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.
The Salton Sea, the body of water in Southern California’s
Coachella Valley and Imperial Valley, is shrinking over time as
the planet warms and exposing more lakebed and new sources of
dust in the process. High levels of dust already plague the
region, a situation likely to worsen as the sea continues to
shrink due to climate change. Not surprisingly, the communities
surrounding the Salton Sea have high rates of childhood asthma
(20–22.4%) — much higher than the California average of 14.5%.
A University of California, Riverside, mouse study, led by Dr.
David Lo, a distinguished professor of biomedical sciences in
the School of Medicine, has found that dust collected at sites
near the Salton Sea triggered lung neutrophil inflammation in
mice. Neutrophils are a type of white blood cells that help
fight infection.
A decades-long effort to remove four dams on the lower Klamath
River in California and Oregon would be the largest dam removal
in the world. The dam removals would reopen access to more than
400 miles of habitat for threatened coho salmon, Chinook
salmon, steelhead trout, and other threatened native fish. NOAA
is one of many partners collaborating to build a network of
restored habitat that can support these species once the dams
are removed. NOAA, the Pacific States Marine Fisheries
Commission, and Trout Unlimited have released a detailed plan
for restoring habitat in a key portion of the watershed.
Approximately 100 concerned Delta residents gathered at a
public forum in the community of Hood Tuesday to express
concern with the Delta Tunnel proposal. … The proposal
reduces the original two tunnel plan, proposed by former
Governor Jerry Brown, to a single tunnel by the Newsom
Administration and the Department of Water Resources. … The
new plan calls for a 40-foot wide concrete tunnel to draw
water from the Hood and Courtland areas approximately 45 miles
south to Bethany Reservoir. The current estimates are that it
would cost $16 billion dollars and take 13 years to
complete. The tunnel would draw 3,000 cubic feet of water
per second and would account for approximately 13% to 15% of
the overall water supply.
Every winter, millions of migrating birds come to the
Sacramento Valley, but now these birds may find the marshes and
flooded rice fields dry. The marshes and flooded rice fields
here are a stopping point for the birds along the Pacific
flyway, and scientists are now putting GPS trackers on birds to
learn how they’re reacting to the dry environment. “A
migratory pathway for waterfowl and shorebirds that are coming
from northern areas, moving into the Central Valley and looking
for spots to feed, to rest and continue on their journey
farther south to warmer areas in the winter, and then heading
back north again in the spring,” Samantha Arthur, Audubon
California Working Lands Program Director, said.
Following a court order requiring approvals to further develop
areas within Olympic Valley, Placer County has released a
revised environmental impact report for the Village at
Palisades Tahoe Specific Plan. The announcement makes official
the resort’s intent to seek entitlements to revitalize and
complete the Village at Palisades Tahoe. Under the California
Environmental Quality Act, Placer County will reassess impacts
regarding traffic and transit mitigation, potential water and
air quality effects on Lake Tahoe, wildfire evacuation and
construction noise.
The Colorado River runs more than 1,400 miles starting as a
trickle of snowmelt in northern Colorado. It becomes a roaring
torrent as it cuts through canyons and five Western states. Now
after more than a century of dam building and development along
the river, it ends as a trickle again at the Arizona-Mexico
border. The river was once the lifeblood of the Cocopah, or
River People. The Cocopah Tribe has begun trying to return a
sliver of that landscape to what it once was. On this day you
hear the wind blowing and the traffic from Interstate 8 as cars
and trucks cross the Arizona-California border less than a mile
away. The Colorado River, or what’s left of it, meanders south
to Mexico with hardly any sound.
As the twin threats of climate change and biodiversity loss
come to a head this decade, the fate of our fresh water lies in
the balance. Extreme weather is becoming increasingly common,
bringing massive rainfall and flooding in some regions and
widespread heat and drought in others, with disastrous impacts
on both humans and nature. At the same time, we have lost
nearly a third of the world’s freshwater ecosystems and 83% of
monitored freshwater species since 1970, a rate that is
significantly higher than that of terrestrial and marine
species in the same timeframe. Freshwater ecosystems deliver
the water on which all life depends. The urgency to better
protect them is now.
A record low number of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon fry
migrated downriver from Redding to Red Bluff on the Sacramento
River this year, according to preliminary data collected by the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) at Red Bluff Diversion
Dam. An estimated 158,764 fry (baby salmon) have made it from
below Keswick Dam to Red Bluff this drought year, compared to
an average number of 1.3 million winter Chinook salmon. This is
the second consecutive year that the service reported
alarmingly low numbers of Chinooks.
Sometimes old age and gritty stamina trumps youth and
resilience. It’s true for people. It turns out it’s true for
trees as well. Old-growth trees can endure the battering of a
drought better than their younger counterparts, scientists have
learned. In the face of increasingly frequent and more intense
droughts fueled by climate change, the new research underscores
the importance of ancient trees to sustain forests.
… Forests in the southwest U.S., for example, are
currently in the grip of the worst drought of at least the
last 1200 years. Such droughts can be lethal for trees,
causing their vasculature to collapse or weakening their
ability to withstand pests and diseases. In one
study of California forests, as many as half the trees in
some places died during the drought that ran from 2012 to 2015.
Saving the endangered Riparian brush rabbits could also protect
large swaths of rural south Manteca as well as part of Lathrop
from flooding. It is because efforts of the non-profit River
Partners at the 2,100-acre Dos Rios Preserve located at the
confluence of the Tuolumne and San Joaquin rivers to assist the
rabbit subspecies, five endangered birds, and three endangered
fish could also provide 10,000 acre feet of critical transient
floodwater storage to reduce flood stages as far north as
Stockton.
