An ecosystem includes all of the living organisms (plants,
animals and microbes) in a given area, interacting with each
other, and also with their non-living environments (air, water
and soil).
Ecosystems are dynamic and are impacted by disturbances such as a
drought, an extraordinarily freezing winter, and pests.
Longer-term disturbances include climate change effects.
Ecosystems provide a variety of goods and services upon which
people depend. Ecosystem management emphasizes managing natural
resources at the level of the ecosystem itself and not just
managing individual species.
The California Legislature was the first in the country to
protect rare plants and animals through passage of the California
Endangered Species Act in 1970. Congress followed suit in 1973 by
passing the federal Endangered Species Act.
In recent years, thick layers of cyanobacteria—commonly known
as blue-green algae—have closed popular local swimming spots
Lake Anza and Lake Temescal for weeks at a time. Last summer, a
toxic algae bloom in the San Francisco Bay killed thousands of
fish. Although algae is always present in some quantity in
lakes and the bay, higher temperatures, stagnant water, and
excessive nutrient levels can cause the algae to multiply. If
the particular species has toxins in it, such as blue-green
algae or the Heterosigma akashiwo species that bloomed in the
bay last summer, the water can become unsafe for humans and
animals. Algae blooms and cyanobacteria have become state and
nationwide problems. In the Bay Area, water managers were
beginning to wonder if the extreme drought conditions of recent
years had pushed the problem into a dangerous new phase in
local waters.
Restoring marsh and wetland habitat can have significant
benefits for dozens of species throughout the Bay and
Delta—that’s beyond dispute. But when it comes to saving the
Estuary’s most imperiled fish, how much habitat improvements
can help in the absence of dramatically increased freshwater
flows is a question that has dogged and divided scientists and
policy makers for years. As the State Water Resources Control
Board considers the latest proposal from the State and water
agencies for a flows agreement that would restore thousands of
riparian and wetland acres—while dedicating less water to the
environment than proposed under an alternative regulatory
framework—critics argue that science doesn’t support its
underlying assumptions.
There could be more than just fashion risks involved when
buying a pair of leggings or a raincoat. Just how much risk is
still not clear, but toxic chemicals have been found in
hundreds of consumer products and clothing bought off the racks
nationwide. Thousands of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl
substances, or PFAS, exist since the first ones were invented
in the 1940s to prevent stains and sticking. PFAS chemicals are
used in nonstick cookware, water-repellent clothing and
firefighting foam. Their manufacture and persistence in
products have contaminated drinking water nationwide. Also
known as “forever chemicals,” these substances do not break
down in the environment and can accumulate in our bodies over
time. Drinking water is widely considered the greatest source
of potential exposure and harm.
A California appeals court has upheld waste discharge
requirements within the eastern San Joaquin River watershed
that growers say are reasonable, rebuffing challenges from
environmentalists. In its March 17 decision, the Third District
Court of Appeal rejected all arguments brought by environmental
groups and sided with the California State Water Resources
Control Board, the California Farm Bureau and others related to
the Central Valley’s Irrigated Lands Regulatory Program. The
court addressed three cases brought by environmental plaintiffs
against the water board.
The amount of grazing land being put off limits to development
in the southern Sierra Nevada has expanded with a deal
announced Wednesday adding 65 acres to a swath now 14 times
that size that conservationists say will serve as a permanent
corridor for local wildlife, among other key benefits.
California Rangeland Trust announced the purchase of the
property at Bufford Ranch, owned by Ernest Bufford, who with
this latest addition has agreed to conserve 910 acres on the
north side of Walker Basin. Terms of the transaction were not
disclosed.
Congress on Wednesday approved a resolution to overturn the
Biden administration’s protections for the nation’s waterways
that Republicans have criticized as a burden on business,
advancing a measure that President Biden has promised to veto.
Republicans have targeted the Biden administration’s
protections for thousands of small streams, wetlands and other
waterways, labeling it an environmental overreach that harms
businesses, developers and farmers. They used the Congressional
Review Act that allows Congress to block recently enacted
executive branch regulations. The Senate voted in favor 53 to
43 Wednesday to give final legislative approval to the measure.
Four Democrats and independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona
joined Republicans to vote in favor of the resolution.
The Lake Merritt Institute, a nonprofit that helps to clean and
monitor the health of Lake Merritt in Oakland, says the recent
rains in the Bay Area have sent lots of fresh water and
pollution into Lake Merritt. The weather-related changes have
also stoked fears that the fish die-off in the lake last summer
could repeat this summer. The Lake Merritt Institute is ramping
up fundraising efforts in hopes of curbing conditions that
could fuel a repeat die-off. In the summer of 2022, thousands
of dead fish washed up in Lake Merritt as a “red tide” algae
bloom spread in the lake and across the surrounding San
Francisco Bay. At Lake Merritt, visitors reported strong smells
from all the dead fish, and crews had to scoop the dead fish up
and out of the water. Visitors reported seeing striped bass,
top smelt, crabs, and even bat rays among the dead wildlife.
A study in Functional Ecology offers evidence
that desert ecosystems, long perceived as the most
resilient to climate change, may be hitting their limits.
Researchers at the University of California Riverside found
that rising temperatures and protracted drought have driven
piñon pines and juniper trees to seek refuge at higher
elevations in the deserts north of Palm Springs. In the place
of these slow-growing, iconic forests is rising an empire of
weeds. That is part of a wholesale transition in arid
landscapes caused by the burning of fossil fuels, the
scientists said. … While the piñon pines and
junipers are often seen as hardier, they nonetheless depend on
ready access to underground water. That’s in
ever-shorter supply thanks to the West’s long drought, though
this year’s record rainfall has provided a brief respite.
The California Department of Water Resources is using the
winter storms to claim that the proposed Delta Conveyance
project would help ensure a more reliable water supply for the
State Water Project in light of how climate change will alter
seasonal patterns of rain and drought. In reality, the
benefits of the conveyance project are speculative at
best. The Delta Counties Coalition demonstrated for over
15 years that resources slated for the tunnel would be better
spent on sustainable, resilient water infrastructure around the
state (such as groundwater recharge, storage, recycled water
expansion, desalination) instead of further increasing reliance
on Sacramento River freshwater flows, which is in direct
conflict with a Delta Reform Act requirement to reduce reliance
on the Delta. -Written by Oscar Villegas, chair of the Yolo
County Board of Supervisors; and Patrick Kennedy, a member
of the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors and Delta
Counties Coalition.
[A]gricultural practices, especially in California, must be
updated to survive the future. One powerful change that is
growing momentum is strategic cropland repurposing. Doing
cropland repurposing right can benefit many, including
landowners. … Cropland retirement has direct
negative effects on agricultural revenues and farmworker
employment, with ripple effects in other sectors that depend on
agriculture (such as transportation and agricultural services).
But cropland retirement also means a decrease in pesticide,
synthetic fertilizers, and water use that can bring significant
environmental and local public health benefits. How do we
weigh these scenarios and decide if cropland repurposing makes
sense?
State officials were supposed to take a conservative approach
to approving salmon fishing season this year — and they did.
California’s fishing season had been scheduled to open April 1.
Instead, as a result of low salmon projections, the season has
been canceled. Salmon provides more to the state than meets the
eye. … According to the California Department of Fish
and Wildlife, salmon numbers are irregular during the three
year life cycle. Data has shown that in years following wetter
seasons fish stock has increased. Consequently there has been a
decline in stock for years following drier seasons.
This winter’s atmospheric river storms, coastal flooding,
erosion, sea level rise, saltwater intrusion into rivers, and
sedimentation dumping thousands of tons of soil into the ocean
were only the most recent of the state’s disasters. The year
2022 alone brought a massive red tide in San Francisco Bay, the
continued die-off of 95% of northern California’s kelp forest
between the Golden Gate and Cape Mendocino, and a spike of gray
whale deaths along the entire coast. Climate impacts threaten
communities, both human and wild, ranging from whales and their
ice-dependent Arctic prey to the 26 million people living in
the state’s 19 coastal counties that, as of 2021, generated
around 85% of the state’s $3.3 trillion dollar GDP. -Written by David Helvarg, author and executive
director of Blue Frontier, an ocean conservation and policy
group.
Ideas flowed at a recent forum on how to manage Napa Valley
water, which is the lifeblood for local cities, world-famous
wine country and the environment. Save Napa Valley Foundation —
formerly Growers/Vintners for Responsible Agriculture — and
other groups put on the Napa Water Forum. It took place Friday,
March 24 in the Native Sons of the Golden West building in
downtown Napa. … [W]ater runs from local mountains in
streams to the Napa River, giving life to fish and other
aquatic life. The Napa River runs for about 50 miles from Mount
St. Helena through the Napa Valley to San Pablo Bay. Some
water is captured behind dams that form reservoirs for local
cities. Some water seeps into the aquifer, becoming groundwater
that feeds streams and the Napa River during the hot summers
and provides well water for vineyards, wineries and homes.
Tiny pieces of plastic shed from food wrappers, grocery bags,
clothing, cigarette butts, tires and paint are invading the
environment and every facet of daily life. Researchers know the
plastic particles have even made it into municipal water
supplies, but very little data exists about the scope of
microplastic contamination in drinking water. After years
of planning, California is embarking on a first-of-its-kind
data-gathering mission to illuminate how prevalent
microplastics are in the state’s largest drinking water
sources. Our latest Western
Water article is among our array of resources available to keep up
with the news and learn more about floods and drought, the
Colorado River and more!
Camp Pendleton leaders on Monday sent a public notice to
thousands of service members and civilians who live and work on
the base’s north end alerting them that recent testing revealed
their drinking water contained a higher-than-desired level of
PFAS, a potentially carcinogenic chemical that has been found
in much of Southern California’s groundwater supply. PFAS, or
per- and polyfluorinated substances, can be found in cleaning
products, water-resistant fabrics, grease-resistant paper and
non-stick cookware, as well as in products such as shampoo,
dental floss and nail polish. The state only set requirements
to test for the chemicals in the last few years and has lowered
the threshold for when their detection needs to be reported to
the public by water agencies. Water districts throughout
Southern California have been struggling to get PFAS levels
down.
While the world’s oceans have hit a record high temperature,
the Pacific Ocean off the California coast remains colder than
average. In fact, in virtually no place in the world is the
ocean so much colder than normal, according to a map from the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
… The stormy weather is clearly a factor. The
winds associated with storms have pushed water from the north
to the south. The weather has also brought upwelling, when
frigid water from the depths is pulled to the surface. San
Francisco Bay has also been unusually cool.
California Trout is proud to announce that Redgie Collins,
CalTrout’s Legal and Policy Director, was selected to represent
conservation interests in California Department of Water
Resources Drought Resilience Interagency and Partners
Collaborative (DRIP Collaborative). This new entity will
serve as a standing interagency task force to plan for and
respond to drought and water shortages across the state.
Established by the Department of Water Resources in
coordination with the State Water Board and other relevant
state agencies, the DRIP Collaborative will facilitate
proactive state planning and coordination for all stages of
current and future drought across the state. This includes
pre-drought planning, emergency response to drought, and
post-drought management.
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 at that location and moment. Droughts and water
scarcity represent too little water at a place and time,
meaning we would often pay to increase its availability. We
highlight these differences because people tend to view such
conditions through an unrealistic zero-sum lens. This essay
uses this year’s experience to examine how floods, drought, and
water scarcity differ, can occur in the same year, and how
droughts might end, but leave legacies.
In little pockets in the state, people like [Matt Kaminski, a
biologist from Ducks Unlimited] are reworking the land yet
again to bring back a version of California’s past, in service
of the future. By allowing rivers to spread out, flows are
diverted from downstream communities, replenishing groundwater
and staving off unwanted floods. “These wetlands,” Kaminski
likes to say, “act as a sponge.” And the state agreed. In
September, the California Wildlife Conservation Board earmarked
$40 million for the nonprofit River Partners to spend on
similar projects in the San Joaquin Valley. But in the
governor’s proposed budget released in January, that funding
was axed.
Proponents of the removal of four dams from the Klamath River
in Northern California and Southern Oregon announced March 23
that work has begun on the project. The Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission’s approval last fall cleared the way for
the the Klamath River Renewal Corp., which has been
pushing removal of the dams for more than a decade to help
endangered fish, to team with California and Oregon in
accepting transfer of the project license from energy
company PacifiCorp and start the dam removal process.
… The project is funded by $200 million from PacifiCorp
and $250 million from a California water bond passed in
2014. The three larger dams are to be removed next year
with removal of all four dams completed by the end of 2024;
however, the restoration of the 38 mile reach of river impacted
by the dams will take longer.
Tule elk herds in the Point Reyes National Seashore rebounded
this winter following a significant die-off during the drought,
according to new National Park Service data. The seashore,
which is the only park in the country with tule elk, has three
herds. The largest, located in a fenced reserve on Tomales
Point, increased from 221 elk in 2021 to 262 elk, an increase
of nearly 19%. The Limantour herd, which is one of two
free-roaming herds, increased from 151 elk to 170 from 2021 to
2022. Park staff said they were unable to conduct a count of
the other free-roaming herd, the Drakes Beach herd, this winter
because of weather conditions and staffing limitations.
