Tag: water quality
-
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…
-
Wetlands on the Edge
By Andrew L. Rypel It’s really easy to overlook and undervalue wetlands. Some are small or just don’t look very important. Others are enormous, and cause flooding issues for homeowners and growers. Some might even think wetlands are gross, worry about mosquitos and vector borne illness, or have never experienced what it’s like to be…
-
Shell-shocking Details About Freshwater Mussel Reproduction
By Andrew L. Rypel, Miranda Bell Tilcock, and Christine A. Parisek One of our favorite aspects of teaching is (occasionally) being able to really surprise a student. Many of the fun nature facts folks pick up nowadays come from TV, YouTube, social media, and other media outlets. But these outlets have an inherent bias: they…
-
Will more wildfire and precipitation extremes mussel-out California’s freshwater streams?
By Andrew J. Lawrence and Andrew L. Rypel Apocalyptic scenes of wildfires and floods are now familiar to Californians. However, the ecological impacts from these events remain understudied in California and across the world. Gaps in awareness and understanding on the issue are especially intense for freshwater mussels, whose cryptic and sedentary life-histories belie their…
-
Losing mussel mass – the silent extinction of freshwater mussels
by Andrew L. Rypel Note: this is a re-post from August 2020. Throughout my career I’ve spent some time studying the fascinating ecology and conservation issues of freshwater mussels (Fig. 1). For me, learning about mussels has fortified a recurring theme of the natural world – that everything is connected and that small changes in…
-
Initial Sampling of the Carp-DEUM Project
By Kim Luke, John Durand, Rachel McConnell, Aaron Sturtevant, Nina Suzuki, Andrew L. Rypel This spring, the Carp-Dependent Urgent Management (Carp-DEUM) Project began its first round of sampling in the UC Davis Arboretum before the Covid-19 lockdown. The project has two planned phases; a population estimate of common carp (and other arboretum fishes) in the…
-
The folly of unimpaired flows for water quality management
by Ann Willis Unimpaired streamflow has long been the benchmark against which current stream flows are evaluated for environmental purposes. The underlying assumption is that if there is water in a stream, the stream must be healthy. A closer look shows why unimpaired flows is often a flawed basis for environmental management, particularly when water…
-
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…
-
The dog that didn’t bark: Unexpectedly small effects of export changes on Delta farms
Inspector Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention? Sherlock Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time. Holmes: That was the curious incident. By Josué Medellín-Azuara and Richard Howitt, UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences California…
-
Water to the sea isn’t wasted
By Jeffrey Mount In December of 2010 we had a remarkable set of storms. Relentless rain and snowfall hit both southern and northern California. The news reports about these events followed a predictable pattern, including the inevitable articles that bemoan floodwaters as “wasted” because they discharge to the sea. This generalization about floodwaters or any…