ARCHIVE
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Follow the Water!
by Jay Lund People often have strange ideas about how water works. Even simple water systems can be confusing. When water systems become large complex socio-physical-ecological systems serving many users and uses, opportunities for confusion become extreme, surpassing comprehension by our ancient Homo sapien brains. When confused by conflicting rhetoric, using numbers to “follow the…
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Saving Clear Lake’s Endangered Chi
By Peter B. Moyle and Thomas L. Taylor ‘Tens of thousands of these fish once ascended streams in Spring. They are of major cultural importance to the Pomo people who harvested them as a valued food source.’ When you read statements like this, most likely it is salmon that come to mind. Yet this statement characterizes…
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Unlocking how juvenile Chinook salmon swim in California rivers
By Rusty C. Holleman, Nann A. Fangue, Edward S. Gross, Michael J. Thomas, and Andrew L. Rypel Despite years of study and thousands of research projects, some aspects of the biology of Chinook salmon remain altogether mysterious. One enduring question is how outmigrating salmon smolts behave and swim through our waterways to somehow find their…
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Uncertainty in modeling, an Art Gallery
Water resource planners regularly rely on computer models to illuminate relationships between human- and natural-systems. Anyone who has tinkered with one of California water supply models knows this is a deeply left-brained exercise. During Winter 2021, as part of Jay Lund’s Art and Water class, water resource engineering students took a break from creating and analyzing…
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California’s continued drought
By Andrew L. Rypel As California’s drought deepens, it is worth checking in on the status of water supplies and what might be in store for the rest of the summer, and beyond. What started with the promise of a wet water year, ended up dry, again. In January, the 8-Station Index showed precipitation totals…
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Considerations for Developing An Environmental Water Right in California
By Karrigan Börk, Andrew L. Rypel, Sarah Yarnell, Ann Willis, Peter B. Moyle, Josué Medellín-Azuara, Jay Lund, and Robert Lusardi This week, news emerged of a State Senate plan that would spend upwards of $1.5B to purchase senior water rights from California growers. Under California’s first-in-time, first-in-right water allocation system, senior water rights are filled…
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Demystifying mist as a source of water supply
By Jay Lund (originally posted in 2015) In some of the world’s driest places, atmospheric moisture is a major source of water for native ecosystems. Some algae, plants and insects in the Israeli and Namibian deserts get much of their water from fog, dew and humidity. The spines of some cacti species have evolved to collect fog droplets.…
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The Failed Recovery Plan for the Delta and Delta Smelt
By Peter Moyle Few native species are as controversial as Delta Smelt. It is a 3-4 inch translucent fish that lives only in the California Delta, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet. This place also happens to be the heart of California’s complex water supply system which provides fresh drinking water to 35-million…
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A conservation bill you’ve never heard of may be the most important in a generation
by Andrew L. Rypel This blog is a short introduction to a lesser known federal bill that is one of the most significant pieces of fish and wildlife legislation in decades. In Spring of 2021, Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) and Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) introduced the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act. During July 2021, a separate…
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How engineers see the water glass in California
This is another dry year. How do California’s engineers see a partially-full water glass? Mostly the same as they did in the original 2012 version of this post, but we’ve added a few more perspectives. by Jay R. Lund Depending on your outlook, the proverbial glass of water is either half full or half empty.…
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Five “F”unctions of the Central Valley Floodplain
by Francheska Torres, Miranda Tilcock, Alexandra Chu, and Sarah Yarnell The Yolo Bypass is one of two large flood bypasses in California’s Central Valley that are examples of multi-benefit floodplain projects (Figure 1; Serra-Llobet et al., 2022). Originally constructed in the early 20th century for flood control, up to 75% of the Sacramento River’s flood flow can…
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Government Spending on Stormwater Management in California
By Erik Porse, Maureen Kerner, Brian Currier, David Babchanik, Danielle Salt, and Julie Mansisidor Stormwater infrastructure in cities is highly visible and serves to mitigate flooding and reduce pollution that reaches local waterbodies. Being so visible, it might be reasonable to assume that stormwater is adequately funded both in infrastructure and water quality management. Yet,…
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The Putah Creek Fish Kill: Learning from a Local Disaster
By Alex Rabidoux, Max Stevenson, Peter B. Moyle, Mackenzie C. Miner, Lauren G. Hitt, Dennis E. Cocherell, Nann A. Fangue, and Andrew L. Rypel Putah Creek is a small stream located in the Central Valley that has been extensively modified to suit urban and agricultural water needs. Following ratification of the Putah Creek Accord in…
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The 20th Anniversary of Another Good Idea: Ecogeomorphology
by Jeffrey Mount and Peter Moyle Several years ago on this site, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Center for Watershed Sciences—what we termed a “really good idea.” That blog described the founding principles of the Center that live on today. A few years after starting the Center, we had a second really good…
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Why give away fish flows for free during a drought?
by Jay Lund, Ellen Hanak, Barton “Buzz” Thompson, Brian Gray, Jeffrey Mount and Katrina Jessoe This is a re-posting from 11 February 2014 (in the previous drought). With California in a major drought, state and federal regulators will be under pressure to loosen environmental flow standards that protect native fish. This happened in the 1976-77…
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Parr for the Course – Holistic Fish Conservation
by Nan Frobish April 1, 2022 Juvenile Chinook Salmon lack rearing habitat in the Central Valley due to pervasive land use change and altered hydrology. Historically, juvenile salmon (or parr) had access to roughly four million acres of seasonal floodplain which provided ideal growth conditions before transitioning to the ocean. Managed wetlands and flooded off-season…
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Nature has solutions…What are they? And why do they matter?
By Andrew L. Rypel California’s water problems are intense; so much so they are often referred to as ‘wicked’ for their extraordinary depth of complexity and general unsolvability. Yet it recently occurred to me that some of the better and more creative solutions often derive from one particular source – nature itself. Indeed, studies of…
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Drought Year Three in California, 2022
by Jay Lund 2022 is another drought year, although we won’t know exactly how dry for about another month. Precipitation and snowpack this year in California are below average. In addition, the prolonged dry and warm months of January through March of this year’s “wet” season will have evaporated more water from watersheds and reduced…
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Between a rock and a dry place: effects of drought on stream drying patterns in California’s intermittent streams
By Hana Moidu, Mariska Obedzinski, Stephanie Carlson, and Ted Grantham You may have heard the saying from the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, “No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” If you walk along a coastal stream in California at the…
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Shift happens
By Miranda Bell-Tilcock, Rachel Alsheikh, and Malte Willmes Doing science is hard. Even in the best of times, it’s incredibly difficult, with many failures, mishaps, and disappointments along the road. More so than just smarts, perseverance, resilience, and teamwork are essential to seeing a project from initial field and lab studies to final conclusions. If…