On the heels of one of California’s wettest winters on
record, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday announced that he will roll
back some of the state’s most severe drought restrictions and
dramatically increase water supplies for agencies serving 27
million people.
In December the Mono Lake Committee asked the State Water Board
to take emergency action to deliver more water to Mono Lake due
to the lake’s perilously low level. We were specifically
concerned about the increasing risk of coyotes accessing the
islands in Mono Lake where California gulls nest. As it turns
out, Mother Nature took immediate action, surprising us all
with six weeks of memorably wet weather in December and
January. The wet winter means the lake will rise this year, and
we recognize changed circumstances reduce the need for action
before April 1. At the same time, we have all seen this movie
before. After the wet winter of 2017 the lake rose multiple
feet, but the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (DWP)
continued its water diversions and those gains in lake level
were lost in subsequent years, returning us to the crisis we
are here to discuss.
No matter where you live, you’re likely to have a wetland
somewhere nearby. Wetlands include any land that is saturated
with water at least some of the time, like marshes and
mangroves along our coasts, floodplains and wet meadows along
rivers and streams, and vernal pools and prairie potholes. And
all of these wetlands touch our lives in many ways you may not
realize. In a new report produced by Point Blue
Conservation Science and the Natural Resources Defense Council,
we compiled evidence for a wide range of benefits wetlands
provide us every day. Across all types of wetlands, we found
evidence for a broad array of benefits, but what became clear
is that wetland restoration is an important strategy for
addressing three major challenges we face here in California
and around the world: climate change, biodiversity
conservation, and water management.
First it was the eerie images of barrels leaking on the
seafloor not far from Catalina Island. Then the shocking
realization that the nation’s largest manufacturer of DDT had
once used the ocean as a huge dumping ground — and that as many
as half a million barrels of its acid waste had been poured
straight into the water. Now, scientists have discovered that
much of the DDT — which had been dumped largely in the 1940s
and ’50s — never broke down. The chemical remains in its most
potent form in startlingly high concentrations, spread across a
wide swath of seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco.
… With a $5.6-million research boost from Congress, at
the urging of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), numerous
federal, state and local agencies have since joined with
scientists and environmental nonprofits to figure out the
extent of the contamination lurking 3,000 feet
underwater.
Prompted by urgent calls for action from Tribal leaders and
community members, a coalition of Tribal, local, state and
federal entities is taking immediate steps to support the
long-term survival of the Clear Lake hitch. A large minnow
found only in northern California’s Clear Lake and its
tributaries, the hitch, known as Chi to local Tribal members,
migrates into the tributaries to spawn each spring before
returning to the lake. Historically numbering in the millions,
Clear Lake hitch now are facing a tough fight to avoid
extinction. Today, the California Department of Fish and
Wildlife (CDFW) announced a list of commitments designed to
protect spawning and rearing areas, provide appropriate stream
flows, remove barriers to migration and reduce predation.
As drought dried up rivers that carry California’s newly
hatched Chinook salmon to the ocean, state officials in recent
years resorted to loading up the fish by the millions onto
trucks and barges to take them to the Pacific. The surreal and
desperate scramble boosted the survival rate of the
hatchery-raised fish, but still it was not enough to reverse
the declining stocks in the face of added challenges. River
water temperatures rose with warm weather, and a Trump-era
rollback of federal protections for waterways allowed more
water to be diverted to farms. Climate change, meanwhile,
threatens food sources for the young Chinook maturing in the
Pacific. Now, ocean salmon fishing season is set to be
prohibited this year off California and much of Oregon for the
second time in 15 years after adult fall-run Chinook, often
known as king salmon, returned to California’s rivers in near
record-low numbers in 2022.
Crews have begun working on removing four dams on the Klamath
River which tribes and other groups have lobbied to take down
for decades. The early removal work involves upgrading bridges
and constructing roads to allow greater access to the remote
dams, which are expected to be fully down by the end of 2024.
The dam removal on the 38-mile stretch of the river comes after
an agreement between the last dam owner PacifiCorp, California,
Oregon, the Yurok Tribe, the Karuk Tribe and a multitude of
environmental organizations, with the goal of restoring salmon
populations. The Klamath River Renewal Corporation held a news
conference on Thursday giving an update on their work in
dismantling the dams and restoring habitats.
Federal researchers have found that two widely used pesticides
significantly harms endangered Northwest salmon and steelhead
species. The opinion could lead to a change in where and how
the pesticides can be used. The National Marine Fisheries
Service issued a draft of its biological opinion Thursday
concluding that continued use of insect-killing chemicals
containing carbaryl or methomyl likely jeopardizes dozens of
endangered fish species — including Chinook salmon, coho
salmon, sockeye, and steelhead in the Columbia, Willamette, and
Snake rivers. Carbaryl and methomyl are insecticides commonly
used on field vegetables and orchard crops. Both are used on
agricultural land across the Willamette Valley, the Columbia
River Gorge, and southeastern Washington, according to federal
data.
Los Angeles County is on track to capture enough stormwater
this year to quench the year-round water needs of more than a
quarter of the county’s residents. It’s good news, but there is
still a lot of work to do to meet local water use goals. [LA
County’s principal stormwater engineer Sterling] Klippel says
LA County gets about a third of its water from those [local]
aquifers while the rest is imported either from Northern
California or from the Colorado River. But the City of LA’s
goal is to flip that equation by 2035, using two-thirds local
water and cutting Southern California’s dependence on imported
water. [Bruce Reznik, head of the nonprofit LA Waterkeeper]
says the local infrastructure is just not set up for that yet.
Rivers are one of the most dynamic water cycle components of
the earth surface and hold fundamental economic and ecological
significance for the development of human societies, ecosystem
sustainability, and regional climate. Yet, their natural
balance has been threatened by a wide range of anthropogenic
stressors and ongoing climate change. With increasing demands
for economic and social development, human disturbances in the
form of dam construction, aquaculture, and irrigation have
resulted in large-scale and rapid transformations of river
channels.
The city of Linsday in eastern Tulare County is one of several
in the region to experience extreme flooding during the recent
storms this month. In the brief pause in rain, the city
declared a state of emergency to prepare for a new storm this
week. But for some residents, the damage is already done. In
this interview, KVPR’s Esther Quintanilla spoke with Lindsay
City Mayor Hipolito Cerros to hear how he’s leading his
community through this time.
California’s winter storms have blasted the Sierra Nevada with
a thick blanket of snow. That ample snowpack has been
subsequently pelted with rain, pushing some of it downhill as
runoff through ravines, canyons, and creeks before feeding into
the forks of the American River. The water eventually fills
Folsom Lake to the delight of the people throughout the
Sacramento metropolitan area who flock there in the heat of
summer. Beyond water supply, power generation, instream flow
needs, and yes, summertime fun, Folsom has a key role to play
in keeping the water temperature in the lower American River
hospitable to the fish that return each year to spawn. That
means having cold water on demand when it’s needed.
Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has raised concerns
about the seismic stability of Scott Dam, and plans to restrict
water flow to lower the water level in the reservoir. This will
be an expedited measure to limit potential seismic instability
of the dam. The decision has been influenced by a recent
analysis by the utility’s engineering consultant, which shows
that the proposed restriction will improve the dam’s expected
stability and safety performance during a major earthquake.
With the discussions surrounding the modernization of our water
system in California for both wetter and drier years, including
the water rights system, we offer the following observations
from the Sacramento Valley to help bring some focus to the
conversations: California’s water rights system is foundational
to our state’s water management system for cities and rural
communities, farms, fish and wildlife, hydropower and
recreation—thus our economy and environment are dependent upon
the orderly exercise of the water rights system and we are all
invested in its success. … California’s existing water
rights structure and system are working in the Sacramento
Valley to serve water for multiple benefits, including cities
and rural communities, farms and ranches, fish and wildlife,
recreation, and hydropower.
Jay Lund, Vice Director of the Center for Watershed Sciences
and Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering, and his wife
Jean Lund have made a historic donation of $800,000 to the
Center for Watershed Sciences. This large and generous gift
will support graduate students to engage in interdisciplinary
water research, pursue their own interests, and think
creatively about how to tackle major water problems. Water
management is a critical part of any society, and UC Davis is
uniquely situated to address water challenges in California and
across the globe. UC Davis is also an ideal setting for
hands-on, collaborative learning, such that new generations of
water professionals are trained across multiple disciplines and
in novel ways.
In 2014, Proposition 1 set aside $2.7 billion to fund the
“public benefit” portions of water storage projects through the
Water Storage Investment Program. Water storage for the
environment played a crucial role in determining how much
funding the projects would receive. One of these projects,
Sites Reservoir, offers a novel approach to storing water to
benefit freshwater ecosystems when they need it most. We talked
to Jerry Brown, executive director of the Sites Project
Authority, to learn more about plans for the reservoir and its
ecosystem water budget.
Plastic pollution is everywhere, from the tip of Mount Everest
to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Wherever it goes, plastic
has unexpected effects: it transports pathogens, strangles
wildlife, and, sometimes, becomes habitat. But on the bottom of
the Philippine Trench, 10,000 meters deep, plastic is reshaping
life on the seafloor. In 2021, Alan Jamieson, a marine
biologist at the University of Western Australia, Deo Florence
L. Onda, a microbial oceanographer at the University of the
Philippines Marine Science Institute, and their crew descended
into the third-deepest trench in the world. The place was
swarming with plastic bags. As the scientists watched, the
deep-sea current was dragging plastic bags along the seafloor,
scraping it with parallel lines like tire tracks.
Images of starving polar bears staggering across the snow
earned the species the dubious honor of being the “poster
child” of climate change. But now another human-caused
environmental danger threatens these apex predators: pollution
from a class of 12,000 chemicals known as per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). And they’re not the only
ones. The nonprofit Environmental Working Group analyzed
hundreds of recent peer-reviewed scientific studies and found
more than 120 different PFAS compounds in wildlife. Some 330
species were affected, spanning nearly every continent — and
that’s just some of what scientists have identified so far.
Tiny pieces of plastic waste shed from food wrappers, grocery
bags, clothing, cigarette butts, tires and paint are invading
the environment and every facet of daily life. Researchers know
the plastic particles have even made it into municipal water
supplies, but very little data exists about the scope of
microplastic contamination in drinking water. After years
of planning, California this year is embarking on a
first-of-its-kind data-gathering mission to illuminate how
prevalent microplastics are in the state’s largest drinking
water sources and help regulators determine whether they are a
public health threat.
The Mississippi silverside (Menidia audens[1]) is one of the
most abundant fishes in the San Francisco Estuary and in the
fresh waters of California in general. As the name indicates,
it is not native to the state but was introduced into Clear
Lake, Lake County, in 1967, from which it quickly spread
widely, via the California aqueduct system and through angler
introductions as a bait and forage fish (Moyle 2002). It is a
small fish, 7-12 cm (3-4 inches) adult length but typically
occurs in large schools. Its impact on native fishes is poorly
understood but is most likely negative. This blog tells the
story of how it came to be introduced, as a classic example of
the Frankenstein Effect, where a well-intentioned,
science-based introduction created an out-of-control monster.
Researchers in Poland have found another reason to love
beavers: They benefit wintering birds. The rodents, once
maligned as destructive pests, have been getting a lot of
positive press lately. And for good reason. Beavers are
ecosystem engineers. As they gather trees and dam waterways,
they create wetlands, increase soil moisture, and allow more
light to reach the ground. That drives the growth of herbaceous
and shrubby vegetation, which benefits numerous animals. Bats,
who enjoy the buffet of insects found along beaver ponds, are
among the beneficiaries. So too are butterflies who come for
the diversity of flowering plants in the meadows beavers
create.
The bottled water industry is a juggernaut. More than 1 million
bottles of water are sold every minute around the world and the
industry shows no sign of slowing down, according to a new
report. Global sales of bottled water are expected to nearly
double by 2030. But the industry’s enormous global success
comes at a huge environmental, climate and social cost,
according to the report published Thursday by the United
Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health,
which analyzes the industry’s global impacts. Groundwater
extracted to help fill billions of plastic bottles a year poses
a potential threat to drinking water resources and feeds the
world’s plastic pollution crisis, while the industry’s growth
helps distract attention and resources away from funding the
public-water infrastructure desperately needed in many
countries, according to the report.
For the time being, it is not safe for pets or people to go
into the water at Lake Elsinore, the city warned Tuesday. The
reason is high levels of toxins from algae were found in the
lake. … Lake users are advised to stay out of the water
until further notice, including boating and other water
recreation activities. People should also keep their pets out
of the water and not eat fish caught in the lake, according to
the city. The toxins are enough to kill pets and make
humans sick, the city reported. In humans, symptoms of exposure
include diarrhea, vomiting, skin rashes and eye irritation.
