Tag: Peter Moyle
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Advice on Voluntary Settlements for California’s Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan Part 1: Addressing a Manageable Suite of Ecosystem Problems
by Jeffrey Mount, PPIC Water Policy Center Recommendation The State Water Resources Control Board and the parties seeking to incorporate voluntary settlement agreements in the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan should identify a specific, tractable set of problems that can be addressed over the next 15 years through this plan. We urge the participants to…
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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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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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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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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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California WaterFix and Delta Smelt
by Peter Moyle and James Hobbs The delta smelt is on a trajectory towards extinction in the wild. Heading into 2017, the spawning adult population was at an all-time low although this past wet winter has apparently seen a small resurgence. However, increasingly warm summer temperatures in the Delta may dampen any upswing. Given the…
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Water wasted to the sea?
by James E. Cloern, Jane Kay, Wim Kimmerer, Jeffrey Mount, Peter B. Moyle, and Anke Mueller-Solger This article originally appeared in the journal San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science. If we farmed the Central Valley or managed water supplies for San Francisco, San Jose or Los Angeles, we might think that fresh water flowing from…
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Blacklock Marsh: Tidal Habitat No Panacea for Thoughtful Restoration
by John Durand and Peter Moyle Returning open tidal exchange to diked lands is a primary goal of Delta restoration, driven by the 2008 Biological Opinion from USFWS. This document requires 8000 acres of tidal and subtidal habitat to be created. California EcoRestore is coordinating with state and federal agencies to restore at least 30,000…
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The Future of California’s Unique Salmon and Trout: Good News, Bad News
by Robert Lusardi, Peter Moyle, Patrick Samuel, and Jacob Katz California is a hot spot for endemic species, those found nowhere else in the world. Among these species are 20 kinds of salmon and trout. That is an astonishing number considering California is also literally a hot-spot in terms of summer temperatures and that these…
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Facing Extinction II: Making hard decisions
by Jason Baumsteiger and Peter Moyle In part I of our blog, we projected a bleak future for many freshwater fishes, especially in California. Some difficult decisions will need to be made to prevent extinctions or to verify them. However these decisions will rely on answers to one sweeping question: When is a species, in…
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Facing extinction: California fishes
by Peter Moyle and Jason Baumsteiger At least two species of California fishes appear to be facing imminent extinction in the wild: delta smelt and winter-run Chinook salmon. These species could join about 57 other North American fishes declared extinct. If we are fortunate, these species will continue to scrape by with small populations, maintained…
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What do stream fish do during flood flows?
By Peter B. Moyle My local stream, Putah Creek, looks like a river these days. Water is pouring down the Glory Hole of Lake Berryessa and rushing in muddy turmoil from the ‘dry’ creeks that are its main tributaries. The creek’s deeply incised and leveed channel is containing the flows that once would have spread…
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Reconciling conservation and human use in the Delta
By John Durand, Peter Moyle, and Amber Manfree In a previous blog, we presented a Grand Scheme for habitat conservation in the North Delta Arc (the Arc). This follows up on our earlier broad vision for recreating a Delta more friendly to its native species. In this essay, we give philosophical and historical reasons to approach…
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Allocating a Share of San Joaquin River Water to the Environment Shows Promise
By Jeffrey Mount, Brian Gray, Ellen Hanak, PPIC Water Policy Center, Peter Moyle, UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences Introduction In September 2016, the State Water Board released its draft plan for new environmental flow requirements in the San Joaquin River watershed. The board’s proposal contains a novel—and controversial—recommendation. Instead of following the traditional approach…
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The North Delta Habitat Arc: an Ecosystem Strategy for Saving Fish
Peter Moyle, John Durand, Amber Manfree. Center for Watershed Sciences, University of California, Davis. Delta native fishes are in desperate condition. Over 90% of fish sampled by diverse means belong to non-native species. Native species such as delta smelt are on a trajectory to extinction. If we are going to reverse this trend, we need…
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Ecogeomorphology: A Transformative Expedition Education
This week, the Center for Watershed Sciences is proud to feature our flagship education course, Ecogeomorphology. What began as a collaboration between then-Professors Jeffrey Mount and Peter Moyle to introduce students to cross-discipline thinking in expedition settings has developed into a transformative opportunity for the select graduate and undergraduate students to experience a range of settings…
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Trump’s Dubious Drought Claims
By Vanessa Schipani This post originally appeared on June 9, 2016 on FactCheck.org. The original post can be found here. Peter Moyle, Associate Director at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, and Jeffrey Mount, Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and founding director of CWS, dispel some myths in Trump’s Fresno rally speech. During…
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Understanding predation impacts on Delta native fishes
By Peter Moyle, Andrew Sih, Anna Steel, Carson Jeffres, William Bennett of University of California, Davis. Will endangered fishes, such as Chinook salmon, delta smelt, and longfin smelt, benefit from control of predators, especially of striped bass? This question is of interest because if the answer is ‘yes’, then predator control might increase the benefits…
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An update on California fishes of ‘special concern’
By Peter Moyle Three-fourths of California’s native fishes are now officially designated as being in trouble, or potentially so. The good news is that not all of these species – 93 of the total 123 native fishes today – have to go the way of winter-run Chinook salmon or delta smelt, which are verging on…
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Delta smelt’s unsung cousin seems verging on extinction, too
By James Hobbs and Peter Moyle Another native fish of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta appears to be rivaling the cliffhanger status of the delta smelt. Relative to its historical abundance, the lesser-known longfin smelt has experienced an even bigger decline than delta smelt — and may be in bigger trouble — according to trawl surveys…