A Tehama County project is among the Wildlife Conservation
Board’s (WCB) selection of approved projects to be funded
through $24.46 million in grants to help restore and protect
fish and wildlife habitat throughout California. Some of the 16
approved projects will benefit fish and wildlife – including
some endangered species, while others will provide public
access to important natural resources. Several projects will
also demonstrate the importance of protecting working
landscapes that integrate economic, social and environmental
stewardship practices beneficial to the environment, landowners
and the local community.
A forest’s resilience, or ability to absorb environmental
disturbances, has long been thought to be a boost for its odds
of survival against the looming threat of climate change. But a
new study suggests that for some Western U.S. forests, it’s
quite the opposite. In the journal Global Change Biology,
researchers have published one of the first large-scale studies
of U.S. forest land exploring the link between forest
resilience and mortality. The study is based on more than three
decades of satellite image data used for assessing forest
resilience, and more than two decades of ground observations of
forest tree death across the continental United States.
Seems like most people are falling all over themselves
celebrating the “historic” deal between the Imperial Irrigation
District, Coachella Valley Water District, the U.S. Department
of Interior (Bureau of Reclamation), and the California Natural
Resources Agency that will supposedly bring up to a
quarter-billion dollars to the Salton Sea for restoration
projects. I certainly understand the need to conserve water and
help bolster the elevation at Lake Mead to try to restore some
kind of balance to the Colorado River, but at what cost to the
people of the Imperial Valley? The Imperial Valley is giving up
1 million acre-feet of water over four years for maybe $250
million and that just doesn’t seem like an even trade off; it
feels like a bad deal – like my friends over at Comite Civico
del Valle so aptly put it – “half-baked.” -Written by John Hernandez, a Brawley resident
and executive director of Our Roots Multicultural Center.
The California State Coastal Conservancy has allotted $2.2
million to a North Bay research group to take over caretaking
responsibilities and volunteer work for one of Marin County’s
largest wetland restoration sites. The Point Blue Conservation
Science nonprofit research group received the funds to continue
the upkeep of nearly 200 acres of the Hamilton wetlands and
forthcoming Bel Marin Keys wetlands near Novato for the next
two years. Its responsibilities include maintenance, replacing
aged or damaged interpretive signs and kiosks, running the
native plant nursery, planting, watering, coordinating
volunteer groups and leading school field trips.
Spring runs of a large minnow numbering in the millions have
nourished Pomo Indians since they first made their home
alongside Northern California’s Clear Lake more than 400
generations ago. The Clear Lake hitch glinted like silver
dollars as they headed up the lake’s tributaries to spawn, a
reliable squirming crop of plenty, steeped in history and tasty
when salted and dried like jerky. In all that time, the
hitch’s domain, about 110 miles northwest of Sacramento, had
never suffered the degradation of recent years. Now, with
a growing sense of sorrow, if not anger, the Pomo Indian tribes
of Clear Lake are watching the symbol of abundance and security
they call chi dwindle into extinction…. The
hitch is a 12-inch-long minnow found only in and around the
oldest, largest and perhaps most polluted and wildfire-prone
watershed in California.
A tiny Nevada toad at the center of a legal battle over a
geothermal power project has officially been declared an
endangered species, after U.S. wildlife officials temporarily
listed it on a rarely used emergency basis last spring. “This
ruling makes final the listing of the Dixie Valley toad,” the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a formal rule published
Friday in the Federal Register. The spectacled, quarter-sized
amphibian “is currently at risk of extinction throughout its
range primarily due to the approval and commencement of
geothermal development,” the service said. Other threats
to the toad include groundwater pumping, agriculture, climate
change, disease and predation from bullfrogs. The
temporary listing in April marked only the second
time in 20 years the agency had taken such emergency action.
Salmon that spawn in the Sacramento River in the Redding area
are enduring the lowest survival rate on record this year.
About 149,000 young winter-run chinook salmon have made it from
Redding to Red Bluff this year on their annual trek to the
Pacific Ocean, according to data from the University of
Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. In an
average year, about 1.3 million of the winter-run salmon would
be counted near the former Red Bluff Diversion Dam. This is the
second-straight year the number of winter-run salmon migrating
down the Sacramento River to the ocean has been very low,
according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. Last year, only 557,652 young salmon got as far
as Red Bluff.
It was major news in August when a hazardous algae bloom turned
San Francisco Bay water a murky brown color and killed a
reported 10,000 yellowfin goby, hundreds of striped bass and
white sturgeon, and a small number of endangered green
sturgeon. That kind of attention may seem understandable today,
but just a couple of generations ago, it’s likely barely anyone
would have noticed. Why? Because fish die-offs used to be far
more common. During the 1960s and early 1970s, huge fish
die-offs were reported in San Francisco Bay almost every year,
with over 100,000 fish dying in 1965 alone. Our bay
had become a dumping ground for minimally treated sewage,
industrial wastewater, polluted runoff and solid waste — unfit
for aquatic life and unsafe for swimming. -Written by Andrew Gunther and Alexis Strauss
Hacker, members of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water
Quality Control Board; and Jay Davis, a senior scientist
at the San Francisco Estuary Institute.