Pets may experience diarrhea, vomiting, convulsions and death,
according to the notice.
On March 10, officials in California made the difficult yet
pragmatic decision to cancel … ocean salmon commercial or
sport fishing off California’s coast until April 2024. In the
Sacramento and Klamath rivers, Chinook salmon numbers have
approached record lows due to recent drought conditions.
… Right now, we believe that the commercial salmon
fishing ban is what our salmon need to ensure population
numbers do not dip to unrecoverable lows. As we look to future
population resiliency, there are so many other things these
fish need, and our teams are working hard to make them
happen. CalTrout works from ridge top to river mouth to
get salmon populations unassisted access to each link in the
chain of habitats that each of their life stages depends on.
Like many deserts, lack of rainfall in the Mojave has pushed
life to the furthest limits of adaptation, saturating the
region with rare and unique species found nowhere else in the
world. In fact, one-fourth of plant species growing in the
Mojave Desert—the smallest of four major deserts in North
America—are one of a kind. One of those plants is the
white-margined penstemon, a small pink bell-shaped flower fixed
on long hardy stems with waved oblong leaves. The highly
adapted flower has carved a niche in the Mojave by occupying
sandy desert washes, valley floors, and mountain foot-slopes
where little else grows. … But the imperiled
wildflower faces a number of threats to its survival, including
urban sprawl, climate change, energy development, off-road
recreation, and invasive grasses.
The Pacific Fishery Management Council on March 10 provided
three options for recreation and commercial salmon fishing from
the California/Oregon border all the way south to the
California/Mexico border. Unfortunately, but not surprising,
all three options included the words “closed.” In an
unprecedented decision, the PFMC was left with little choice
but to close recreational and commercial salmon fishing this
season statewide. Southern Oregon, which also impacts
Sacramento and Klamath River fall Chinook, will also be closed
from Cape Falcon south. The sport fishery had been scheduled to
open off California in most areas on April 1. The closures were
made to protect Sacramento River fall Chinook, which returned
to the Central Valley in 2022 at near-record low numbers,
and Klamath River fall Chinook, which had the second lowest
abundance forecast since the current assessment method began in
1997.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of the
wealthiest and most influential institutions in Utah, plans to
donate a pool of water to help save the Great Salt Lake. The
Utah Department of Natural Resources, which helps manage the
lake, announced the gift Wednesday morning. The donation
amounts to about 20,000 acre-feet worth of shares that the
church holds in the North Point Consolidated Irrigation
Co. … Although the lake is the nation’s largest
saline system, it has run a water deficit of about 1.2 million
acre-feet in recent years. This winter’s substantial snowpack,
however, will likely raise its elevation by at least a few
feet. It currently sits at about 4,190 feet above sea level
but needs to rise to around 4,200 feet to reach an
elevation that’s sustainable for wildlife, recreation and
lake-based industries like brine shrimp and mineral harvesting.
Last summer Governor Newsom released California’s Water Supply
Strategy–which calls for the modernization of our water
management system. We know that the Sacramento Valley continues
to modernize everything we do, from our farms, communities and
businesses, to the way we approach water. These improvements
include adopting improved water efficiency, irrigation systems,
and tools to measure water use. We are planting new varieties
that are more productive and produce more crop per drop. We are
investing millions to improve water delivery systems for the
environment as well as for farms, cities, and disadvantaged
communities.
The southern Sierra Nevada is covered with the deepest snowpack
in recorded history, and the rest of the range is not far
behind. When all that snow melts, where will it go? You
can read the answer in the landscape of the Central Valley. To
the eye it is nearly flat, covered by layers of gravel, silt
and clay washed from the mountains over the eons by rain and
melting snow. … The solution is shockingly simple,
relatively cheap — compared with the cost of cataclysmic floods
— and surprisingly non-controversial. We just haven’t yet done
it on the scale that’s needed. California needs to restore its
floodplains. Not the whole valley floors, and not as they were
in the pre-development era. But it needs to have many more
acres of land reserved for floodwater.
On the north shore of Iron Gate reservoir, Frank Henry, Jr.
jams a heavy metal pole into the ground and twists. Once a hole
is excavated, he grabs a stick from a five-gallon bucket. Water
drips from the small tangle of roots at one end. The stick is
Klamath plum; it will eventually grow into a shrubby tree that
forms dense thickets and produces mauve-colored fruits.
… Henry is part of a crew contracted by Resource
Environmental Solutions, or RES, to restore the banks of the
Klamath River in the wake of dam removal. Late last year,
PacifiCorp transferred ownership of four hydroelectric
dams—three in Northern California; one in Southern Oregon—to
the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, which is managing the
dam removal. Drawdown of the reservoirs is scheduled to begin
as early as next January.
In response to crashing Chinook populations, a council of West
Coast fishery managers plans to cancel this year’s salmon
season in California, which will put hundreds of commercial
fishermen and women out of work in Northern California and turn
the summer into a bummer for thousands of recreational anglers.
…The Pacific Fishery Management Council announced March 10
that it is choosing between three fishing season
alternatives. Each would close the 2023 season, with the
possibility of a reopening in 2024. The final decision will
come during a session that begins April 1.
Recently, the United States District Court for the Northern
District of California refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a
concerned citizen against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
(Corps) and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) alleging
Endangered Species Act (ESA) violations in connection with the
Corps’ operation of the Coyote Valley Dam on the Russian River
in Northern California. The court opined that federal
defendants cannot avoid having to defend their prior actions
simply by initiating the consultation process under section
7(a)(2) of the ESA, and the equities weighed against a stay of
the litigation while the consultation process unfolds.
Solano County supervisors are scheduled Tuesday to receive an
update on the latest Delta tunnel project. “The Delta
Conveyance Project is the latest iteration of an isolated
conveyance by the state Department of Water Resources to remove
freshwater flows from the Delta for use in central and Southern
California,” the staff report to the board states. “The (Delta
Conveyance Project) includes constructing a 45-mile long,
39-foot diameter tunnel under the Delta with new diversions in
the North Delta that have a capacity to divert up to 6,000
cubic feet (of water) per second and operating new conveyance
facilities that would add to the existing State Water Project
infrastructure.”
Federal officials have proposed closing commercial chinook
salmon fishing off the coast of California over concerns for
expected low numbers of fall-run chinook salmon returning to
the Sacramento River this year. The Pacific Fishery Management
Council announced its three alternatives for recreational and
commercial fishing Friday. Ocean recreational fishing from the
Oregon-California border to the U.S.-Mexico border will be
closed in all three proposals, “given the low abundance
forecasts for both Klamath and Sacramento River fall chinook.”
the council said in a news release issued Friday. Commercial
salmon fishing off the coast of California also will be closed,
the council said. Ocean fishing restrictions were also
announced for Oregon and Washington.
Even with winter’s remarkable rainfall, Mono Lake will not rise
enough to reduce unhealthy dust storms that billow off the
exposed lakebed and violate air quality standards. Nor will it
offset increasing salinity levels that threaten Mono Lake
Kutzadika’a tribe’s cultural resources and food for millions of
migratory birds. Any gain Mono Lake makes surely won’t last due
to the [Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's] ongoing
diversions….If DWP won’t voluntarily cooperate in finding a
way to protect Mono Lake, then the State Water Board needs to
step up and save Mono Lake – again. -Written by Martha Davis, a board member for the
Mono Lake Committee.
Some of the tall, stately trees that have grown up in
California’s Sierra Nevada are no longer compatible with the
climate they live in, new research has shown. Hotter, drier
conditions driven by climate change in the mountain range have
made certain regions once hospitable to conifers — such as
sequoia, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir — an environmental
mismatch for the cone-bearing trees. … Although there
are conifers in those areas now, Hill and other researchers
suggested that as the trees die out, they’ll be replaced with
other types of vegetation better suited to the environmental
conditions. The team estimated that about 20% of all
Sierra Nevada conifer trees in California are no longer
compatible with the climate around them and are in danger
of disappearing. They dubbed these trees “zombie forests.”
Regenerative agriculture is a holistic land management approach
with principles that date back to Indigenous
farmers. Instead of letting the land fallow or repeating a
cycle of planting water-intensive crops that cannot survive the
harsh conditions along the lower Gila River, Hansen has worked
to develop strategies to make less water go further. He has
successfully introduced arid-adapted crops, integrated
livestock on his land and used non-traditional farming methods
to improve soil health and biodiversity. While
regenerative agriculture has been a way to conserve water and
grow healthier crops for centuries, the alternate farming
method has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years as a
way to potentially reverse the effects of climate change by
rebuilding soil organic matter and restoring degraded soil
biodiversity, resulting in both carbon drawdown and
improvements to the water cycle.
Federal dam managers are preparing a springtime assault against
smallmouth bass on the Colorado River, possibly using cool
water from deep in Lake Powell to keep the non-native fish from
getting entrenched in Grand Canyon. Environmental and river
recreation advocates hope the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will
pair cold water with a rush of water from deep behind Glen
Canyon Dam, both disrupting bass reproduction around Lees Ferry
and restoring eroded sandbars farther downstream. That option,
officially under study, is politically sensitive because it
would cost hydropower production and move water out of a
reservoir that has dropped to about a quarter of its storage
capacity. The stakes for humpback chub and other native fishes
are high. Young smallmouth bass, which grow into voracious
warm-water predators, were found between the dam and Lees Ferry
last year…
Before Californians built a network of levees and dams to keep
cities from flooding, the rivers that formed the Central Valley
each winter would spill out of their channels. In the wettest
years, they’d flood to form a massive inland sea that stretched
hundreds of miles from Redding to Bakersfield. In wet winters
such as this one, those rivers keep trying to form that massive
seasonal wetland again, testing the strength of the levees that
protect communities built on the state’s floodplains. Along two
of the state’s most flood-prone rivers, Ducks Unlimited has
been working to create wetlands that use those natural flood
patterns to create vital habitat for waterbirds and wildlife.
The projects highlight why Californians should look to wetland
expansion as one of the solutions to help reduce the risks from
future floods.
As storms swell California’s reservoirs, state water officials
have rescinded a controversial order that allowed more water
storage in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta while putting
salmon and other endangered fish at risk. Ten environmental
groups had petitioned the board to rescind its order, calling
it “arbitrary and capricious, contrary to law, and…not
supported by substantial evidence.” The reason for the
state’s reversal, according to the State Water Resources
Control Board, is that conditions in the Delta have changed as
storms boost the snowpack and runoff used to supply water to
cities and farms.
In many ways, Owens Lake — which dried up early last century
when the city of Los Angeles began diverting the lake’s water
supply to a major aqueduct — is a cautionary tale and a
harbinger of disasters to come. Climate change is altering
patterns of drought and rainfall across the world, and demand
for water is growing. Just 500 miles from Owens Lake, Utah’s
Great Salt Lake is drying rapidly and creating another stream
of toxic dust. And while Owens Lake has finally managed to get
its air pollution problems in check, it came at enormous cost.
In a sense, it is lucky that there is such an example already
out there, if only to demonstrate how important it will be to
avoid a similar fate.
A Montana-based lawsuit against the United States Forest
Service could bring sweeping changes to how forest fires are
fought in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Such changes could
result in worse wildfire seasons in the future as the lawsuit
aims to prohibit the use of aerial fire retardants. The
backstory: … Chemical retardants that are used by
firefighting agencies such as the USFS are tested and approved
by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Missoula Technology and
Development Center. The big picture: Per the lawsuit,
the FSEEE is attempting to require the USFS to obtain a Clean
Water Act permit to use fire retardant from airplanes.
The Biden administration’s move to throw out the Trump-era
biological opinions that govern California’s water flow is
nothing more than a political move to Rep. David Valadao
(R–Hanford). In an upcoming interview on Sunrise FM,
Valadao discussed the history of the biological opinions and
the Congressional investigation into the Biden administration’s
decision. The backstory: The latest biological opinions
which govern the State Water Project and the Central Valley
Project were signed by President Donald Trump in 2019, capping
the process of formulating the new opinions that started under
President Barack Obama. When President Joe Biden took
office two years ago, his administration quickly began the
process of removing the 2019 biological opinions to revert back
to the previous opinions issued in 2008 and 2009.
California’s severely depleted groundwater basins could get a
boost this spring, after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive
order waiving permits to recharge them. State water leaders
hope to encourage local agencies and agricultural districts to
capture water from newly engorged rivers and spread it onto
fields, letting it seep into aquifers after decades of heavy
agricultural pumping. … To pull water from the state’s
network of rivers and canals for groundwater recharge, state
law requires a permit from the State Water Resources Control
Board and Department of Fish and Wildlife. Many local agencies
lacked the permitting during January storms, but this month’s
atmospheric rivers and near record snowpack promises new
opportunities to put water underground.
One doesn’t have to visit bucolic Gold Rush towns like Coloma,
where you can give panning for gold a try, to see the truth.
Before 1975, there was no state or federal law mandating
cleanup of mining operations. Today, California’s Department of
Conservation estimates that there are at least 47,000 abandoned
mines dotted across almost every county in the state.
