ARCHIVE
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Ecological Incentives for Delta Water Exports
by Jay Lund and Peter Moyle All parties in the Delta have an interest in a healthy ecosystem and in healthy water exports. Without a healthy ecosystem, endangered species requirements increasingly intrude on water exports and Delta landowners. Without healthy water exports, the south and central Delta becomes dominated by brackish agricultural drainage and state…
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Los Angeles and the Future of Urban Water in California
by Erik Porse Los Angeles is a grand American urban experiment. It brings emerging ideas into the mainstream, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. In the early 20th Century, it seemed fanciful to build a metropolis in a region receiving limited seasonal rainfall. But LA adopted the ideas of the time at grand scales.…
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Will Delta Smelt Have a Happy New Year?
by James Hobbs and Peter Moyle The results of 2017 surveys of Delta fishes are coming in. Already, the results are clear: it was an unhappy year for Delta smelt. The wet year with high outflows should have created an increase in the population, as happened in 2011. Instead numbers stayed extremely low. The US…
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New paths to survival for endangered winter run Chinook salmon
by Anna Sturrock and Corey Phillis Many Californians have seen headlines about endangered Sacramento River Winter Run Chinook salmon (“winter run”) on the “brink of extinction.” But not many people know exactly what winter run are, nor why they are endangered. Like all salmon, winter run reproduce (spawn) in freshwater. Their offspring migrate to the…
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Beginning of 2018 drought? – December 31, 2017
by Jay Lund Every year is different for water management in California. The 2012-2016 water years were among the driest and warmest on record. 2017 was the wettest year of record for much of California, with thousands of water managers struggling to store as much water as possible in reservoirs and aquifers. So far for…
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Nudging progress on funding safe drinking water
by Jay Lund This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics went to Richard Thaler, who pioneered “nudging” to help people volunteer to make more personally and socially beneficial decisions. As an example, having employees automatically enrolled for retirement contributions and then allowing them to lower their contributions results in considerably more retirement savings than having them…
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Making water for the environment count in an era of change: Cautionary tales from Australia
by Alison Whipple The specter of California drought looming again on the horizon gives renewed urgency for water policy and management reforms. Recent discussions reflect a growing recognition that our future depends on us making water count for both humans and the environment. For much of our state’s history, water has counted primarily in its…
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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.…