In drought-prone northern California, limited water resources,
private water rights allocations, and inefficient transport and
use of water resources causes tension between freshwater
conservation and private landownership (Garibaldi et al. 2020,
Vissers 2017). In the face of a changing climate, drought
curtailments will likely become more frequent, ratchetting
stress on all water users (Vissers 2017). From an engineering
perspective, efficiently managing water rights as arid
landscapes become drier and less predictable will be essential
to preservation of working landscapes and the environment.
Water purchases and leases are a common tool for securing water
rights for environmental purposes. California recently
considered a budget proposal to allocate $1.5 billion to
buy-back private agricultural water rights to mitigate drought
and support ecological uses (Bork et al. 2022).
Last week, the federal government announced it will spend a
quarter of a billion dollars over four years to clean up what
remains of the Salton Sea, a lake in southern California that
has been shrinking due to climate change-driven drought.
For decades, communities living near the sea have been
afflicted by health problems caused by algae blooms and dust
storms spurred by wind kicking up drying sediment from the
sea’s ever-widening shores. The government’s new plan aims to
help remediate some of those health impacts while
simultaneously encouraging farms in the region to reduce their
reliance on water from the Colorado River.
As water in the Western U.S. becomes an increasingly rare
commodity, the driest states are grasping at solutions for an
even drier future — investing heavily in technologies to
maximize the conservation, and creation, of the region’s most
precious resource. … With more than a thousand miles of
Pacific Ocean coastline, California appears to have access to a
wellspring that other arid states lack. The technology to
transform that unlimited sea supply into potable drinking water
has existed for decades, through a process called desalination.
Yet while two new desalination plants have received approvals
in the past couple months, California’s coast isn’t exactly
teeming with such facilities.
Savannah Barteau dropped out of college to become a rancher
nearly nine years ago. Now, the 26-year-old Flagstaff native
runs the beef business at Date Creek Ranch outside Wickenburg
with her husband. … Date Creek Ranch still uses
Knight’s grazing management techniques. It sells beef locally
instead of transporting cattle out of state. It uses water from
the creek instead of relying on groundwater or the Colorado
River. The ranch’s herd is only 120 head because the fewer
cattle on pastures, the better. In addition, Date Creek Ranch
recently installed solar panels that provide power to
structures on the property, irrigation and beef freezers.
I know a lot of people think of deserts as big, empty, lifeless
wastelands — that’s one of the reasons it can be tough to get
folks to care about protecting them. But when I moved to
Southern California from New England, my desert enchantment was
immediate and deep. One of the things that struck me most about
exploring the deserts here was that the slower I went, the more
I saw. … Take the Amargosa River, which flows for 185
miles and drains a 5,500-square-mile basin in Nevada and
California before feeding the aquifer remnants of ancient Lake
Manly in Death Valley. It’s the seventh-longest river in
California, but you could be forgiven for not noticing it,
since it spends almost all its time underground. Its water
provides habitat for the improbable Devil’s Hole pupfish
… -Written by Casey Schreiner, a writer, producer,
presenter and author who has taken over The Wild newsletter for
the next few months.
A bipartisan bill meant to address declining saline lakes in
the West, including the Great Salt Lake, passed the U.S. Senate
with unanimous approval Wednesday. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah,
introduced and co-sponsored the Saline Lake Ecosystems in the
Great Basin States Program Act with Democratic Sens. Jeff
Merkley of Oregon, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Catherine Cortez
Masto of Nevada, Roy Wyden of Oregon and Diane Feinstein of
California. The bill earmarks $5 million each year over five
years for the U.S. Geological Survey to study saline lakes
throughout the Great
Basin…. Owens and Mono lakes in
California are also named, which water diversions have turned
into sources of toxic and dangerous blowing dust.
As California confronts another extended drought and its
impacts, it is more obvious than ever that the state has failed
to address its water supply and management challenges for far
too long. The immediate fallout of the unprecedented
situation we find ourselves in is frightening: local residents
with wells running dry; urban water rationing and critical
shortages; massive fallowing of some of the nation’s most
productive agricultural land and the resulting impacts on food
prices; and significant uncertainty about our ability to adapt
to the future. The long-term effects are even more
dire. The viability of California’s $3.4 trillion economy
is at stake. -Written by Tom Coleman, General Manager at Rowland
Water District; and Federico Barajas, Executive Director
of the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority.
The Bureau of Land Management on Nov. 15 called for its state
offices to work with state wildlife agencies and tribes to
preserve and improve habitat connectivity – the ability of fish
and wildlife to move freely across landscapes and seasonal
ranges. The agency says this guidance will translate to
activities like removing unnecessary fencing and other
barriers, installing signs to prevent vehicle-wildlife
collisions, and pursuing landscape restoration projects.
Russell Kuhlman, executive director of the Nevada Wildlife
Federation, said this kind of work is increasingly urgent
across the drought-stricken West.
Several public interest groups sued the City of Bakersfield
Nov. 30 alleging the city has been derelict in its operation of
the Kern River by diverting most of its flows to agriculture
and other uses leaving a dry riverbed through the heart of
town. … Even though the city operates the river per a century
of agreements and judicial decrees, the lawsuit states, the
city still has an obligation to study the harm those diversions
may cause to the environment, fisheries and even the
recreational value of a flowing river. The case hinges on a
concept known as the “public trust,” under which the state
holds all natural resources, including water, in trust for the
most “beneficial use” for the public. That includes water
covered by 100-year-old rights, which includes most of the
rights to waters on the Kern.
