economic impacts from prolonged drought. More than anything, the results of our 16-page analysis of the current growing season speak to agriculture’s remarkable resilience to multiyear surface water shortages. They also show that the…
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The hard work of sustainable groundwater management
By Erik Porse Under California’s new groundwater law, local agencies must adopt long-term plans for sustainably managing basins subject to critical overdraft. Preparing these plans will be challenging, requiring collaboration and compromise among water users accustomed to pumping as they please. Local agencies do not know exactly what they’re in for. They’ve never been responsible…
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Napa County strings together a ‘living’ river
By Amber Manfree In the historic heart of Napa Valley, a moderate climate and alluvial soils deposited by the Napa River create perfect conditions for world-class cabernets. An acre of vines here sells for around $300,000, or 25 times the state average for irrigated cropland. Yet a group of landowners have ripped out 20 acres…
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Ten realities for managing the Delta
This article was originally published Feb. 26, 2013 By Peter Moyle I have been working on Delta fishes for nearly 40 years. Increasingly, I have curmudgeonly thoughts about what is needed to make the ecosystem work better. Here I present these thoughts as “Ten Realities” – statements of the obvious that are often overlooked in…