… And about 5,000 of these mines, according to state
estimates, are also likely contaminated — leaching out harmful
heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and mercury that were dug up
from deep underground or added to the environment in a
desperate attempt to extract every nugget of gold.
Humans have filled the world’s oceans with more than 170
trillion pieces of plastic, dramatically more than previously
estimated, according to a major study released Wednesday.
The trillions of plastic particles — a “plastic smog,” in the
words of the researchers — weigh roughly 2.4 million metric
tons and are doubling about every six years, according to the
study conducted by a team of international researchers led by
Marcus Eriksen of the 5 Gyres Institute, based in Santa Monica,
Calif. That is more than 21,000 pieces of plastic for each of
the Earth’s 8 billion residents. Most pieces are very
small. The study, which was published in the PLOS One
journal, draws on nearly 12,000 samples collected across 40
years of research in all the world’s major ocean basins.
Starting in 2004, researchers observed a major rise in the
material, which they say coincided with an explosion in
plastics production.
A coalition of environmental groups – the California Water
Impact Network, the California Sportfishing Protection
Alliance, and AquAlliance – have submitted a notice of intent
to sue the State Water Resources Control Board unless it
rescinds an order to suspend water quality and fish protections
in California rivers and the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta,
according to a coalition press release. The Board’s order was
issued following a decision by Governor Gavin Newsom to retain
water in state reservoirs to ensure future deliveries for
Central Valley agriculture. The order constituted an end-run
around state and federal legal requirements to maintain
adequate water quality and temperature conditions for salmon
below dams.
National and regional media love a good fight, and lately a day
doesn’t pass without a major news story or op-ed focused on
Colorado River disagreements, particularly amongst the seven
states of the Colorado River Basin (Arizona, California,
Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming). Which state
must bear the brunt of shortages needed as Colorado River flows
decline? Which sector of water users takes the hit as climate
change continues to diminish the river? Should urban water
supplies be protected because that’s where all the people are?
(Municipal water supply representatives will quickly remind us
that if all urban uses of Colorado River water were cut off,
there would still be a shortage). Should agricultural water
supplies be protected because we all need to eat?
The House on Thursday voted to overturn the Biden
administration’s protections for thousands of small
streams, wetlands and other waterways, advancing long-held
Republican arguments that the regulations are an environmental
overreach and burden to business. The vote was 227-198 to
overturn the rule. House Republicans used the Congressional
Review Act, which allows Congress to block recently enacted
executive-branch regulations. The measure now heads to the
Senate, where Republicans hope to attract Democratic senators
wary of Biden’s environmental policies. Sen. Joe Manchin,
D-W.Va., a frequent Biden antagonist, has already pledged to
support the overturn of a rule he calls federal overreach.
Biden said he would veto the measure if it reaches his desk.
The 30×30 initiative is a global effort to set aside 30% of
land and sea area for conservation by 2030, a move scientists
hope will reverse biodiversity loss and mitigate the effects of
climate change. Now adopted by state and national governments
around the world, 30×30 creates an unprecedented opportunity to
advance global conservation. When it comes to the water side of
30×30, most programs focus primarily on conservation of oceans,
but a new study by researchers at the University of California,
Berkeley argues that freshwater ecosystems must not be
neglected. Published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in
Ecology and the Environment, the paper urges policy makers to
explicitly include freshwater ecosystems like rivers, lakes,
and wetlands in 30×30 plans, and outlines how their
conservation will be critical to achieving the initiative’s
broader goals.
While images of discarded plastic bottles and bags dominate
news headlines, in reality most plastics contaminating Earth’s
lands and waters are barely visible to the naked eye. And these
microplastics (fragments less than 5 millimeters in diameter)
have become a problem too big to ignore. They are ubiquitous,
found in nearly every environment around the world, and
threatening ecosystems and animals ranging in size from
plankton to whales. They are also in drinking water, food and
our bodies — posing serious questions about the long-term
impacts to human and planetary health. From skin care products
and paint to plastic containers and car tires, these
microplastics originate from almost every industry. However,
many people don’t realize that their clothing is also made from
plastic. When we wash and wear synthetic textiles, they shed
microplastics, called microfibers.
Construction to start the removal process of the Klamath River
dams will start this month and all four dams are scheduled to
be removed from the river by the end of 2024. The Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission approved the $450 million dam
removal project in November of 2022. It will be the largest dam
removal project in American history. The Klamath River
Renewal Corporation (KRRC), who took over ownership of the dams
from Pacific Power, is leading the historic construction
project. This month, construction preparation work is underway.
Construction on the dams will begin this summer, starting with
Copco 2.
Weeks of frigid air temperatures in the Sierra have caused Lake
Tahoe’s water to “mix” for the first time since 2019, as cold
water at the surface sinks to the lake’s 1,600-foot depths,
bringing clearer water up. That means that the historically
crystal-clear lake, which has grown murkier over the past
several decades, is the clearest it has been in four years. The
lake’s clarity, which is a sign of its overall health and
typically drops to 60 or 70 feet deep, now goes down to 115
feet. … But it won’t last long, said Geoffrey Schladow,
a professor and director of the UC Davis’ Tahoe
Environmental Research Center. … Water clarity in the
lake was at an average depth of 61 feet in 2021,
compared with 102 feet in 1968, when it was first studied by UC
Davis. It also tends to be clearer in winter than summer, when
there is more algae growth and sediment.
The Golden State has never looked so green and white: Images
captured by NASA’s Earth Observatory and WorldView satellites
over the past three months reveal what happens when nine record
atmospheric rivers soak California in 32 trillion-plus gallons
of water. Closer to ground level, some daredevils are kayaking
off rooftops in South Lake Tahoe and down the mounds of snow
cloaking their homes and leaping off second-floor balconies at
Tahoe-area resorts into whiteout landscapes. Meanwhile, first
responders and emergency workers continue unearthing mountain
residents trapped by up to 16 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada
and at least 17 feet in the San Bernardino range. Oncoming
atmospheric rivers are also raising flood concerns as they
stream into the colossal snowpack later this month.
A few weeks ago, federally threatened coho salmon swam up the
Klamath River, spawned and laid egg nests. But some of these
nests, or redds, holding as many as 4,000 eggs, may never
hatch, owing to reduced water levels in the river. It’s the
result of a severe water management bungling, say critics, by
the Bureau of Reclamation, which controls how much water flows
from Upper Klamath Lake into the river. … Tribal nations and
commercial fishing groups argue the agency violated the
Endangered Species Act when it reduced river flows in mid-March
below a minimum level set in a National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration biological opinion, a series of recommendations
and requirements meant to help the salmon recover and ensure
river management decisions don’t push the species to the brink
of extinction…. The Bureau of Reclamation, which controls
flows and water allocation on the Klamath, says it is caught
between competing priorities.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife has awarded
$22.5 million to 19 projects that reportedly restore habitat
for salmon and wildlife corridors. According to the CDFW, eight
of the 19 projects address drought impacts on salmon and seek
to repair unscreened water diversions. The largest salmon
project will be led by the Yurok Tribe, which was awarded $3.9
million. Tribal officials will work within the Oregon Gulch
area of the Upper Trinity River to reestablish the river’s
natural flow after it was damaged by hydraulic mining. The
tribe will also reportedly work on restoring overflow banks for
Coho salmon.
For the first time since 2019, the water in Lake Tahoe is fully
mixed. When a body of water is “mixed,” cold water at the
surface sinks all the way to the lake bottom. Water that was
previously at the bottom rises to the top. This mixing
phenomenon happens about every four or five years in Lake
Tahoe. … This comes as a result of a much
colder-than-average winter for the Tahoe Basin. Scientists
with the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center track
Lake Tahoe’s water temperature each day. They say that right
now, the temperature throughout the entire lake is pretty much
the same, a sign that the water has indeed mixed from top to
bottom.
It’s a familiar scenario: Rising rivers are pinched off from
the flood plains that could have spread, slowed and stored the
sudden abundance of water. Floodwaters break through levees and
leave destruction and heartbreaking loss in their wake. Renewed
frustration and fury enter the public dialogue about “wasted”
water. … River managers use the term “environmental
flows” to describe the water that’s allowed to stay in rivers
to nurture the ecosystem, as opposed to water diverted or
stored for farms, cities or hydropower. While I worked at the
UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, we dove in deep on
environmental flows, calculating an environmental flow
management strategy for every major tributary to the San
Joaquin River, which nourishes the valley that bears its
name. -Written by Ann Willis, California Regional Director
for American Rivers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to
restoring and protecting rivers across the country.
Thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency complex (TDC) has become a
widespread affliction in fisheries around the world. During the
2022 annual meeting of the American Fisheries Society, a
special symposium on TDC included presentations from
researchers describing findings addressing the root causes of
thiamine deficiency. TDC is not isolated to California’s
Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) it also occurs in
lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) in the Great Lakes, and
Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) in Europe and in the northeastern
United States, among other important fisheries. However, this
symposium was not the first time scientists came together to
understand TDC, as Dr. Dale Honeyfield – professor emeritus at
the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) – spoke about meetings
sponsored by the Great Lakes Fishery Commission during the
mid-1990s.
As 5-year-old Stella Penn and her sister, Maxine, 3,
enthusiastically play hide-and-seek in the backyard of their
Eagle Rock home, the girls are accompanied by a merry band of
lizards, butterflies and birds drawn to the yard’s low-water
California natives, abundant fruit trees and the fragrance of
Cleveland sage and Champaca trees. Oblivious to the rainfall on
an overcast morning in Los Angeles, the sisters move to a
chunky wood stump in the front yard where, unprovoked, they
assemble a “pizza” with a large sycamore leaf and locally
sourced bits of gravel, California buckwheat and blue bush
acacia as toppings. … Soon after the two bought the
property, Claire’s father came and laid sod in the backyard so
that his granddaughters would have a place to run around.
Although his heart was in the right place, the couple felt that
it was “ridiculous” to try to keep the lawn alive in the face
of California’s ongoing drought and
eventual water restrictions.
A warming climate has left a fifth of the conifer forests that
blanket California’s Sierra Nevada stranded in habitats that no
longer suit them, according to a study published last week by
researchers at Stanford University. In these “zombie forests,”
older, well-established trees — including ponderosa pines,
Douglas firs and sugar pines — still tower overhead, but few
young trees have been able to take root because the climate has
become too warm and dry for them to thrive.
Over the past 10 years, California has seen two of the most
severe droughts in a millennium separated by two of the wettest
years on record. This erratic weather, volatile even by
California standards, shattered heat records, killed millions
of trees, fueled explosive wildfires and caused significant
flooding. As California’s changing climate pushes us deeper
into uncharted climate waters, past records are becoming a less
reliable tool for predicting current and future weather
patterns. That’s why Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent decision to
delay the release of 700,000 acre-feet of water, enough to
supply nearly 7 million people for a year, from state
reservoirs into the Sacramento-San Joaquin-River Delta was the
right call. Snowpack from early storms can be lost to dry, hot
weather later this spring. -Written by Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of
the Bay Area Council.
An invasive fish species could begin swarming more areas of the
Colorado River, officials have warned. In a report released in
February by the Bureau of Reclamation, concerns are raised that
smallmouth bass—an invasive species established in Colorado
River reservoir Lake Powell—could escape into other reaches of
the river, below the dam. Lake Powell, formed by the Glen
Canyon Dam, is seeing some of its lowest water levels ever.
Officials are concerned that the low water levels will cause
the smallmouth bass to escape past the dam, which has so far
served as a barrier for the fish. When water levels are high,
the report said it prevents the fish passing through.
This blog is an announcement that the Santa Ana Speckled Dace
exists, and now has an official name, which includes its new
scientific name, Rhinichthys gabrielino (Moyle et al. 2023).
Rhin-ichthys means “snout-fish” while gabielino honors the
native peoples who lived comfortably with Santa Ana Speckled
Dace for thousands of years. Today this fish is missing from
about half its historic habitats in the Los Angeles, San
Gabriel, and Santa Ana rivers [see map below]. Because it now
has an official name, it is more likely to gain the attention
of conservation agencies, much like the Santa Ana Sucker
(Pantoseus santannae), which is listed as a Threatened species
under state and federal Endangered Species Acts. … Moyle et
al. (2023) used genomic (DNA) analyses as a major basis for
providing, not only a name for Santa Ana Speckled Dace, but for
all dace populations in California.
A Northern California man’s protest against the unlawful
“taking” of endangered salmon by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers lives another day, as a judge ruled against allowing
either a dismissal or a stay on the matter on Friday. The
defendants sought to either dismiss or stay the case that
accused them of creating a hazardous habitat for Central
California Coast steelhead, coho, and Chinook salmon, saying
that the case should be deemed moot, considering recent action
taken by the Army Corp to come into compliance with Endangered
Species Act requirements. The Coyote Valley Dam, an earthen dam
built seventy years ago, is currently managed by the Army Corp
and lies above the city of Ukiah.