At a special meeting of California’s Imperial Irrigation
District this week, the influential water agency voted 3-2 to
sign an agreement with the U.S. Department of the Interior, the
California Natural Resources Agency and the Coachella Valley
Water District regarding the management of the Salton Sea. The
deal, which would provide $250 million for restoration, is by
far the largest injection of federal funds to date for the
ailing sea. The federal funds will go toward environmentally
beneficial projects, including air quality improvements, public
health programs and ecosystem restoration projects.
Throughout the winter months and into spring, Chinook salmon,
coho salmon and steelhead trout will be spawning throughout
Humboldt County, especially in the Eel River. California Trout,
a San Francisco-based conservation group, uses a sonar system
to count migrating steelhead and salmon climbing the fish
ladder to spawn upriver. On Nov. 10, they estimated that 1,770
Chinook salmon traveled through Miranda to local spawning
grounds, but they cannot estimate what the total spawning
amount will inevitably be, said Matthew Metheny, the North
Coast program manager at California Trout. In order to
avoid disturbing spawning, fishermen should be careful when
crossing rivers in shallow spots because they run the risk of
accidentally crushing fish eggs underneath their feet.
It’s a golden summer day, and I’m standing on a low coastal
levee, overlooking a pond at Eden Landing Ecological Reserve
that looks positively apocalyptic. … This pond is a legacy of
a salt industry that has moved elsewhere. A few decades ago,
when flying into San Francisco or San Jose, the ground beneath
looked like a giant’s Easter egg dip. Ponds of blue, yellow,
green, red, purple, orange, and pink ringed the South Bay.
People had built low levees in semicircles from the shore,
sectioning off portions of the bay to let the water evaporate,
leaving behind the salt…. Humans are often inclined to
build seawalls to protect coastal communities from encroaching
oceans, but those require constant, expensive maintenance.
With the brassy stutter of a rusty wheel whizzing downhill, an
American coot announces itself from the shores of Pinto Lake as
Kendra Hayashi scoops water from the side of the dock. Today,
the sample in her glass bottle looks mostly clear, as does the
liquid buoying the bird. But three weeks earlier, she says, the
lake’s surface bloomed with potentially toxic algae. The coots
and mallards didn’t seem to notice. … Hayashi manages a lab
at UC Santa Cruz that monitors microcystin—a toxin produced by
algae in the genus Microcystis—in Watsonville’s Pinto Lake.
Though it once had among the highest measured levels of
microcystin of any freshwater body on earth, the lake hasn’t
had a toxic event in years, thanks to local cleanup efforts.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, has
unanimously approved its staff recommendation to surrender
the license for the four lower PacifiCorp dams on the Klamath
River in California and Oregon – and begin the dam removal
process. These dam removals on the Klamath will open up over
240 stream-miles of salmon and steelhead habitat that has been
blocked to fish migration for over 100 years. The project, the
largest of its kind in U.S. history, is funded by dam owner
PacifiCorp and a voter-approved California bond measure.
Klamath Basin indigenous tribes, along with commercial and
recreational fishermen and environmental groups, had
worked on making dam removal a reality for two decades.
Southern California’s powerful Imperial Irrigation District
voted late Tuesday 3-2 to ink an agreement with federal and
state officials that could yield as much as $250 million for
Salton Sea restoration projects in exchange for not using
another 250,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water… The vote
came despite livid objections from Imperial County farmers and
environmental groups, who questioned why such a major agreement
was being voted on just 24 hours after it was made public,
and four days before two newly elected board members are slated
to be sworn in to the five-member panel….But director JB
Hamby, agreeing with a majority of the board and the district’s
general manager and water director said, “there is no down
side” to the agreement … because while it does not bind
the district to cuts, it guarantees critical federal support if
cuts are implemented.
Vintner Ted Hall’s wish that steelhead trout could more easily
go from the Napa River on the Napa Valley floor to the Bear
Creek spawning grounds in the Mayacamas Mountains is getting a
boost. Bale Slough is a key. … Bale Slough over the
decades has been channelized and straightened. Next summer, the
Napa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District will
launch a Bale Slough restoration that ultimately could total
$6.6 million. The multi-year project at 14 sites over 1.6
miles will create floodplains and seasonal wetlands — in short,
a more natural habitat for steelhead and other wildlife.
The vote was unanimous and completely expected: the Klamath
River dams are coming out. Not all of them, but the three in
California and one just over the border in Oregon are
officially doomed after a vote from the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission, which licenses the dams. Now the work of
the Klamath River Renewal Corporation ramps up to full speed,
with destruction work potentially getting started in the next
calendar year. KRRC is a transitional agency with one job: get
rid of the dams. Mark Bransom, Executive Director, drops in to
give an overview of next steps and how the dam-removal timeline
unfolds.
The San Francisco Bay is the largest estuary in Western North
America and a key link in the 4,000-mile Pacific Flyway, one of
the primary migratory routes used by birds to move north and
south across the continent. It’s a place where birds come to
rest and refuel for their long trip, or breed and nest the next
generation. But in the span of a few human generations, 90% of
California’s wetlands have disappeared to development and
agriculture, endangering migrating and local birds. Now drought
and sea level rise are further diminishing important bird
habitats. As climate change becomes a bigger threat to the Bay
Area’s local and migratory birds, scientists and
conservationists work to help habitats adapt to climate change
to ensure bird’s futures.
