Tag: Karrigan Bork
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2025 Annual Report: Highlights from the Center for Watershed Sciences
The Center for Watershed Sciences unveils its inaugural annual report, featuring a letter from Director Dr. Karrigan Börk, insights into ongoing research, summaries of events, and the 2025 Strategic Plan. The report also highlights popular blogs, significant grants, and the California WaterBlog’s 15th anniversary.
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Day 12 – California Water: The Gift that Keeps on Giving
By Karrigan Börk and Jay Lund . . . California is full of gifts that keep on giving. California water provides for a bounty of social, environmental, economic, and cultural benefits. Water is the lifeblood of California farms, which have created one of the world’s great agricultural economies. Water carves our state’s beautiful landscapes and…
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Day 11 – The Gift of Students
By Karrigan Börk . . . You might think that teaching the same thing again every year would get old, or that taking field trips to the same location year after year would be repetitive. And, sure, gearing up to teach landlord-tenant law for the nth time can be a bit daunting. But I’ve found…
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Day 8 – Haikus
We invited haiku submissions from CWS members and friends to be a part of the 8th day of our California WaterBlog series, “12 Days of CWS“. A haiku is a traditional Japanese three-line poem (5-7-5 syllables) that focuses on capturing a moment, feeling, or image. We hope you enjoy… and leave us your own haiku in the…
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Change at the Center for Watershed Sciences
By Karrigan Börk Readers of the California Water Blog (Blog) may have noticed some changes over the past year. The Blog is a product of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences (CWS), and after many years of dedicated service, longtime CWS leaders Dr. Andrew Rypel (Director) and Dr. Cathryn Lawrence (Assistant Director) are transitioning…
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How redefining just one word could strip the Endangered Species Act’s ability to protect vital habitat
This blog is a cross-post from one featured on The Conversation on May 13, 2025. By Mariah Meek & Karrigan Börk It wouldn’t make much sense to prohibit people from shooting a threatened woodpecker while allowing its forest to be cut down, or to bar killing endangered salmon while allowing a dam to dry out their habitat. But that’s…
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Newly Listed Smelt in the Delta
By Karrigan Börk, John Durand, Nann Fangue, and Levi Lewis Late last summer, on August 29th, 2024, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service listed the San Francisco Bay-Delta distinct population segment of longfin smelt (Spirinchus thaleichthys) as ‘endangered’ under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). With this decision, the Longfin Smelt joins the Delta…
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California Water under a Trump Administration, Part 2 of 2
By Karrigan Börk Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series of blogs that examines how the incoming Trump Administration may—or may not—be able to change how water is managed in California. The first blog covered three issues: the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), updates of the Bay-Delta Water Quality Plans, and major infrastructure projects. The…
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California Water under a Trump Administration, Part 1 of 2
By Karrigan Börk Editor’s note: Interim Director Karrigan Börk appeared on the NPR show AirTalk a few weeks ago to address California water policy under a Trump administration; the segment starts at 18:00. This blogpost is the first of a 2 part series exploring the topic from a nonpartisan perspective with a goal of predicting likely outcomes…
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Dear Santa: A California Water Holiday Wish List
by folks at UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences: Karrigan Börk, John Durand, Jay Lund, Christine Parisek, Andrew Rypel, Kathleen Schaefer, Jonathan Walter (authors listed alphabetically, and all are now PhDs. Congratulations to Doctors Parisek and Schaefer!) ‘Tis the season of gift-giving (and gift-seeking). So we thought a California Water Holiday wish list might be…
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Lessons from the California Environmental Flows Framework and Opportunities for Chile
By Camila Boettiger, Karrigan Börk, Roberto Ponce Oliva, Diego Rivera, Jay Lund, and Sarah Yarnell Managing waterways for ecosystems with minimal loss to existing water uses is increasingly difficult. As we’ve discussed in the first two blogs in this series (here and here, now with Spanish language translations), California and Chile both struggle with this challenge. Both…
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Water Right Exactions
By Karrigan Börk Water right exactions are a proposed tool to mitigate costs associated with water rights and water infrastructure that would also help users make better decisions about how much water to use. But first, what are exactions? Exactions are a land use permitting tool used by cities and other permitting agencies to ensure developers…
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Minimum Flow Laws in California and Chile
By Camila Boettiger, Karrigan Börk, Roberto Ponce Oliva, Diego Rivera, Jay Lund, and Sarah Yarnell California and Chile share a history of water allocation with little regard for instream uses of water, especially environmental uses. In California, for example, many water rights were obtained with no consideration of the environmental impacts of the water use,…
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Reallocating Environmental Risk
By Karrigan Bork & Keith Hirokawa [X-posted from Environmental Law Prof Blog] Living the good life has often meant finding ways to allow for growth and construction while ostensibly protecting the natural environment on which we depend. Want to build a housing development, but there’s a wetland in the way? Mitigate the harm by building…
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What’s the dam problem with deadbeat dams?
by Andrew L. Rypel, Christine A. Parisek, Jay Lund, Ann Willis, Peter B. Moyle, Sarah Yarnell, Karrigan Börk *this is a repost of a blog originally published in June 2020. Damming rivers was once a staple of public works and a signal of technological and scientific progress. Even today, dams underpin much of California’s public…
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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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New science or just spin: science charade in the Delta
By Karrigan Bork, Andrew L. Rypel, and Peter Moyle Science-based decision making is key to improved conservation management and a legal mandate in the US Endangered Species Act. Thus supporters of federal efforts to increase water exports from the Central Valley Project (CVP) and State Water Project (SWP) have claimed that these efforts are based…
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Guest Species – What about the nonnative species we like?
by Karrigan Bork, JD, PhD Conservationists worry about a host of nonnative species, and with good reason. Nonnative species cause north of $120 billion per year in damages in North America alone, and they present the primary extinction risk for roughly half of the threatened or endangered species in the United States. The worst offenders are…
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Fish, flows, and 5937 – legal challenges on the Santa Maria River
by Karrigan Bork, JD, PhD Driving down the 101, you cross a half-mile long bridge over the Santa Maria River into the city of Santa Maria, California. It’s a large bridge, with big levees to constrain the river on either end. But the Santa Maria River, like many southern California rivers, is dry throughout much…