It’s going to be a bad year for Sacramento River chinook
salmon. That was the message from this year’s annual Salmon
Information Meeting attended by state and federal fisheries
scientists. State and federal officials announced one of the
lowest adult fall-run chinook salmon population estimates since
2008, according to the California Department of Fish and
Wildlife. The fall-run chinook is considered the predominant
species of salmon in freshwater and ocean fisheries, the state
said. This year, the state forecast 169,767 adults in the
population.
It’s an arcane system of water law that dates back to the birth
of California — an era when 49ers used sluice boxes and water
cannons to scour gold from Sierra Nevada foothills and when the
state government promoted the extermination of Native people to
make way for white settlers. Today, this antiquated system of
water rights still governs the use of the state’s supplies, but
it is now drawing scrutiny like never before. In the face of
global warming and worsening cycles of drought, a growing
number of water experts, lawmakers, environmental groups and
tribes say the time has finally come for change. Some are
pushing for a variety of reforms, while others are calling for
the outright dismantling of California’s contentious water
rights system.
In its evolving effort to meet Congress’s directive that
determinations under the federal Endangered Species Act should
be informed by the “best available scientific and commercial
data” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service uses Species
Status Assessments “to deliver foundational science” to support
its decisions. While this process does not typically
garner much attention beyond that of the agency, the recent
proposal to list longfin smelt as endangered has highlighted
the SSA’s importance and brought to light some assessment
elements that can be improved. By way of background, the
Service intends the Assessments to provide “focused,
repeatable, and rigorous scientific assessment” that results in
“improved and more transparent and defensible decision making,
and clearer and more concise documents.”
An independent investigation has found that a catastrophic fish
mortality event at the UC Davis Center for Aquatic Biology and
Aquaculture in August 2022 was caused by accumulation of
mineral deposits inside sealed piping carrying wastewater away
from the facility. This blockage caused chlorine, added to
effluent water as a disinfectant, to back up to a water line
used to lubricate pumps at the well supplying the fish tanks,
and thus contaminate the tanks. There was no forewarning of the
problem and no individual or group of individuals can be
singled out as responsible, wrote Anthony Farrell, professor
emeritus of zoology at the University of British Columbia, who
conducted the investigation at the invitation of UC Davis Vice
Chancellor for Research Prasant Mohapatra.
The Provo River Delta Restoration Project broke ground in June
of 2020, and on March 2, 2023 we’ll reach a major milestone:
the Provo River will run into the channels and ponds created
over the past few years, connecting the river with a restored
delta, and with Utah Lake. To mark this achievement, a brief
celebration will be held onsite on Thursday, March 2 at 1:30
PM, as outlined in the event agenda. The celebration will be
held just west of the Lakeshore Bridge Trailhead in Provo.
Please refer to the map below for parking locations and walking
routes to the event location. Given limited space and winter
site conditions, people are encouraged to carpool, walk or ride
to the event and to be prepared for potentially cold and wet
weather.
California Chinook salmon populations have fallen to their
lowest levels in years, according to new estimates released by
state and federal scientists — a decline that could trigger a
shutdown of the commercial and recreational fishing season
along the coast. … The department said scientists
estimated that the number of 3-year-old fall-run Chinook likely
to return to the Sacramento River this year to spawn would be
fewer than 170,000, one of the lowest forecasts in 15 years.
They also estimated that fewer than 104,000 are likely to
return to the Klamath River, the second-lowest estimate since
1997. In its announcement Wednesday, the department said
returning fall-run Chinook “fell well short of conservation
objectives” in the Sacramento River last year, and may now be
approaching a point of being declared overfished.
As the effects of heat-trapping pollution continue to raise sea
levels, wetlands dotting American coastlines could drown —
or they could flourish. Their fate will depend upon rates of
sea-level rise, how quickly the plants can grow, and whether
there’s space inland into which they can migrate. Climate
Central modeled how American coastal wetlands will
respond to sea level rise in an array of potential scenarios.
It found that conserving land for wetlands to migrate into is a
decisive factor in whether wetlands will survive or drown.
Wetlands and development have long been in conflict, with
ecological values weighed against waterfront economic
opportunities. As seas rise, benefits of conserving areas
inland for wetland migration are creating new tensions. And as
climate change intensifies storms and elevate high tides and
storm surges, the economic values of wetlands are growing.
The $15 million in funding will come from the federal
government’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which was passed by
Congress in late 2021. “Anything that improves the ecological
infrastructure of the Basin we’re interested in learning
about,” said Matt Baun, the Klamath coordinator with the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service. A total of $162 million was
earmarked for the Klamath Basin over five years from the
infrastructure law. This is the second year of funding.
Organizations that are eligible include nonprofits, academic
institutions, tribes and even community groups. Projects could
range from fisheries restoration and water quality work to
agricultural projects and efforts to improve waterfowl habitat.
A well-known Bay Area construction materials firm has unleashed
harmful pollutants into Guadalupe River and Coyote Creek,
threatening sensitive species of fish, frogs and salamanders, a
newly filed lawsuit alleges. The Santa Clara County District
Attorney claims that Graniterock, an over-century-old
Watsonville-based corporation, has discharged stormwater from
two of its San Jose facilities that contain above-level pH
values, cement, sand, concrete, chemical additives and other
heavy metals. Those pollutants have endangered steelhead trout,
the California Tiger Salamander and the California Red Legged
frog — animals that live in and around the South Bay waterways,
the suit alleges. The complaint does not specify when or how
much of the pollutants were apparently found discharged into
the waterways.
Despite the continued heavy winter rain and snow throughout
California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently extended his executive
orders from 2022 that declared a drought emergency statewide.
He also asked the state water board to waive water flow
regulations intended to protect salmon and other endangered
fish species, as well as San Francisco Bay and Delta estuary
overall. Some viewed these moves as pragmatic steps to
avoid “wasting” the bounty of California’s rains out to
sea. Others saw them as a declaration of war against
the health of the bay. In fact, a war against the bay has
been going on for decades. Newsom’s order was merely the latest
skirmish. The war’s primary aggressors are agricultural
interests in the Central Valley. -Written by Howard V. Hendrix, the author of six
novels as well as many essays, poems and short
stories.
Huge blooms of phytoplankton — microscopic algae floating on
the ocean’s surface — have become larger and more frequent
along the world’s coastlines, according to new research,
bringing benefits to fisheries but also potentially causing
harm. Between 2003 and 2020, coastal phytoplankton blooms
increased by about 13% in extent, covering an additional 4
million square kilometres of the global ocean, the Nature study
found. And the blooms occurred more often, up by 59% during
that period. … [Phytoplankton can starve] the ocean of
oxygen and leading to “dead zones” that wreak chaos on the food
chain and fisheries. … While some regions saw weaker
blooms over the past two decades, including the California
Current, blooms strengthened in the northern Gulf of Mexico and
the East and South China Seas. … Fertilizer runoff from
agriculture can spike nutrient loads in the ocean, leading to
blooms.
California commercial and sports fishers are bracing for the
possibility of no salmon season this year after the fish
population along the Pacific Coast dropped to its lowest point
in 15 years. On Wednesday, wildlife officials announced a low
forecast for the number of the wild adult Chinook (or “king”)
salmon that will be in the ocean during the fishing season that
typically starts in May. The final plan for the commercial and
recreational salmon season will be announced in April.
…Salmon are highly dependent on how much water is available
in their native rivers and streams, especially when they are
very young. Even though the state has gotten a lot of rain and
snow this winter, the population that is now in the ocean was
born in 2020, in the beginning of the state’s current
record-breaking drought. … This year, there will be
about 170,000 adult salmon in the ocean from the Sacramento
River fall run Chinook population, the main group that is
fished commercially in the state and the lowest number since
2008.
A new winter water flow management project implemented in
California’s Trinity River is best for the region’s fish
populations, the U.S. Department of the Interior and its Bureau
of Reclamation said …
California State Parks’ Division of Boating and Waterways (DBW)
announced today its plans for this year’s Aquatic Invasive
Plant Control Program in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and
its southern tributaries. Starting tomorrow, March 1, DBW will
begin herbicide treatments to control water hyacinth, South
American spongeplant, Uruguay water primrose, Alligator weed,
Brazilian waterweed, curlyleaf pondweed, Eurasian watermilfoil,
hornwort (aka coontail), and fanwort. These aquatic invasive
plants have no known natural controls in the west coast’s
largest estuary, the Delta. They negatively affect the Delta’s
ecosystem as they displace native plants. Continued warm
temperatures help the plants proliferate at high rates.
This year, CalTrout is thrilled to co-sponsor three bills. The
team will be collaborating with the legislative authors and our
co-sponsors as the bills move through the legislature in the
2023-24 cycle. The first bill, AB 809, will establish a
dedicated fund to support the long-term monitoring of
California’s native salmon and steelhead trout populations.
Next, AB 460, will empower the State Water Resources Control
Board to act swiftly to prevent harm to the environment, public
health, and water resources caused by illegal water rights
violations. AB 1272 will lay the groundwork for creating a more
climate-resilient future for native fish and for water supplies
in coastal California. Keep scrolling to the bottom of this
page for a deeper dive into each of the three bills.
Clean water is California’s most vital need. Our lives and the
lives of future generations depend on it. Yet when it comes to
protecting the state’s supply, Gov. Gavin Newsom is failing
California. The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta provides
drinking water to 27 million Californians, or roughly 70% of
the state’s residents. On Feb. 15, the governor signed an
executive order allowing the State Water Resources Control
Board to ignore the state requirement of how much water needs
to flow through the Delta to protect its health. It’s an
outrageous move right out of Donald Trump’s playbook. Big Ag
and its wealthy landowners, including some of Newsom’s
political financial backers, will reap the benefits while the
Delta suffers.
After a winter of epic storms in California, Yosemite National
Park’s famous waterfalls are in full flow, its reservoirs are
brimming, and the snowpack in the surrounding Sierra Nevada
Mountains is well above average. In drought-stricken
California, that is cause for celebration, but wildlife experts
warn that weather extremes driven by climate change can also
change habitats too quickly for wildlife to adapt.
… [Beth Pratt, California regional director for the
National Wildlife Federation] has been studying Yosemite Valley
wildlife for 25 years, including the more than 400 species of
vertebrates that call the 1,200 square-mile (3,100
square-kilometer) park home. … In his 27 years as a
Yosemite park ranger, Scott Gediman has never seen so much
winter snow and water in the park.
By returning to spawn in the Sacramento River at different
ages, Chinook salmon lessen the potential impact of a bad year
and increase the stability of their population in the face of
climate variability, according to a new study by scientists at
UC Santa Cruz and NOAA Fisheries. Unfortunately, spawning
Chinook salmon are increasingly younger and concentrated within
fewer age groups, with the oldest age classes of spawners
rarely seen in recent years. The new study, published February
27 in the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences,
suggests changes in hatchery practices and fishery management
could help restore the age structure of the salmon population
and make it more resilient to climate change.
Reports of at least 200 sick or dead band-tailed pigeons
throughout Northern California could be linked to an outbreak
of avian trichomonosis, according to the California Department
of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). – Video above: Blizzard Conditions
force closure of Interstate 80 Since early February, reports
have been coming in from residents located along the Central
Coast, the Bay Area and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The
band-tailed pigeon is native to California and during the
winter is often gathering acorns for the winter from central
California to Southern California.
A judge has extended a temporary settlement of a long-running
dispute over California water rights and how the Central Valley
Project and State Water Project manage the Sacramento River
flows. … The opinions address how the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation and California Department of Water Resources’ plan
for operating the Central Valley and State Water Projects
affects fish species. The opinions make it possible to send
more water to 20 million farms, businesses and homes in
Southern and Central California via the massive federal and
state water diversion projects, and eliminate requirements such
as mandating extra flows to keep water temperatures from rising
high enough to damage salmon eggs. … A federal
judge approved plans to allow the biological opinions
to remain in effect over the next three years with added
safeguards.
A new report from the Bay Area Council Economic Institute
details the beneficial local economic impacts that would be
generated by the removal of Scott and Cape Horn Dams, two aging
dams on the Eel River that are part of the hydroelectric Potter
Valley Project. The report estimates dam removal would create
between 1,037 and 1,332 local jobs and would boost the regional
economy to the tune of $203 million to $278 million. In
addition to boosting the local economy, dam removal is crucial
for healthy fish populations, clean water, and Tribal cultural
practices. Located on the Eel River 20 miles northeast of
Ukiah, the Potter Valley Project includes two Eel River dams, a
diversion tunnel that moves water out of the Eel River
watershed and into the East Branch of the Russian River, and a
powerhouse.
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 importance to freshwater ecosystems
and biodiversity (see previous post on freshwater mussels). One
difficulty in studying effects of wildfire on freshwater
ecosystems is that there is often a “right time in the right
place” factor to appropriately conduct the science. For
example, researchers and biologists often need to be studying a
population or ecosystem before a burn so effects afterwards can
be quantified – ideally alongside nearby unaffected control
sites. Yet such natural experiments are rare because we never
know when and where major wildfires will strike.