The federal government said Monday it will spend $250 million
over four years on environmental cleanup and restoration work
around a drying Southern California lake that’s fed by the
depleted Colorado River. The future of the Salton Sea — and who
is financially responsible for it — has been a key issue in
discussions over how to stave off a crisis in the Colorado
River. The lake was formed in 1905 when the river overflowed,
creating a resort destination that slowly morphed into an
environmental disaster as water levels receded, exposing
residents to harmful dust and reducing wildlife habitat. The
lake is largely fed by runoff from farms in California’s
Imperial Valley, who use Colorado River water to grow many of
the nation’s winter vegetables as well as feed crops such as
alfalfa.
Looking down at the coast from a hill above the historic L
Ranch at Point Reyes National Seashore, rolling swells appear
on the ocean surface like blue corduroy. The peninsula that
stretches south toward the horizon is almost entirely taken up
by ranchland and weathered buildings. Among them, coyotes stalk
gophers on the dun hillsides, red-tailed hawks perch on fence
posts and a skunk waddles along the road’s asphalt margin.
Those beef and dairy ranches are the focus of a recent water
quality report showing high levels of fecal bacteria downstream
from the cattle, and their manure, in lagoons and beaches
popular with park visitors. The report, which was commissioned
by an environmental group and is disputed by the ranching
industry, is the latest flareup in a decades-long debate over
the ranching that occupies more than one-third of the national
seashore.
The San Joaquin River is a vital source of water for
agriculture and the environment and it is also home to a unique
program that hopes to restore native fish runs. It is a complex
program and SJV Water was fortunate to take advantage of a tour
offered through the Water Education Foundation Nov. 2-3 that
helps break down the various aspects of restoration efforts.
The restoration program is a nearly one billion dollar endeavor
to restore spring-run Chinook salmon to the river which went
extinct there after Friant Dam and other obstructions were
built.
As California awakens to the worsening risk of extreme climate
events, researchers are shedding new light on last year’s
anomalous and extreme Pacific Northwest heat wave. One study
published this week said such heat waves could become 20 times
more likely to occur if current carbon emissions continue
unabated. … The nine-day event in late June and early
July 2021 seared parts of Northern California, Oregon,
Washington and British Columbia, where Canada saw its highest
temperature on record, 121.3 degrees. The heat wave claimed
hundreds of lives, sparked several devastating wildfires and
killed an estimated 1 billion sea creatures. … In
California and other parts of the western United States,
increasing heat, drought and aridification are
contributing to long-term drying of soils, which means there’s
less water to be evaporated into the air.
Drought, human-caused climate change, invasive species and a
“legacy” of environmental issues are permanently altering
California’s landscape and placing some communities and
ecosystems at increasing risk, a panel of experts told water
officials recently. Invasive species and decades of disruptions
from massive land and water developments are partly responsible
for a continuous decline in native California species, experts
told the California Water Commission on Nov. 16. Also, rural
communities, many of whom are lower income and rely on
privately owned wells, are disproportionately contending with
water contamination and scarcity amid recurring cycles of
drought, experts said.
In a deep muddy creek near Silicon Valley’s busiest freeway, a
large furry head pokes up. And then quickly submerges. The
brief sighting, along with a growing collection of video
footage, confirms something remarkable: After being hunted to
extinction in the 1800s, the North American beaver is returning
to the creeks of the San Francisco Bay Area. Ecosystem
explorers, beavers were re-introduced to Lexington Reservoir in
Los Gatos about four decades ago, and made homes in upper Los
Gatos Creek. Since then, they’ve expanded their range north
along the edge of the Bay to the Guadalupe River, Coyote Creek,
San Tomas Aquino Creek in the wetlands by Sunnyvale’s Water
Pollution Control Plant – and, now, Palo Alto’s Matadero Creek.
Conservationists have notified U.S. wildlife officials that
they will sue over delinquent decisions related to protections
for two rare fish species that are threatened by groundwater
pumping in the drought-stricken West. The Center for Biological
Diversity sent a formal notice of intent to sue the Fish and
Wildlife Service last week over the Fish Lake Valley tui chub
near the California-Nevada line and the least chub in southwest
Utah. Utah and Nevada are the driest states in the country, and
the planned lawsuits are among the many fronts on which
conservationists are battling water districts and the users
they cater to over plans to siphon water to either maintain or
expand consumption.
U.S. regulators approved a plan Nov. 17 to demolish four dams
on a California river and open up hundreds of miles of salmon
habitat that would be the largest dam removal and river
restoration project in the world, reports the Associated Press
(AP). The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s unanimous vote
on the lower Klamath River dams is the last major regulatory
hurdle and the biggest milestone for a $500 million demolition
proposal championed by Native American tribes and
environmentalists for years. The project would return the lower
half of California’s second-largest river to a free-flowing
state for the first time in more than a century.
In 2022, deadly brain-eating amoeba infections were recorded in
states that had not seen the water-borne pathogen before. The
amoeba Naegleria fowleri thrives in warm freshwater — mostly
lakes and rivers, but it’s also been found in public splash
pads. If inhaled up the nose, the microscopic creature can
cause a devastating brain infection known as primary amebic
meningoencephalitis (PAM). In past years, this has meant that
health officials in southern states spend their summers on the
lookout for reports of mysterious brain infections. However,
the amoeba’s geographic footprint has expanded as temperatures
warm across the US. … The river runs along a similar
latitude to the Lake of Three Fires, as well as a Northern
California lake where officials believe a 7-year-old
contracted the amoeba last year.
