Tag: Yolo Bypass
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Getting Our Feet Wet: Bringing Photography Students into the Yolo Bypass
By Eliza Gregory . . . The first time I heard the phrase “flood-based ecosystem,” I was in New South Wales, and I was confused. I was on a 4000 km drive around the Murray Darling Basin, the largest watershed in Australia. I was with a group from Engineers Without Borders Australia, who luckily had an expansive idea of who would be fun to have along (shout out to Claire…
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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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Reconciling fish and fowl with floods and farming
By Robyn Suddeth Floodplains are extremely productive habitats for native fish and birds, yet floodplains in California are cut off from rivers by levees and development. The loss of this severed habitat threatens many native species that evolved to take advantage of seasonal flooding. Ecologists’ traditional approach to this problem would be to recreate some…
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Innovations in floodplain modeling: A test-drive on the Yolo Bypass
High-resolution simulation of 2006 flooding in Yolo Bypass Video shows a swollen Sacramento River spilling over the Fremont weir into the 57,000-acre floodway. Notice that the floodwaters spread through individual irrigation ditches and drains, the blue hues darkening as levels rise. Hydraulic models need such fine detail when the acreage at stake is relatively small –…