Tag: water management
-
California’s Amazing Terminal Lakes
By Peter B. Moyle * This is a re-post of a blog originally published 11/26/2023. When Californians talk of lakes, they usually mean reservoirs, the 1500 or so artificial bodies of water behind dams. Alternately, they may be referring to the 4,000 or so natural lakes in the Sierra Nevada or to one of the…
-
Sites – The Permitting Process
By Christopher Mouawad This blog provides a glimpse into the complexity of permitting for large water projects like Sites. California water law is as intricate and varied as the systems it governs. What begins as a seemingly simple doctrine, such as “first in time, first in right,” can quickly spiral into a labyrinth of layered…
-
AI explanations of California water management
By ChatGPT prompted by Jay Lund I was playing with ChatGPT and had some fun and insightful replies. (I’d interpret these insights, but I am no Professor of Literature, and it would probably get me into trouble. Please add your interpretations below in the replies.) 1) Prompt: Write a buzzword sentence on California water management. ChatGPT replied:…
-
Trade-offs in California Water Discussions
By Jay Lund In policy and management, we should always be interested in performance, both overall effectiveness and efficiency of solutions, as well as trade-offs across objectives. These are often depicted on plots of Pareto-optimality, showing the relative performance of alternatives, the performance of efficient (Pareto-optimal) solutions, and trade-offs across these most efficient alternatives, often compared with…
-
How Better Data is Helping to Improve Water Management in California
By Spencer Cole Careful stewardship is key for managing California’s highly sought-after water resources, but a lack of reliable data hampers this goal. That’s beginning to change, however, thanks to two things: technological advances and the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which celebrates its 10th anniversary this month. SGMA has made waves in the…
-
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…
-
Science seen from different perspectives
by Jay Lund The awe-inspiring Phil Isenberg used to talk about differences in culture between science and policy as being akin to the two cultures of scholarship discussed by C.P. Snow – science and humanities. It is hard for one mind to deeply appreciate the variety and importance of many ways of thinking, and more…
-
California’s Amazing Terminal Lakes
By Peter B. Moyle When Californians talk of lakes, they usually mean reservoirs, the 1500 or so artificial bodies of water behind dams. Alternately, they may be referring to the 4,000 or so natural lakes in the Sierra Nevada or to one of the few large natural lakes in the state, such as Lake Tahoe…
-
Strategic Decision Making for Dam Removal Planning
By Suman Jumani, Ted Grantham, Lucy Andrews, Jeanette Howard California has a dam problem. Since the start of the 20th century, the state has built thousands of dams on its rivers and streams. Now, more than 75% of the largest dams (totaling over 900) are greater than 50 years old, and the mean age is…
-
Evolution of Drought Response and Resilience in California’s Cities
By Erik Porse Drought is a regular event in California. In recent decades, California has experienced five prolonged drought periods (1976-77, 1987-1992, 2007-09, 2011-16, 2020-22). Urban water agencies have responded with investments in supply and demand management measures, which have made California’s cities more resilient to drought effects. What motivated these investments? Our current habits…
-
This Drought is Dead – Long Live the Drought
by Jay Lund and Andrew L. Rypel Floods and droughts are not opposites and can occur simultaneously. This occurs often in California and is especially well-illustrated this year. Floods, droughts, and water scarcity are different. Floods are too much water at a place and time, and we would often pay to reduce the water present…
-
Why give away fish flows for free during a drought?
by Jay Lund, Ellen Hanak, Barton “Buzz” Thompson, Brian Gray, Jeffrey Mount and Katrina Jessoe This is a re-posting from 11 February 2014 (in the previous drought). With California in a major drought, state and federal regulators will be under pressure to loosen environmental flow standards that protect native fish. This happened in the 1976-77…
-
Dammed hot: California’s regulated streams fail cold-water ecosystems
by Ann Willis, Ryan Peek, and Andrew L. Rypel Given the current drought, it’s no surprise that California’s dams are struggling to provide cool water habitats to support native freshwater ecosystems. But what if they were never able to support them under any conditions? New research shows how current stream management fails to provide the…
-
A Swiss Cheese Model for Fish Conservation in California
by Andrew L. Rypel, Peter B. Moyle, and Jay Lund We read with great interest Nicholas Chistakis’s piece outlining a “Swiss Cheese Model For Combating Covid-19” in the Wall Street Journal. Christakis presents a model for considering the individual steps needed to achieve a larger goal, and how each step should fit into a larger…
-
Picture this research – a photo blog from the Center for Watershed Sciences
by Scientists at CWS Holidays are a natural time of introspection on who we are, what we do, and why. Towards a bit of our own self-reflection, some researchers from UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences (CWS) have each contributed a photo and short description of their work. We hope you enjoy reading about us…
-
Making “productive” assessments of California’s ecosystems
by Andrew L. Rypel Conservation science and restoration ecology are challenging and interdisciplinary fields. Managing for ecological function necessitates focus on multiple scales of ecological organization while simultaneously integrating feedback loops with critical environmental drivers like temperature, flow and habitat change. This means scientists working on these issues can emerge from diverse areas of inquiry…
-
The banality of California’s ‘1,200-year’ drought
By Jay Lund California’s ongoing drought will continue to break records and grab headlines, but it is unlikely to be especially rare from a water policy and management perspective. Estimates of the current drought’s rarity range from once in 15 years to once in 1,200 years (Griffin and Anchukaitis 2014), depending on the region and…
-
How to manage drought: Ask an economist
The economics of water scarcity is crucial to sustainable water management, particularly during droughts. California has long benefited from the insights of economists, though their ranks in state water agencies are thinning. Luckily, California has a wealth of young, talented economists already active in public water policy and who will be around for future droughts. California…
-
Making the most of little water — with spreadsheets
By Jenny Ta and Joshua Viers It seems inevitable that increasing numbers of California farmers will see their claims to surface water suspended this growing season as the drought persists into a fourth year. The State Water Resources Control Board said as much Friday (June 12) when it extended drought-related prohibitions on river diversions to irrigators with rights…
-
Getting through the dry times
California’s economy overall is weathering the worst drought in decades remarkably well, thanks in part to groundwater use and water market transfers. But as a recent UC Davis study noted, the resilience is tenuous because groundwater is treated like an unlimited savings account and water marketing is hobbled by red tape and lack of transparency.…