Jeff Schlecht has spent his lifetime fishing. Now he figures
it’s time to help others have those same opportunities.
… Earlier this year, Schlecht and two others went to
work to remove small dams along Spencer Creek, a tributary of
the Klamath River. Located near Chase Mountain in Klamath
County, Spencer Creek is known for its quality trout
fishing. Removal of the small dams was part of what
Schlecht sees as a larger effort to “give back” by recreating a
Klamath Falls chapter of Trout Unlimited, a national non-profit
group with a slogan of “Fishing. Conservation. Community.”
Abortion opponents and their allies in elected office are
seizing on an unusual strategy after suffering a wave of
election defeats — using environmental laws to try to block the
distribution of abortion pills. … It claims without
direct evidence that trace amounts of the drug in wastewater
could threaten livestock and wildlife as well as humans, citing
some studies in which the drug was given directly to animals
rather than ingested from groundwater, and others where drugs
flushed directly down the toilet contaminated the water supply.
The spawning of fall-run chinook salmon concluded at the
Feather River Fish Hatchery in early November with millions of
fish eggs now fertilized and incubated. For the second year in
a row, the hatchery increased the amount of fall-run chinook
salmon eggs collected to offset effects of California’s current
drought now going on its third year. This year, the hatchery
collected about 9.5 million fall-run salmon eggs, according to
the Department of Water Resources. The average number of
fall-run chinook salmon eggs collected at the hatchery is 7.2
million. Raquel Borrayo, spokeswoman for the Department of
Water Resources, said DWR and the California Department of Fish
and Wildlife agreed to increase the amount of fall-run chinook
salmon grown at the hatchery “to enhance the salmon fishery
during this drought period as the overall Central Valley salmon
numbers have been lower due to the drought.”
Discussion of restoring Big Canyon, which has long been
impacted by human activity and development as Orange County
grew, started in 2002, according to project manager and Newport
Beach assistant city engineer Bob Stein, but nothing came of it
until about 2015. … That led to Phase I, which cost
roughly $1.6 million and recently concluded its monitoring
period. That phase addressed roughly 6 acres of the park and
focused on the rehabilitation of the creek that runs through it
and riparian restoration. Urban runoff was diverted to a water
treatment center.
An adaption strategy for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta must
address and reduce climate change impacts in a way that meets
the coequal goals, builds resilience for the future, and
prioritizes the most vulnerable communities. Climate change is
already altering the physical environment of the Delta,
resulting in significant impacts on its people and resources
that are only expected to worsen over time. The Delta
Stewardship Council recognized the need to address climate
change and completed the Delta Adapts Vulnerability Assessment
in 2021, which is the first comprehensive study of projected
climate hazards in the Delta and Suisun Marsh, identifying the
people and resources most vulnerable to increased flood risk,
extreme heat, drought, and wildfire smoke.
Federal wildlife officials have declared the boom-or-bust
lesser prairie chicken a threatened species in Colorado, and
endangered in states to the south, a goal of a long
environmental campaign but a disappointment to farmers who fear
new restrictions. … Wildlife scientists and advocates
say the bird is a leading indicator of healthy continuous
grassland and prairies, and the species once ranged across
nearly 100 million acres in the Southwest with a population
possibly in the millions. It’s now limited to a range of a few
million acres broken up by row crops, overgrazing and oil and
gas development, with aerial surveys putting the population at
32,000 across five states. … With a threatened
designation, farmers and ranchers are able to continue most
land uses but face new reviews on significant changes.
… hundreds of miles of salmon spawning habitat are blocked by
four dams on the lower Klamath River. But an historic decision
made on Thursday in Washington, D.C. holds the promise to
change that. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s
approval of removing those four dams should set free a huge
stretch of one of the West’s most important coastal rivers for
salmon and reopen 400 miles of habitat — much of which salmon
have been unable to reach for more than a century…. Next
year, deconstruction work will begin at JC Boyle, Copco 1,
Copco 2 and Iron Gate dams, with the biggest dams scheduled to
be removed in 2024. Getting to this point has taken decades of
negotiation and planning, and removing the four dams will be a
massive, $500 million undertaking that many in the surrounding
communities still oppose.
Last year, a group of Washington researchers pinpointed the
cause of these mass fish kills [in Pacific Northwest
streams]: 6PPD, a chemical added to tires to prevent them from
breaking down. When 6PPD, which has been used in tires since
the 1970s according to the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association,
reacts with ozone in the atmosphere, it creates 6PPD-quinone
(6PPD-q), a compound that leaches into urban stormwater and
watersheds. This derivative chemical has proven difficult to
identify and study and is even harder to regulate given that
the chemicals in tires are proprietary and not disclosed by
tire manufacturers. However, new research led by NOAA
scientists found 6PPD-q harms other species in the salmonid
family besides coho, including steelhead trout.
On a dirt road on a cool autumn morning, deep in the
rugged backcountry of San Benito County, Alex Hubner bounces
over boulders in his Toyota Tacoma truck, eyeing each passing
plant like a bounty hunter seeking prey. He stops suddenly
beside a lonely gray-green lump, its roots gripping the
inhospitable serpentine soil like skeletal fingers. Crouching
over the plant, Hubner takes a closer look. It’s a rare variety
of sulfur buckwheat — past its prime, seeds scattered.