The drought crisis on the Colorado River looms large in
California’s Imperial Valley, which produces much of the
nation’s lettuce, broccoli and other crops, and now faces water
cuts. But those cuts will also be bad news for the
environmental and ecological disaster unfolding just to the
north, at the shallow, shimmering and long-suffering Salton
Sea. “There’s going to be collateral damage everywhere,” said
Frank Ruiz, a program director with California Audubon. To
irrigate their fields, the valley’s farmers rely completely on
Colorado River water, which arrives by an 80-mile-long canal.
And the Salton Sea, the state’s largest lake, relies on water
draining from those fields to stay full. But it’s been
shrinking for decades, killing off fish species that attract
migratory birds and exposing lake bed that generates dust that
is harmful to human health.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is seeking public input on a
plan to prevent smallmouth bass from spawning downstream of
Glen Canyon Dam. Officials say the historically low levels in
Lake Powell result in warm water being released from the dam
which creates ideal spawning conditions for the predatory
invasive species. The bureau wants to prevent the bass from
establishing in the Colorado River between the dam and the
confluence of the Little Colorado River and could try to reduce
the water temperature and change the flow velocity from the
dam. Smallmouth bass are a major threat to native fish
including the federally protected humpback chub that live at
the confluence.
The world’s largest dam removal in history is slated for 2023.
Led by Indigenous tribes in partnership with organizations,
lawyers, scientists and activists, the project will remove four
dams, clearing the way for the lower Klamath River to flow
freely for the first time in more than a century. The
Institute of the Environment’s monthly seminar series recently
brought together a panel of experts intimately tied to the
project to discuss the history and outlook for these changes.
Participants on the Feb. 8 panel were Brittani Orona, assistant
professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State
University; Robert Lusardi of the UC Davis Center for Watershed
Sciences; Tommy Williams from NOAA Fisheries; Toz Soto, Karuk
Tribe fisheries manager; Scott Williams, an attorney from
Berkeley.
Last century, California built dozens of large dams, creating
the elaborate reservoir system that supplies the bulk of the
state’s drinking and irrigation water. Now state officials and
supporters are ready to build the next one. The Sites Reservoir
— planned in a remote corner of the western Sacramento Valley
for at least 40 years — has been gaining steam and support
since 2014, when voters approved Prop. 1, a water bond that
authorized $2.7 billion for new storage projects. Still,
Sites Reservoir remains almost a decade away: Acquisition of
water rights, permitting and environmental review are still in
the works. Kickoff of construction, which includes two large
dams, had been scheduled for 2024, but likely will be delayed
another year. Completion is expected in 2030 or 2031.
Gov. Gavin Newsom bills himself as a protector of wildlife, so
you wouldn’t think he’d take water from baby salmon and give it
to almonds. Or to pistachios, or cotton or alfalfa. Especially
when California was just drenched with the wettest three-week
series of storms on record and was headed into another powerful
soaking of snow and rain. But Newsom and his water officials
still contend we’re suffering a drought — apparently it’s a
never-ending drought. So, they used that as a reason last week
to drastically cut river flows needed by migrating little
salmon in case the water is needed to irrigate San Joaquin
Valley crops in summer. -Written by columnist George Skelton.
Utah’s Great Salt Lake doesn’t look so “great” these days. This
place where tourists once bobbed up and down like corks in
water far saltier than the ocean is now quite literally turning
to dust. … Climate change and the West’s historic
megadrought certainly haven’t done the lake any favors, but
it’s the diversion of water away from the lake that Romney says
is less than divine: “The water in this area helped us bloom
like a rose, as the Scripture says. And yeah, we’ve got trees
and beautiful lawns. But some of that’s gonna have to
change.” Most of the lake’s water is spoken for long
before it gets there. It’s not just those green lawns for
Utah’s exploding population; 70% of the water goes to
agriculture. And then there’s the billion-dollar-a-year mineral
extraction industry. It uses the lake’s water, too.
Fungal pathogens that cause die-back in grape, avocado, citrus,
nut and other crops has found a new host and is infecting
conifer trees causing Pine Ghost Canker in urban forest areas
of Southern California. The canker can be deadly to
trees. Scientists from University of California, Davis,
first spotted evidence that the pathogens had moved to pines
during a routine examination of trees in Orange County in 2018.
Over four years, they found that more than 30 mature pines had
been infected in an area of nearly 100 acres, according to a
report in the journal Plant Disease.
An error in paperwork proved to be a costly mistake for Justin
Jenson, who was fined around $30,000 by the Environmental
Protection Agency. According to the EPA, Jenson, in November
2021, conducted bank stabilization activities on his residence
along the shoreline below the ordinary high water mark,
impacting 90 linear feet of the Sacramento River without a CWA
Section 404 permit. … [T]he Corps permit application was
pending because the Corps was in consultation with relevant
federal agencies regarding potential impacts to endangered or
threatened species and their critical habitats. Those species
included Sacramento River Winter-run Chinook Salmon, Central
Valley Spring-run Chinook Salmon, California Central Valley
Steelhead, and the Southern Distinct Population Segment of
North American Green Sturgeon.
Celebrations in a beachside California city will soon have to
take place without an iconic, single-use party favor: balloons.
The city council of Laguna Beach, about 50 miles southeast of
Los Angeles, voted Tuesday to ban the sale and use of all types
of balloons, citing their contribution to ocean litter as well
as health and safety risks from potential fires when they hit
power lines. Starting in 2024, people using balloons on public
property or at city events could incur fines of up to $500 for
each violation. … Balloons, especially those filled with
helium, often become ocean pollution after just a few hours of
use. Those made of latex — a kind of soft, synthetic or natural
material that may take decades to break down — can be
mistaken for food by marine animals and birds. When ingested,
latex can conform to birds’ stomach cavities, causing nutrient
deficiency or suffocation.
A Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday revived a Trump-era Clean
Water Act regulation, finding the lower court lacked authority
to vacate the rule without finding it unlawful. In 2021, U.S.
District Judge William Alsup vacated a Trump administration
revision of the “Clean Water Act 401 Certification Rule,” which
narrows what issues state and tribal governments can consider
when determining whether a project, particularly one
discharging pollution into a waterway, complies with state
water quality standards. The rule affected the permitting and
relicensing process for thousands of industrial projects,
including natural gas pipelines, hydroelectric plants,
wastewater treatment facilities and construction sites near
sensitive wetlands. Beginning September 2020, states could no
longer consider a project’s effects on air emissions and road
traffic congestion.
Climate change isn’t the only threat facing California’s birds.
Over the course of the 20th century, urban sprawl and
agricultural development have dramatically changed the
landscape of the state, forcing many native species to adapt to
new and unfamiliar habitats. In a new study, biologists at
the University of California, Berkeley, use current and
historical bird surveys to reveal how land use
change has amplified—and in some cases mitigated—the
impacts of climate change on bird populations in Los
Angeles and the Central Valley.
What might beavers have to do with wildfire mitigation? Quite a
lot, as it turns out. I talked about it with Dr. Emily Fairfax,
an environmental scientist at California State
University-Channel Islands who studies (among other things) how
beaver dams impact the landscape around them. Here’s part of
our conversation, edited for brevity. Tell me, what do beavers
have to do with wildfires? Beavers are ecosystem engineers that
can rapidly transform simple streams in thriving wetland
ecosystems. In doing so, they also massively increase the
surface water storage and soil water storage of landscapes.
During wet periods, the earth around beaver ponds fills up with
water like a great big sponge.
California farms and cities that get their water from the
Central Valley Project are due to receive a large increase in
water allocations this year after snowpack and reservoirs were
replenished in winter storms, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
announced Wednesday. Most recipients of the Central Valley
Projects are irrigation districts that supply farms, and some
are cities, including those served by the East Bay Municipal
Utility District and Contra Costa Water District in the Bay
Area. Farms that received zero initial water allocations last
year, in the third year of the state’s historic drought, are
due to receive 35% of their allocation this year, the most
they’ve gotten since 2019. Others, including the
Sacramento River Settlement Contractors, large shareholders
with senior water rights, will receive 100% of their contracted
water supply.
I often tell people in Placer County that the Sacramento Valley
is a national leader in delivering high quality water to farms,
wildlife refuges, and all of our residents in a sustainable
way. But what does this really mean in practice? I
was recently asked to author an article for the American Water
Resources Association’s IMPACT magazine to give an example to
our ridgetop to river mouth “Supershed” approach. I am
sharing the article with you today, which discusses why it is
so important to our collective future to make sure we take a
broad view of water and natural resource management in our
respective watersheds.
A shortage on the Colorado River has put tremendous pressure on
the water supply that serves more than 40-million people in the
Western United States. But a punishing drought and the over
allocation of the river have also created an urgent problem for
California’s Salton Sea. The 340-square-mile lake was formed in
1905 when a canal carrying river water to farmers in the
Imperial Valley ruptured. The flood created a desert oasis that
lured tourists and migratory birds to its shore. A century
later, the Salton Sea — California’s largest lake — is
spiraling into an ecological disaster. At 223 feet below
sea level, Bombay Beach occupies a low spot on the
map. Many of the shoreline community’s trailer homes are
rusting into the earth and tagged with graffiti. Artists have
created large pieces of public sculpture, including a vintage
phone booth that stands on the shoreline as a tribute to a
bygone era.
California’s water board decided Tuesday to temporarily allow
more storage in Central Valley reservoirs, waiving state rules
that require water to be released to protect salmon and other
endangered fish. The waiver means more water can be sent to the
cities and growers that receive supplies from the San
Joaquin-Sacramento Delta through the State Water Project and
the federal Central Valley Project. The state aqueduct delivers
water to 27 million people, mostly in Southern California, and
750,000 acres of farmland, while the Central Valley Project
mostly serves farms. The flow rules will remain suspended until
March 31. Environmentalists reacted with frustration and
concern that the move will jeopardize chinook salmon and other
native fish in the Delta that are already struggling to
survive…. But water suppliers applauded the decision,
saying the water is needed to help provide enough water to
cities and farms.
Not issuing the drought permits could have a significant impact
on agriculture in the region if farmers don’t have access to
irrigation water. …The department usually issues 40 to 50
drought permits per year. A spokesperson for the Klamath Water
Users Association, which lobbies for the basin’s agriculture
community, did not respond to an interview request. Groundwater
levels in the Klamath Basin have declined significantly in
recent years. OWRD said the water level dropped by 20 to 30
feet over the last three years alone, so additional access is
unsustainable. Emergency drought declarations have been made in
Klamath County in 16 of the past 31 years.
Yesterday’s Los Angeles Times article, “LA’s new water war:
Keeping supply from Mono Lake flowing as critics want it cut
off,” on the State Water Board’s Mono Lake workshop left
readers and workshop attendees, well … wondering. Print
space and attention spans are always tight, but the article
missed information key to understanding the issue at Mono
Lake, the diversity of voices calling Mono Lake protection, and
the water supply solutions that are right at hand for Los
Angeles. The State Water Board’s five-hour
workshop was attended by 365 people, and 49 of the 53
public commenters spoke in support of raising Mono Lake.
The future is now. Governor Newsom’s February 13, 2023
Executive Order ordering the State Water Board to
consider modifying flow and storage requirements for the State
Water Project (SWP) and the Central Valley Project (CVP) is his
blueprint for the Bay-Delta estuary and every river that feeds
it. When requirements to protect water quality, fish, and
wildlife are inconvenient, water managers can ignore them. It’s
all voluntary. For ten-odd years, California’s water managers
have promised “Voluntary Agreements” to replace the Bay-Delta
Water Quality Control Plan. They could never figure out
the details of what to propose.
Researchers reported finding microplastics in drinking water
nearly 5 years ago, prompting California lawmakers to require
monitoring of the state’s drinking water for the tiny
particles. But in 2018, there were no standard methods for
analyzing microplastics. So California regulators reached out
to chemists and toxicologists from all sectors to develop those
methods. They also sought assistance in developing a
health-based limit to help consumers understand what the
monitoring results mean for their health. In this episode of
Stereo Chemistry, we will hear from some of the scientists
leading those groundbreaking efforts.
As salmon runs on the Sacramento and Klamath River systems
continue to plummet, the California Department of Fish and
Wildlife will hold its annual Salmon Information Meeting via
webinar next week. The session is schedule 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
next Wednesday, March 1. This meeting is one of the most
important meetings of the year for anglers to attend. It will
feature the outlook for this year’s sport and commercial ocean
salmon fisheries, in addition to a review of last year’s salmon
fisheries and spawning escapement, according to the CDFW.
The Bakersfield City Council at its meeting Wednesday will
likely approve a $288,350 contract to conduct a detailed study
of the city’s water supplies and demands with a strong focus on
Kern River operations. Though the proposed study, on the
consent agenda, isn’t in direct response to a lawsuit filed
last year against the city by Water Audit of California over
the river, the study could answer some questions posed in the
lawsuit. The Water Audit suit alleges the city has been
derelict by not considering the public in how it operates the
river. The lawsuit doesn’t demand money. Rather it seeks to
stop water diversions from the river temporarily while the
court orders the city to study how river operations have
affected fisheries, the environment and recreational uses.
