Tag: Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
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A Flood of Hope
By Ted Sommer . . . My most inspiring bike ride this past year was not on a mountain or in some exotic destination. It was sixteen flat and muddy valley miles under overcast skies. My destination was a new concrete structure designed to reconnect the Sacramento River with its adjacent floodplain, the Yolo Bypass.…
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Delta Ecosystem Threatened by Another Nonnative Mollusk
By Andrew Cohen and Peter Moyle One of the world’s most invasive freshwater mussels has arrived in North America. The Golden Mussel (Limnoperna fortunei), discovered in the California Delta in October, is a voracious plankton feeder and may further reduce the food supply for Delta Smelt and other plankton-feeding fishes in low salinity environments. It…
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You’re invited to the Bay-Delta Science Conference from September 30-October 2, 2024 at the SAFE Credit Union Convention Center in downtown Sacramento
by Miranda Bell-Tilcock The Bay-Delta Science Conference (BDSC) is just around the corner! The last BDSC was fully virtual in 2021, so we are very excited to see everyone at the first in-person conference since 2018. Just like in 2018, we will be at the Convention Center in downtown Sacramento, but it won’t be the…
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The Delta Smelt Controversy in Sociological Perspective
By Caleb Scoville The Delta Smelt is a small, endangered fish that lives exclusively in the heart of the state’s water distribution system, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. At times, regulations to protect smelt affect conveyance of water to 35 million Californians and the state’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry. As Peter Moyle put it in a 2022 post,…
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Restoration of Tidal wetlands of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – Where are we at?
By Rosemary Hartman, Matt Young, Dylan Chapple, Stacy Sherman, Dave Ayers, Emma Mendonsa, Elizabeth Brusati, and Louise Conrad Tidal wetlands in the Sacramento – San Joaquin Delta used to be vast. You may have seen artistic renditions of how the landscape may have looked with meandering channels weaving through a mosaic of land and water…
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The Big Impact of Small Waters: Zooplankton Density Trends in the North Delta
By Kim Luke & John Durand Zooplankton and their history in the San Francisco Estuary Zooplankton are tiny aquatic organisms unable to swim against currents; they include microscopic crustaceans, small jellyfish, and larval life stages of other organisms (Figure 1). Although zooplankton are small in size, they have a big impact on the food web…
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Some curious things about water management
By Jay R. Lund *This is a repost of a blog originally published in 2012. Water management is often very different from what we think intuitively, or what we have been taught. Here are some examples. 1. Most water decisions are local. Water policy and management discussions often seem to assume that state and federal…
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The Earth is Falling! – Land Subsidence and Water Management in California
By Jay Lund, Thomas Harter, Rob Gailey, Rick Frank, and Graham Fogg Groundwater problems are mostly invisible. However, as California has come to rely more on groundwater during the drought, land subsidence from groundwater drawdown and accumulating overdraft has become a visible concern in some areas. Some of this subsidence has been dramatic. Almost 4…
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For a change in Delta perspective, move a few feet
By Jay Lund Each year my family takes a week’s vacation in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta on our old sailboat. We often follow some Delta veterans who show us new places. As an engineering professor working on California’s water problems, I research the Delta mainly as a water supply hub and a flood-prone landscape. Sailing…
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Ten realities for managing the Delta
This article was originally published Feb. 26, 2013 By Peter Moyle I have been working on Delta fishes for nearly 40 years. Increasingly, I have curmudgeonly thoughts about what is needed to make the ecosystem work better. Here I present these thoughts as “Ten Realities” – statements of the obvious that are often overlooked in…
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Exotic animals deployed as Delta ‘weed whackers’
By Nestle J. Frobish Visitors to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are doing double takes lately as they encounter some newly introduced “biological controls” to keep a fast-spreading waterweed from damaging boat propellers and choking off waterways. Working with state water officials, UC Davis scientists last month released a herd or “bloat” of hippopotamuses from Botswana…
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Dutch lessons on levee design and prioritization for California
This is the second of an intermittent series of articles on the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. By Jay Lund In any lowland, levees define how humans live and how they disrupt native habitats. This is as true for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as it is for coastal Louisiana, Vietnam and the Netherlands. Flood…
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21st Century Delta: Reconciling the desired with the possible
This is this first in an intermittent series of articles on the future of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. By Steven Culberson Estuaries are hard places to understand and even harder to explain. Estuarine scientists, myself included, have struggled to learn how changes in the San Francisco Estuary led to declining fish populations and waning productivity,…
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Ten realities for managing the Delta
By Peter Moyle I have been working on Delta fishes for about 40 years. Increasingly, I have curmudgeonly thoughts about what is needed to make the ecosystem work better. Here I present these thoughts as “Ten Realities” – statements of the obvious that are often overlooked in public debates about the system. Reality No. 1:…
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Knowing Delta’s past offers new ideas forward
By Alison Whipple San Francisco Estuary Institute-Aquatic Science Center Teetering atop a haystack to get his bearings, Sacramento County Surveyor Edwin Sherman observed “dense tules and willows” lining the sloughs that wove through “large tule plains and some grass.” The haystack also afforded him a dry bed at night when high tides inundated the surrounding…
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Reconciling wild things with tamed places – a future for native fish species in the Delta
Peter Moyle, William Bennett, John Durand, William Fleenor, Jay Lund, Jeffrey Mount, University of California – Davis Ellen Hanak, Public Policy Institute of California, San Francisco Brian Gray, University of California – Hastings School of Law Today, the Public Policy Institute of California released two reports that look at how California can better manage the…
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Wild Things and the Delta
Jay Lund, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Peter Moyle, Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology University of California – Davis The recent death of Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, brings some whimsical reflections on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Several quotes from the book seem to have potential lessons…