… Based at UC Santa Cruz, Hubner and his wife, Lucy
Ferneyhough, are collectors for California Plant Rescue, a
state-funded consortium of botanical institutions that aims to
find and conserve the botanical diversity of the Golden State
… to store seeds and sprouts, each a modern-day Noah’s ark
that could help protect against the permanent loss of rich,
unique and irreplaceable lives.
The California Coastal Commission [Thursday night] approved
another desalination plant, despite citing its high costs,
risks to Monterey Bay’s environment and “the most significant
environmental justice issues” the commission has faced in
recent years. The commission’s divided, 8-to-2 vote came
after 13 hours of debate at a Salinas public hearing packed
with several hundred people, plus more crammed into overflow
space. Many of the 375 who signed up to speak opposed the
project — some in tears. Much of the debate focused on the
fairness of locating a for-profit company’s facility in the
Monterey County city of Marina — which does not need the water
and is home to designated disadvantaged neighborhoods. The
expensive supply will flow to other communities, including the
whiter, wealthy enclaves of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Pacific Grove
and Pebble Beach.
Miles and miles away from Washoe County’s border with
California, snowpack is starting to fall on the eastern Sierra
Nevada. Over the next several months, with a few more storms,
that snow will accumulate and begin to slowly melt and run off,
trickling into the streams that feed the Truckee
River. The Truckee River, which pours out of Lake Tahoe,
winds its way through California and crosses into Nevada, where
it is used as a source for water in Reno and Sparks. What
happens in the forests that the Truckee cuts across has a
direct effect on what happens downstream. That’s why the
Truckee Meadows Water Authority, the main utility for the
fast-growing region, is looking upstream to reduce the risk of
extreme wildfires that have, in recent years, torn through
forests across the West, scarring soil, eroding streambeds and
altering the water cycle.
What is the cost of defying California’s environmental laws?
Less than $50. That’s all Northern California farmers will pay
for blatantly draining the Shasta River in defiance of the
state’s drought regulations last summer, likely killing
protected salmon. The Shasta River Water Association is an
irrigation district serving about 100 farmers and ranchers in
Siskiyou County. Over eight days, its members drained nearly
two-thirds of the river to fill livestock ponds in the
area. This was the primary finding of a Bee investigation
that suggests California is unable to stop farmers from
draining water as they wish — no matter how much damage is done
to the environment.
The biggest dam-removal project in history moved one step
closer to reality Thursday after the federal government cleared
a key regulatory hurdle that would allow demolition to begin on
four hydroelectric dams along California’s border with Oregon.
The decision Thursday by the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission allows PacifiCorp, a utility company controlled by
financier Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, to surrender the
dams’ license to a nonprofit organization backed by California
and Oregon. Demolition on the Klamath River dams — three in
California and one in Oregon — could begin as quickly as a few
months from now.
It’s an October morning at Point Reyes National Seashore and
I’m scooting under barbed wire fences, wary of sliding into cow
pies. My guide on this safari is Jocelyn Knight, wildlife
photographer. We’re stalking a toxic waste dump hidden from
public view behind a hill at “Historic E Ranch, established
circa 1859” land lorded by the National Park Service. Park
regulations require Seashore pastures to remain open to the
public, but the dump is inside the E Ranch “core” of barns and
dwellings, and the public is disallowed. … According to
EHS investigators, a septic tank was installed without the
required permit; its sewage level exceeded the operational
limit; they could not locate a leach field. The ranch land
drains into the Pacific.
Oscar-nominated actor and star of “Succession” spoke in support
of lawsuits aiming to stop a project that plans to bulldoze the
Ballona Wetlands on Sunday. More than 200 residents of Venice,
Culver City, Santa Monica, Marina del Rey and Playa del Rey
attended an event held by Defend Ballona Wetlands where
Cromwell spoke about his support and involvement with the
organization. Cromwell said Marcia Hanscom, Executive Director
of the Ballona Institute, approached him 25 years ago asking
him to visit the wetlands. When he did, Cromwell said it was
moving and he knew he wanted to do whatever it took to support
efforts to protect it.
This developing story has been
updated: US regulators approved a major milestone
Thursday in a plan to demolish four dams on a California river
and open up hundreds of miles of salmon habitat that would be
the largest dam removal and river restoration project in the
world when it goes forward. The Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission vote on the lower Klamath River dams is the last
major regulatory hurdle and the biggest milestone for a $500
million demolition proposal championed by Native American
tribes and environmentalists for years. The project would
return the lower half of California’s second-largest river to a
free-flowing state for the first time in more than a century.
A Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday heard arguments on whether
federal judges can vacate a rule by the Trump-era U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency without finding the rule
unlawful. In July 2020, the Trump administration revised the
“Clean Water Act 401 Certification Rule,” which narrowed 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.
More than half of anchovies and all of the seabirds that feed
on them were found to have microplastic particles in their
digestive tracts, according to a study by researchers at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. The researchers tested 24
anchovy and 19 common murres for microplastic particles and
found particles of at least 5 millimeters in 58 percent of the
fish and all of the birds. The researchers also analyzed
seawater samples from Santa Cruz and Moss Landing, finding a
microplastic concentration of about 2 microparticles per 1,000
liters.
Fishing for white sturgeon has been relatively productive on
the West Delta and Suisun Bay over the past two weeks, but some
anglers and prominent scientists are supporting changes in
fishing regulations to preserve the prehistoric fish for the
future. Hundreds of white sturgeon and some green sturgeon
perished in San Francisco and San Pablo bays in late August in
a massive fish kill spurred by a red tide algae bloom, but the
exact number of fish killed is unknown. Captain Zack Medinas of
Gatecrasher Fishing Adventures reported “very good” sturgeon
fishing on his latest few trips, but ponders how long this
fishery will last at current rates of harvest.
