ARCHIVE
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Realty Meets Climate Reality
by Kat Kerlin My husband and I fell in love a couple of months ago. It was with a house by a river. (See what I did there?) This is the river that was a stone’s throw away when we were engaged 13 years ago. The river we’ve brought our children to every summer of…
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Striped Bass: An Important Indicator Species in the Delta
by Peter Moyle The striped bass is a favorite sport fish in the San Francisco Estuary (SFE), especially the Delta, because of its large size, sporting qualities, and tasty flesh. Historically, it supported major commercial and sport fisheries but the commercial fishery was shut down long ago and the sport fishery is in long-term decline.…
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A Change of Plans
by Jay Lund The 1957 California Water Plan was ambitious for its time, and successful in its own way for a time. This plan was the ultimate major water project development plan arising from a century of struggles to orient and organize a society transplanted from the humid eastern US to California’s highly variable Mediterranean…
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Rapid changes in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta both diminish scientific certainty and increase science’s value
by Jay Lund Conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are changing, changing in new ways, and changing rapidly. Changes are rampant not only in climate, but also in ecosystem structure, economic structure and globalization, invasive species, infrastructure, water demands, environmental regulations, and societal objectives. Although the Delta always has changed, often rapidly, we are seeing…
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Futures for Delta Smelt
by Peter Moyle, Karrigan Bork, John Durand, Tien-Chieh Hung, Andrew Rypel A recent biological opinion (BiOp) released by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) concluded that a proposed re-operation of California’s largest water projects will avoid driving the federally threatened Delta smelt to extinction. The plan proposes increasing water exports from the Central Valley…
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Jobs per drop irrigating California crops
By Josué Medellín-Azuara, Jay Lund and Richard Howitt Reposted from Apr 28, 2015 (an oldie, but goodie!) Some of the most popular drought stories lately have been on the amount of what water needed to produce food from California, as a consumer sees it — a single almond, a head of lettuce or a glass of wine.…
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Turbidity and Insights on Flow-Habitat-Fish Abundance Curves in Policy-making
by Jay Lund California’s water policy community continues to be embroiled on how best to manage what remains of California’s native aquatic ecosystems, particularly for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and its tributaries. One aspect of this controversy is the dedication and use of habitat and flow resources to support native fishes. There is general agreement…
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Is it drought yet? Dry October-November 2019
by Jay Lund So far, October and November 2019 has been the driest (or almost the driest) beginning of any recorded water year with almost zero precipitation. (The 2020 water year began October 1, 2019 – so you might have missed a New Year’s party already.) Should we worry about a drought yet? Yes, this…
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Some more water management truisms (Part II)
by Jay Lund Here is part two of a partial collection of truisms on water management. These ideas seem obviously true, but still offer insights and perspective. Original sources are mostly unknown (but apocryphal citations are common). Any that I think are original to me, are probably not. Progress and effectiveness occur somewhere between complacency…
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Night of the Living Dead Salmon
by Kelly Neal and Gabe Saron On a cool and misty morning somewhere south of Redding, California, jet boats roar across the tranquil Sacramento River. Armed with tridents, machetes and poleaxes, it seems akin to a scene from an action movie; except that “California Department of Fish and Wildlife” is painted on the boats. One…
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The Dreamt Land by Mark Arax: We’re all complicit in California’s water follies
by Ann Willis We are all sinners. At least, that’s the impression Mark Arax leaves in The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California. What’s bold, and distinguishes this book from others about California, is that Arax grapples with a history that we’re still in the midst of creating, rather than reflecting on sins…
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Can we understand it all?
This is my favorite water cartoon. It depicts how well the public (and elected officials) will ever understand how water systems work. Today, as individuals we understand only a little about the detailed world around us (cell phones, medical technology, monetary policy, politics, international trade, law, etc.). We operate with amazing Neolithic brains in a…
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Some water management truisms, Part I
by Jay Lund Here is a partial collection of truisms on water management. These are common ideas that seem obviously true (particularly in the western US), but still offer insights and perspective. The original sources of these are unknown (although apocryphal citations are common). Any that I think are original to me, are probably not.…
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Management’s eternal relevance
by Jay Lund Just a brief, and slightly pedantic, blog post this week on the importance of liberal education and broad thinking for those want to solve real problems, illustrated with a bit of history. Engineers and physical scientists will know Claude-Louis Navier from his work on the fundamental equations of fluid mechanics (the Navier-Stokes…
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The long and winding road of salmon trucking in California
By Dr Anna Sturrock Trucking juvenile hatchery salmon downstream is often used in the California Central Valley to reduce mortality during their perilous swim to the ocean. But is it all good? Researchers at UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Francisco and NOAA Fisheries published an article in Fisheries this month exploring the history and…
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Providing Flows for Fish
by Peter Moyle A reality in California and the American West is that people are competing with fish for water. We humans are winning the competition. However, because there are moral, aesthetic, and legal obligations to provide fish with water in streams, biologists like me often get asked the question “Just how much water do…
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The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of California’s State-Mandated Urban Water Conservation during Drought
by Amy Talbot Amy Talbot is the Regional Water Efficiency Manger for the Regional Water Authority, which represents 21 water suppliers in the Sacramento region. She manages an award-winning public outreach and education program. Additionally, she is a board member of the California Water Efficiency Partnership (CalWEP), which is supporting water suppliers with the implementation…
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Remarkable Suisun Marsh: a bright spot for fish in the San Francisco Estuary
by Teejay O’Rear and Peter Moyle To most people, Suisun Marsh is either the seemingly blank area visible at 70 MPH from the north side of Highway 680 or the sudden expanse of tules visible after the Amtrak train leaves Suisun City, headed for Oakland. However, it is one of our favorite places in California,…
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Can Water Agencies Work Together Sustainably? – Lessons from Metropolitan Planning
by Jay Lund It is said that, “In the US, we hate government so much that we have thousands of them.” This decentralization has advantages, but poses problems for integration. Integration is easy to say, and hard to do. Integration is especially hard, and unavoidably imperfect, for organizing common functions across different agencies with different…
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What Water is Covered by the Clean Water Act?
by Karrigan Bork It is important if a stream, river, wetland, or even a dry ditch is protected by the Clean Water Act (CWA). The CWA is a federal law “to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.”[1] But the Act doesn’t cover all waters. Waters covered by the…