The time is fast approaching when a native fish species known
as the Clear Lake hitch should begin their yearly run up
tributaries around the lake to produce a new generation of
young. Pomo elders and old-timers say the hitch, or “chi,” as
they are known by the region’s Indigenous people, once spawned
in such abundance that people could practically walk across
their backs in the creeks. For the region’s tribal members, the
spawning time was cause for celebration — a reason for tribal
folk from all around to gather, collect food for the year and
visit. But all that was before expanding development and
agriculture, declining water quality, gravel mining, invasive
species, habitat loss and extended drought took a toll on the
hitch, a species of minnow found nowhere else on earth.
When atmospheric rivers drenched the North Bay in December and
January, the Lockharts greeted those heavy rains with open arms
and undisguised relief. Daunting and destructive as those
storms were — causing widespread flooding, downed trees and
mudslides — they brought a bounty that soaked a parched
landscape, easing stress and strain on a wide range of flora
and fauna. Joining the Lockharts’ chorus of hallelujahs were
farmers and ranchers, anxious water supply experts and — if
they could sing — coho salmon and steelhead trout now migrating
up the recharged Russian River and its now-swollen tributaries,
to spawn.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive order this week declaring war on
California’s water scarcity takes a note from the Bush
playbook. The decision to extend his drought emergency
declaration — despite the recent record rains and flooding —
gives carte blanche to state agencies to eviscerate essential
water quality and environmental protections in perpetuity.
Meanwhile, his administration continues to press for the same
kinds of projects and management strategies that helped create
the state’s water problems in the first place. The results
will be catastrophic for the health of San Francisco
Bay. The bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta form one
of the planet’s great estuaries, where salt water and fresh
mix, and the estuarine ecosystem is highly dependent on the
amount of fresh water that flows into it from the
watershed. -Written by Gary Bobker, program director at the Bay
Institute.
A coalition of farmers, water managers and local, state and
federal agencies will be installing 20 unique, natural
structures known as ‘rockwads’ in the Sacramento River to
increase the likelihood that young salmon will be able to grow
in size and strength to prepare for their journey to the
Pacific Ocean. … The effort, led by the Sacramento River
Settlement Contractors and the Sacramento Valley Ecological
Restoration Foundation (SAVER), includes the installation of 20
structures, made of large tree roots and canopies bolted to
boulders, near the South Bonnyview Bridge and boat ramp in
Redding.
With its haunting rock spires and salt-crusted shores, Mono
Lake is a Hollywood vision of the apocalypse. To the city of
Los Angeles, however, this Eastern Sierra basin represents the
very source of L.A.’s prosperity — the right to free water. For
decades, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has
relied on long-standing water rights to divert from the streams
that feed this ancient lake as part of the city’s far-flung
water empire. But in the face of global warming, drought and
lawsuits from environmentalists, the DWP is now facing the
previously unthinkable prospect of ending its diversions there.
In the coming months, the State Water Resources Control Board
will decide whether Mono Lake’s declining water level — and the
associated ecological impacts — constitute an emergency that
outweighs L.A.’s right to divert up to 16,000 acre-feet of
supplies each year.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation … announced last week that it
will cut flows on the [Klamath] river to historic lows, drying
out the river and likely killing salmon farther downstream.
… The basin has more than 200,000 acres of irrigated
farmland, between 10,000 and 14,000 of which are dedicated to
potatoes, an Indigenous food originally engineered from a
toxic wild root by Andean horticulturists. Roughly three
quarters of the basin’s potato yield go to companies like Frito
Lay for potato chips, and In-N-Out Burger for fries, according
to the Klamath Water Users Association.
A new definition of “waters of the United States” (“WOTUS”)
will help drive the regulatory reach of the Federal Water
Pollution Control Act, or Clean Water Act (“CWA”), starting
March 20, 2023. The term WOTUS is used to determine the extent
to which the CWA applies to different types of water bodies,
such as rivers, streams, lakes, wetlands, and other water
resources. Redefining WOTUS changes the scope of CWA programs
imposing water quality standards, allocating total maximum
daily loads of pollutants to impaired waters, certifying CWA
Section 401 compliance, regulating the discharge of pollutants
through National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System
permits, and regulating the discharge of dredged or fill
material under CWA Section 404 permits.
A Change.org petition asking the city of Carpinteria and Santa
Barbara County to stop moving rock and sand from local basins
onto the Carpinteria beach has amassed over 400 signatures,
quickly gaining traction across local social media channels
since its launch late last week. The petition – created by
Carpinteria resident Michelle Carlen – urges the city, the
county and First District supervisor Das Williams to “stop
using (the area) as a dumping ground.” … The debris
removal began in January, through the Santa Barbara County
Flood Control, following the rough storms where debris and
other items flooded nearby debris basins. Workers began
clearing out the Arroyo Paredon, Santa Monica and Toro Canyon
debris basins, removing rocks and sediments to Carpinteria
beach near Ash Avenue.
The California Salmon and Steelhead Coalition, a partnership
comprised of California Trout, The Nature Conservancy, and
Trout Unlimited, welcomes the introduction of AB 1272, which
will lay the groundwork for creating a more climate-resilient
future for native fish and water supplies in coastal
California. The bill, introduced by Assemblymember Jim Wood
(D-Healdsburg), would direct the State Water Resources Control
Board and California Department of Fish and Wildlife to work
together to develop principles and guidelines for the diversion
and use of water in coastal watersheds during times of water
shortage, for the purpose of enhancing drought preparedness and
climate resiliency.
Monitoring the pollutants that result from desalination is
critical for ensuring that the process is carried out in an
environmentally sustainable manner. There are several
instruments that are commonly used to monitor pollutants in the
marine environment, including chemical sensors, optical
sensors, and biological indicators. Chemical sensors are
used to measure the concentration of various pollutants in the
water, including heavy metals, organic matter, and pathogens.
These sensors can be deployed in real-time, providing
continuous monitoring of water quality, and can be used to
detect changes in water quality over time. Some chemical
sensors are also capable of measuring multiple parameters
simultaneously, which can help to provide a more comprehensive
picture of water quality.
The world thrives on plastic—one of the most enduring,
versatile materials ever invented. It’s in our coffee pods,
clothes, cars we drive to work, and tech devices we can’t live
without. Extracting ourselves from plastic-land is tough. Buy
strawberries in a clamshell box, and you’re fueling the plastic
economy. The cost seems negligible—a penny in a $20 takeout
order. But a global addiction to plastic is turning into an
environmental catastrophe, challenging goals to curb
greenhouse-gas emissions and reduce the 385 million tons of
waste that’s landfilled or incinerated, or that drifts out to
sea, each year.
A team of researchers at UC Davis this year will study 10
different species of trees in Sacramento to determine which
have the best chance of thriving as global average temperatures
rise. On a hot summer day, highly populated cities can be much
hotter than surrounding rural areas. Suburban neighborhoods
tend to have far more shade-producing trees, which act as
natural air conditioners. Multiple studies have shown that
communities with a healthy tree population can be anywhere from
5 to 12 degrees cooler than more exposed urban centers. As
climate change threatens to make our hottest days even hotter
in the years ahead, scientists want to make sure that people
living in cities have trees that are strong enough to withstand
the challenges of heat waves and intensifying drought.
A bill that will be introduced in the Utah State Legislature
will task one person with overseeing efforts to save the Great
Salt Lake. The position, currently titled the “Great Salt Lake
Commissioner,” will coordinate with government agencies,
environmental, tribal and industry groups and come up with a
master plan for the future of the lake. … The bill is
expected to be made public in the Utah State Legislature soon.
It would be a significant change in approach to how the
state is responding to the lake shrinking to historic lows
and the environmental catastrophe it presents with toxic
dust storms, reduced snowpack and harms to wildlife and public
health.
Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, and Bureau of Reclamation traveled to
rural Ecuador to work with scientists from the
Corporacion Electrica del Ecuador (CELEC) in assessing an
unusual and catastrophic geohazard: the collapse of a
132-meter-tall (433 foot) lava dam on the Rio Coca, which
triggered massive erosion along the river that has damaged
critical infrastructure (roads, buildings, pipelines) and cut
off transportation corridors to local communities. Before
2020, the Rio Coca cascaded over a lava dam as the famous San
Rafael waterfall, Ecuador’s tallest. Over several months, a
large sinkhole formed just upstream of the waterfall. The river
re-routed through the sinkhole on February 2, 2020,
undercutting the lava dam (which collapsed in 2021) and
triggering major retrogressive erosion that has been migrating
upstream for the past three years…
As January’s drenching storms have given way to an unseasonably
dry February, Gov. Gavin Newsom is seeking to waive
environmental rules in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta
in an effort to store more water in reservoirs — a move that is
drawing heated criticism from environmental advocates who say
the action will imperil struggling fish populations. …The
agencies are requesting an easing of requirements that would
otherwise mandate larger flows through the estuary. The aim is
to hold back more water in Lake Oroville while also continuing
to pump water to reservoirs south of the delta that supply
farmlands as well as Southern California cities that are
dealing with the ongoing shortage of supplies from the
shrinking Colorado River.
This tour explored the Sacramento River and its tributaries
through a scenic landscape while learning about the issues
associated with a key source for the state’s water supply.
All together, the river and its tributaries supply 35 percent of
California’s water and feed into two major projects: the State
Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project.
Water Education Foundation
2151 River Plaza Drive, Suite 205
Sacramento, CA 95833
Biologists have designed a variety
of unique experiments in the past decade to demonstrate the
benefits that floodplains provide for small fish. Tracking
studies have used acoustic tags to show that chinook salmon
smolts with access to inundated fields are more likely than their
river-bound cohorts to reach the Pacific Ocean. This is because
the richness of floodplains offers a vital buffet of nourishment
on which young salmon can capitalize, supercharging their growth
and leading to bigger, stronger smolts.
Water is flowing once again
to the Colorado River’s delta in Mexico, a vast region that
was once a natural splendor before the iconic Western river was
dammed and diverted at the turn of the last century, essentially
turning the delta into a desert.
In 2012, the idea emerged that water could be intentionally sent
down the river to inundate the delta floodplain and regenerate
native cottonwood and willow trees, even in an overallocated
river system. Ultimately, dedicated flows of river water were
brokered under cooperative
efforts by the U.S. and Mexican governments.
State work to improve wildlife habitat and tamp down dust at California’s ailing Salton Sea is finally moving forward. Now the sea may be on the verge of getting the vital ingredient needed to supercharge those restoration efforts – money.
The shrinking desert lake has long been a trouble spot beset by rising salinity and unhealthy, lung-irritating dust blowing from its increasingly exposed bed. It shadows discussions of how to address the Colorado River’s two-decade-long drought because of its connection to the system. The lake is a festering health hazard to nearby residents, many of them impoverished, who struggle with elevated asthma risk as dust rises from the sea’s receding shoreline.
This tour guided participants on a virtual exploration of the Sacramento River and its tributaries and learn about the issues associated with a key source for the state’s water supply.
All together, the river and its tributaries supply 35 percent of California’s water and feed into two major projects: the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project.
Radically transformed from its ancient origin as a vast tidal-influenced freshwater marsh, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem is in constant flux, influenced by factors within the estuary itself and the massive watersheds that drain though it into the Pacific Ocean.
Lately, however, scientists say the rate of change has kicked into overdrive, fueled in part by climate change, and is limiting the ability of science and Delta water managers to keep up. The rapid pace of upheaval demands a new way of conducting science and managing water in the troubled estuary.
Out of sight and out of mind to most
people, the Salton Sea in California’s far southeast corner has
challenged policymakers and local agencies alike to save the
desert lake from becoming a fetid, hyper-saline water body
inhospitable to wildlife and surrounded by clouds of choking
dust.
The sea’s problems stretch beyond its boundaries in Imperial and
Riverside counties and threaten to undermine multistate
management of the Colorado River. A 2019 Drought Contingency Plan for the
Lower Colorado River Basin was briefly stalled when the Imperial
Irrigation District, holding the river’s largest water
allocation, balked at participating in the plan because, the
district said, it ignored the problems of the Salton Sea.
Deep, throaty cadenced calls —
sounding like an off-key bassoon — echo over the grasslands,
farmers’ fields and wetlands starting in late September of each
year. They mark the annual return of sandhill cranes to the
Cosumnes River Preserve,
46,000 acres located 20 miles south of Sacramento on the edge of
the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
High in the headwaters of the Colorado River, around the hamlet of Kremmling, Colorado, generations of families have made ranching and farming a way of life, their hay fields and cattle sustained by the river’s flow. But as more water was pulled from the river and sent over the Continental Divide to meet the needs of Denver and other cities on the Front Range, less was left behind to meet the needs of ranchers and fish.
