ARCHIVE
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The Collapse of Water Exports – Los Angeles, 1914
This is a re-post from 2019 with updated links for pictures and further readings. by Jay Lund Collapse of Los Angeles aqueduct pipeline through Antelope Valley from a major flood in February, 1914 (3-months after the aqueduct’s official opening) “In February, 1914, the rainfall in the Mojave Desert region exceeded by nearly fifty per cent…
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The Largest Estuary on the West Coast of North America
By Jeffrey Mount and Wim Kimmerer For decades the San Francisco Estuary, which includes San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, has been routinely described as “the largest estuary on the west coast of North America.” This appeared in publications of all types, presumably to emphasize the importance and unique nature of the estuary.…
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The 2020-2023 drought continues for a fourth year?
by Jay Lund After three years of drought and two dry months, plus two wet weeks, into California’s “wet” season for 2023, California has become unsettlingly settled into this long drought. Most cities have decreased their water use, some more than others. Agricultural fallowing has been modest statewide, but large in the Sacramento Valley, with…
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Managing source water for maximum benefit in a challenging climate
By Amber Lukk and Ann Willis In drought-prone northern California, limited water resources, private water rights allocations, and inefficient transport and use of water resources causes tension between freshwater conservation and private landownership (Garibaldi et al. 2020, Vissers 2017). In the face of a changing climate, drought curtailments will likely become more frequent, ratchetting stress…
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The Flow of California Water Policy – A Chart
by Jay Lund California water policy is often discussed and depicted as being impossibly complex. In its essentials, it can be seen much more simply, as in the flow chart below. Without extreme events (such as floods and droughts), the policy process would be simpler, but ironically less effective, and less well funded. California’s remarkable…
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Are native fishes and reservoirs compatible?
By Peter B. Moyle and Anna M. Sturrock The question addressed in this blog comes from a new PPIC report that calls for reforms in management of environmental water stored behind dams in California. The report shows it is possible to manage water in ways that are compatible with maintaining a natural ecosystem in streams…
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White sturgeon: is an ancient survivor facing extinction in California?
by Andrea Schreier, Peter B. Moyle, Nicholas J. Demetras, Sarah Baird, Dennis Cocherell, Nann A. Fangue, Kirsten Sellheim, Jonathan Walter, Myfanwy Johnston, Scott Colborne, Levi S. Lewis, and Andrew L. Rypel Sturgeons belong to an ancient family of fishes that once lived alongside dinosaurs. This resilient group of fishes survived a meteor strike, shifting seas and continents,…
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Spawning of the living dead: understanding how salmon pass thiamine deficiency to their young
By Abigail E. Ward and Miranda Bell-Tilcock This is no ordinary witch’s brew. It’s one part of the recipe to study thiamine deficiency in our California Central Valley Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) populations. In 2019, hatcheries noticed an eerie and shivering change in juvenile Chinook salmon. Offspring were laying on their side at the bottom…
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Innovative Approaches for Flood Insurance Affordability
by Kathleen Schaefer People have been asking if Hurricane Ian will push the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) into an affordability crisis? Some argue the NFIP is already there. Two weeks ago, the Greater New Orleans, Inc.’s Coalition for Sustainable Flood Insurance (CSFI) reported that NFIP’s new pricing strategy makes NFIP insurance premiums unaffordable. The…
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Being patient and persistent with nature
By Andrew L. Rypel In the coming weeks, fall-run Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) will appear in Putah Creek again to spawn. The fact that any salmon spawn in Putah Creek is a small miracle, and testimony to the resilience of salmon and a small army of people that worked tirelessly to restore and care for…
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Losing mussel mass – the silent extinction of freshwater mussels
by Andrew L. Rypel Note: this is a re-post from August 2020. Throughout my career I’ve spent some time studying the fascinating ecology and conservation issues of freshwater mussels (Fig. 1). For me, learning about mussels has fortified a recurring theme of the natural world – that everything is connected and that small changes in…
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Happy New Water Year 2023!
by Jay Lund Happy New Water Year, 2023! (October 2022 – September 2023) The first New Year celebration for California’s water wonks is October 1, the beginning of the new Water Year, the nominal beginning of California’s wet season. California sometimes has its first big rain storm earlier, and sometimes later, but by convention the…
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Federal Disaster Assistance to California
By Ryan Miller and Nicholas Pinter Following a major flood or other natural disaster, the US federal government provides disaster assistance to individuals and local and state jurisdictions to help them recover. Over the past ~20 years, these federal payments have totaled nearly $150 billion (in 2020 dollars), including over $20 billion for recovery from Hurricane…
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Watershed Outreach – Summer 2022
With summer wrapping up and a new school year upon us, we decided it was a good time to reflect on outreach done by researchers at the Center for Watershed Sciences (CWS) at UC Davis. Some of the outreach was organized by the Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee while others took initiative and pursued…
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Science Happens
By Andrew L. Rypel The famous expression ‘Life Happens!’ has certainly been around awhile. It’s reserved as a sort of colloquialism, describing how someone’s life or life plans are completely upended by circumstances, usually because of seemingly random events. This summer, I’ve been reflecting on how these types of events also seem to occur in…
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You Can’t Always Get What You Want – A Mick Jagger Theory of Drought Management
by Jay Lund [This is a reposting of a CaliforniaWaterBlog.com post from February 2016, near the end of the previous drought. For human uses, conditions seem somewhat similar to this point in the previous drought, so this perspective might be useful. A couple of more recent readings are added to this post.] “You can’t always…
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The vortex of executive activity
by Jay Lund The graphic below seems to apply to any bureaucracy, with larger bureaucracies showing this tendency more strongly. In this vortex conception of management, one can often make more progress from the periphery than from the center of power. The center spins rapidly, always changing directions, but moving little in space. Those in…
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Two-way thinking in natural resource management
By Andrew L. Rypel “I have more confidence in the ability of institutions to improve their thinking than in the ability of individuals to improve their thinking” ~Daniel Kahneman It is long recognized that there are two dominant modes of thinking (Glatzeder 2011). New research and empirical data support the elemental interplay between these modes…
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Dissecting the use of water management plans in California
By Nicola Ulibarri California uses plans as a primary tool for managing water throughout the state. Regulations like the Urban Water Management Planning Act of 1983, Regional Water Management Planning Act of 2002, Water Conservation Act of 2009, and Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 require local water agencies to write plans documenting their available…
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The Great Lakes and Invasive Species
This week’s CaliforniaWaterBlog post is an excerpt (Box 1) from a recent Delta Independent Science Board report on non-native species and the California Delta. This excerpt summarizes the experience of the Great Lakes, and how its physical and ecological management has led to waves of profoundly disruptive species invasions, resulting in a sequence of “novel”…