“What used to be a very large river that inundated the land has really become a trickle,” said Mely Whiting, Colorado counsel for Trout Unlimited. “We estimate that 70 percent of the flow on an annual average goes across the Continental Divide and never comes back.”
One of California Gov. Gavin
Newsom’s first actions after taking office was to appoint Wade
Crowfoot as Natural Resources Agency secretary. Then, within
weeks, the governor laid out an ambitious water agenda that
Crowfoot, 45, is now charged with executing.
That agenda includes the governor’s desire for a “fresh approach”
on water, scaling back the conveyance plan in the Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta and calling for more water recycling, expanded
floodplains in the Central Valley and more groundwater recharge.
Bruce Babbitt, the former Arizona
governor and secretary of the Interior, has been a thoughtful,
provocative and sometimes forceful voice in some of the most
high-profile water conflicts over the last 40 years, including
groundwater management in Arizona and the reduction of
California’s take of the Colorado River. In 2016, former
California Gov. Jerry Brown named Babbitt as a special adviser to
work on matters relating to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and
the Delta tunnels plan.
For the bulk of her career, Jayne
Harkins has devoted her energy to issues associated with the
management of the Colorado River, both with the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation and with the Colorado River Commission of Nevada.
Now her career is taking a different direction. Harkins, 58, was
appointed by President Trump last August to take the helm of the
United States section of the U.S.-Mexico agency that oversees
myriad water matters between the two countries as they seek to
sustainably manage the supply and water quality of the Colorado
River, including its once-thriving Delta in Mexico, and other
rivers the two countries share. She is the first woman to be
named the U.S. Commissioner of the International Boundary and
Water Commission for either the United States or Mexico in the
commission’s 129-year history.
The growing leadership of women in water. The Colorado River’s persistent drought and efforts to sign off on a plan to avert worse shortfalls of water from the river. And in California’s Central Valley, promising solutions to vexing water resource challenges.
These were among the topics that Western Water news explored in 2018.
We’re already planning a full slate of stories for 2019. You can sign up here to be alerted when new stories are published. In the meantime, take a look at what we dove into in 2018:
In the universe of California water, Tim Quinn is a professor emeritus. Quinn has seen — and been a key player in — a lot of major California water issues since he began his water career 40 years ago as a young economist with the Rand Corporation, then later as deputy general manager with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and finally as executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. In December, the 66-year-old will retire from ACWA.
In 1983, a landmark California Supreme Court ruling extended the public trust doctrine to tributary creeks that feed Mono Lake, which is a navigable water body even though the creeks themselves were not. The ruling marked a dramatic shift in water law and forced Los Angeles to cut back its take of water from those creeks in the Eastern Sierra to preserve the lake.
Now, a state appellate court has for the first time extended that same public trust doctrine to groundwater that feeds a navigable river, in this case the Scott River flowing through a picturesque valley of farms and alfalfa in Siskiyou County in the northern reaches of California.
This tour explored the Sacramento River and its tributaries
through a scenic landscape as participants learned about the
issues associated with a key source for the state’s water supply.
All together, the river and its tributaries supply 35 percent of
California’s water and feed into two major projects: the State
Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project. Tour
participants got an on-site update of Oroville Dam spillway
repairs.
There’s going to be a new governor
in California next year – and a host of challenges both old and
new involving the state’s most vital natural resource, water.
So what should be the next governor’s water priorities?
That was one of the questions put to more than 150 participants
during a wrap-up session at the end of the Water Education
Foundation’s Sept. 20 Water Summit in Sacramento.
Water means life for all the Grand Canyon’s inhabitants, including the many varieties of insects that are a foundation of the ecosystem’s food web. But hydropower operations upstream on the Colorado River at Glen Canyon Dam, in Northern Arizona near the Utah border, disrupt the natural pace of insect reproduction as the river rises and falls, sometimes dramatically. Eggs deposited at the river’s edge are often left high and dry and their loss directly affects available food for endangered fish such as the humpback chub.
An hour’s drive north of Sacramento sits a picture-perfect valley hugging the eastern foothills of Northern California’s Coast Range, with golden hills framing grasslands mostly used for cattle grazing.
Back in the late 1800s, pioneer John Sites built his ranch there and a small township, now gone, bore his name. Today, the community of a handful of families and ranchers still maintains a proud heritage.
Farmers in the Central Valley are broiling about California’s plan to increase flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems to help struggling salmon runs avoid extinction. But in one corner of the fertile breadbasket, River Garden Farms is taking part in some extraordinary efforts to provide the embattled fish with refuge from predators and enough food to eat.
And while there is no direct benefit to one farm’s voluntary actions, the belief is what’s good for the fish is good for the farmers.
For more than 100 years, invasive
species have made the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta their home,
disrupting the ecosystem and costing millions of dollars annually
in remediation.
The latest invader is the nutria, a large rodent native to South
America that causes concern because of its propensity to devour
every bit of vegetation in sight and destabilize levees by
burrowing into them. Wildlife officials are trapping the animal
and trying to learn the extent of its infestation.
Deep, throaty cadenced calls —
sounding like an off-key bassoon — echo over the grasslands,
farmers’ fields and wetlands starting in late September of each
year. They mark the annual return of sandhill cranes to the
Cosumnes River Preserve,
46,000 acres located 20 miles south of Sacramento on the edge of
the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
As we continue forging ahead in 2018
with our online version of Western Water after 40 years
as a print magazine, we turned our attention to a topic that also
got its start this year: recreational marijuana as a legal use.
State regulators, in the last few years, already had been beefing
up their workforce to tackle the glut in marijuana crops and
combat their impacts to water quality and supply for people, fish
and farming downstream. Thus, even if these impacts were perhaps
unbeknownst to the majority of Californians who approved
Proposition 64 in 2016, we thought it important to see if
anything new had evolved from a water perspective now that
marijuana was legal.
California voters may experience a sense of déjà vu this year when they are asked twice in the same year to consider water bonds — one in June, the other headed to the November ballot.
Both tackle a variety of water issues, from helping disadvantaged communities get clean drinking water to making flood management improvements. But they avoid more controversial proposals, such as new surface storage, and they propose to do some very different things to appeal to different constituencies.
Along the banks of the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in Oakley, about 50 miles southwest
of Sacramento, is a park that harkens back to the days when the
Delta lured Native Americans, Spanish explorers, French fur
trappers, and later farmers to its abundant wildlife and rich
soil.
That historical Delta was an enormous marsh linked to the two
freshwater rivers entering from the north and south, and tidal
flows coming from the San Francisco Bay. After the Gold Rush,
settlers began building levees and farms, changing the landscape
and altering the habitat.
Despite the heat that often
accompanies debates over setting aside water for the environment,
there are instances where California stakeholders have forged
agreements to provide guaranteed water for fish. Here are two
examples cited by the Public Policy Institute of California in
its report arguing for an environmental water right.
Does California need to revamp the way in which water is dedicated to the environment to better protect fish and the ecosystem at large? In the hypersensitive world of California water, where differences over who gets what can result in epic legislative and legal battles, the idea sparks a combination of fear, uncertainty and promise.
Saying that the way California manages water for the environment “isn’t working for anyone,” the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) shook things up late last year by proposing a redesigned regulatory system featuring what they described as water ecosystem plans and water budgets with allocations set aside for the environment.
This tour explored the Sacramento River and its tributaries
through a scenic landscape as participants learned about the
issues associated with a key source for the state’s water supply.
All together, the river and its tributaries supply 35 percent of
California’s water and feed into two major projects: the State
Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project. Tour
participants got an on-site update of repair efforts on the
Oroville Dam spillway.
Estuaries are places where fresh and
salt water mix, usually at the point where a river enters the
ocean. They are the meeting point between riverine environments
and the sea, with a combination of tides, waves, salinity, fresh
water flow and sediment. The constant churning means there are
elevated levels of nutrients, making estuaries highly productive
natural habitats.
Zooplankton, which are floating
aquatic microorganisms too small and weak to swim against
currents, are are important food sources for many fish species in
the Delta such as salmon, sturgeon and Delta smelt.
A tributary is a river or stream
that enters a larger body of water, especially a lake or river.
The receiving water into which a tributary
feeds is called the “mainstem,” and the point where they come
together is referred to as the “confluence.”
With a holding capacity of more than 260 billion gallons, Diamond
Valley Lake is
Southern California’s largest reservoir. It sits about 90
miles southeast of Los Angeles and just west of Hemet in
Riverside County where it was built in 2000. The offstream
reservoir was created by three large dams that connect the surrounding
hills, costing around $1.9 billion and doubling the region’s
water storage capacity.
Headwaters are the source of a
stream or river. They are located at the furthest point from
where the water body empties or merges with
another. Two-thirds of California’s surface water supply
originates in these mountainous and typically forested regions.
In wet years, dry years and every type of water year in between,
the daily intrusion and retreat of salinity in the Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta is a constant pattern.
The cycle of ebb and flood is the defining nature of an estuary
and prior to its transformation into an agricultural tract in
the mid-19th century, the Delta was a freshwater marsh with
plants, birds, fish and wildlife that thrived on the edge of the
saltwater/freshwater interface.
This 28-page report describes the watersheds of the Sierra Nevada
region and details their importance to California’s overall water
picture. It describes the region’s issues and challenges,
including healthy forests, catastrophic fire, recreational
impacts, climate change, development and land use.
The report also discusses the importance of protecting and
restoring watersheds in order to retain water quality and enhance
quantity. Examples and case studies are included.
20-minute version of the 2012 documentary The Klamath Basin: A
Restoration for the Ages. This DVD is ideal for showing at
community forums and speaking engagements to help the public
understand the complex issues related to complex water management
disputes in the Klamath River Basin. Narrated by actress Frances
Fisher.
For over a century, the Klamath River Basin along the Oregon and
California border has faced complex water management disputes. As
relayed in this 2012, 60-minute public television documentary
narrated by actress Frances Fisher, the water interests range
from the Tribes near the river, to energy producer PacifiCorp,
farmers, municipalities, commercial fishermen, environmentalists
– all bearing legitimate arguments for how to manage the water.
After years of fighting, a groundbreaking compromise may soon
settle the battles with two epic agreements that hold the promise
of peace and fish for the watershed. View an excerpt from the
documentary here.
This 25-minute documentary-style DVD, developed in partnership
with the California Department of Water Resources, provides an
excellent overview of climate change and how it is already
affecting California. The DVD also explains what scientists
anticipate in the future related to sea level rise and
precipitation/runoff changes and explores the efforts that are
underway to plan and adapt to climate.
30-minute DVD that traces the history of the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation and its role in the development of the West. Includes
extensive historic footage of farming and the construction of
dams and other water projects, and discusses historic and modern
day issues.
California’s little-known New River has been called one of North
America’s most polluted. A closer look reveals the New River is
full of ironic twists: its pollution has long defied cleanup, yet
even in its degraded condition, the river is important to the
border economies of Mexicali and the Imperial Valley and a
lifeline that helps sustain the fragile Salton Sea ecosystem.
Now, after decades of inertia on its pollution problems, the New
River has emerged as an important test of binational cooperation
on border water issues. These issues were profiled in the 2004
PBS documentary Two Sides of a River.
This beautiful 24×36 inch poster, suitable for framing, features
a map of the San Joaquin River. The map text focuses on the San
Joaquin River Restoration Program, which aims to restore flows
and populations of Chinook salmon to the river below Friant Dam
to its confluence with the Merced River. The text discusses the
history of the program, its goals and ongoing challenges with
implementation.
This beautiful 24×36 inch poster, suitable for framing, displays
the rivers, lakes and reservoirs, irrigated farmland, urban areas
and Indian reservations within the Klamath River Watershed. The
map text explains the many issues facing this vast,
15,000-square-mile watershed, including fish restoration;
agricultural water use; and wetlands. Also included are
descriptions of the separate, but linked, Klamath Basin
Restoration Agreement and the Klamath Hydroelectric Agreement,
and the next steps associated with those agreements. Development
of the map was funded by a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service.
A companion to the Truckee River Basin Map poster, this 24×36
inch poster, suitable for framing, explores the Carson River, and
its link to the Truckee River. The map includes Lahontan Dam and
Reservoir, the Carson Sink, and the farming areas in the basin.
Map text discusses the region’s hydrology and geography, the
Newlands Project, land and water use within the basin and
wetlands. Development of the map was funded by a grant from the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Mid-Pacific Region, Lahontan Basin
Area Office.
This 24×36 inch poster, suitable for framing, explains how
non-native invasive animals can alter the natural ecosystem,
leading to the demise of native animals. “Unwelcome Visitors”
features photos and information on four such species – including
the zerbra mussel – and explains the environmental and economic
threats posed by these species.
The 28-page Layperson’s Guide to
Water Rights Law, recognized as the most thorough explanation of
California water rights law available to non-lawyers, traces the
authority for water flowing in a stream or reservoir, from a
faucet or into an irrigation ditch through the complex web of
California water rights.