Rep. Jared Huffman (D-02) isn’t the only one from the North
Coast making the rounds at the United Nations Climate Change
Conference. On Tuesday, Danielle Frank, of Ríos to Rivers and a
youth leader of the Hupa Valley Tribe, and Brook Thompson, who
is a member of the Yurok Tribe and Karuk Tribe, shared the
story of the dams in the Klamath River basin at a panel titled
Centering the Protection of Rivers and Rights in Achieving
Climate Justice in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. They were speaking
alongside Indigenous people from other parts of the world who
have also been fighting to protect rivers in their communities.
… Six dams in the Klamath River basin have severely
impacted water quality, temperatures and flows, which in turn
have led to the degradation of the ecosystem. In 2002, the
river experienced one of the largest fish kills in its history,
leading to a 20-year legal fight to bring the dams down.
Modesto Irrigation District, Turlock Irrigation District and
the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission have signed a
memorandum of understanding with the state to advance a
voluntary agreement for the Tuolumne River. MID and TID, which
jointly operate the Don Pedro Reservoir on the Tuolumne River,
joined dozens of other California water agencies in committing
to collaborate with the state to finalize agreements that will
provide water supply reliability to communities, while
enhancing river ecosystems. Contra Costa Water District signed
onto the agreement in September. … The action by the
districts signals momentum towards an alternative to
regulations adopted by the State Water Resources Control Board
in 2018, as part of the first phase of the state’s Bay-Delta
water quality control plan.
In the last decade, California—along with the rest of the
world—has entered a new phase of climate change. The changes
that scientists predicted have started to arrive. California’s
already variable climate is growing increasingly volatile and
unpredictable: The dry periods are hotter and drier, and the
wet periods—lately too few and far between—are warmer and often
more intense. … The snowpack—that once-reliable annual source
of water—is diminishing as temperatures rise. Water withdrawals
during multiyear droughts are depleting the state’s reservoirs
and groundwater basins. … This report considers the
state of water in California: What changes are we seeing now,
and what should we expect in the near future?
First the bad news. The production in 2022 of winter-run salmon
fry in the upper Sacramento River near Redding was at record
low levels, similar to the disaster years 2014 and 2015, maybe
worse (Figure 1). Next, more bad news (there is no good news).
Most of the fry are now in the 100-mile reach below Red Bluff,
with only a small proportion to date (November 7) reaching
Knights Landing below Chico (Figure 2). Flows (Figure 3) remain
too low for good fry survival, with little flow increase
following late October and early November rains. Clear water
conditions make it easy for the tens of thousands of striped
bass and smallmouth bass residing in the 100-mile reach to pick
off migrating juvenile salmon. Up till late October, water
temperatures above 60ºF kept bass active (also Figure 3).
Microplastic particles are widespread in Monterey Bay anchovies
and the diving seabirds that eat them as a main food source -
which could possibly impact the birds’ reproductive systems,
according to a new study. Scientists at UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis
and the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance studied microplastic
pollution in Monterey Bay by testing microplastic particles in
the water and in anchovies and common murres, a bird species
found in abundance in the region. … The study also comes two
months after California became the first state in the
United States to begin requiring water agencies to test for
microplastics, which can be found everywhere from clothing,
food packaging, drinking water and the ocean.
For the second time since the Delta Stewardship Council’s
establishment in 2010, its regulatory authority has been upheld
by California’s judicial branch, clearing the way for the
Council to continue to apply its expertise and exercise its
broad authority in determining how to accomplish the goals and
objectives of the Delta Reform Act. On November 4, the Superior
Court of California ruled in favor of the Council regarding
lawsuits filed by 17 parties challenging two amendments to the
Delta Plan and the Programmatic Environmental Impact Report
(PEIR) prepared pursuant to the California Environmental
Quality Act (CEQA).
Major construction is complete for the multi-year Upper Truckee
Marsh Restoration project, Lake Tahoe’s largest ever wetland
restoration, the California Tahoe Conservancy announced
Monday. The Conservancy has completed steps to repair
damage caused by 20th century development, restoring and
enhancing hundreds of acres of wetland habitat. A new trail
offers improved access for all to experience and enjoy the
lake’s shoreline.
With California butting up against 840 miles of
ocean, desalination seems an obvious solution to the
state’s water woes. However, the cost, energy demands and
environmental impacts have made the technology largely
unworkable. Three years of drought may be
changing the calculus. The latest push for desalination is
on the Monterey Peninsula, where a plan for a plant, which has
faced more than a decade of hurdles, is poised to win approval
this week from the California Coastal Commission. The $300
million-plus proposal calls for pumping seawater from wells
beneath Monterey Bay, near the city of Marina, and piping it
ashore to the popular tourist region to help relieve a longtime
water shortage… the Monterey Peninsula Water Management
District, which works with Cal Am to ensure water for the area,
said the new supply could run as much as $7,000 per acre
foot.
Marin County residents and visitors can once again watch the
natural spectacle of endangered coho salmon making their annual
return to their spawning grounds in Lagunitas Creek this
winter. The rainfall this month was enough to signal the
red-and-silver salmon to make their way from Tomales Bay —
where they have been holding these past weeks — to begin the
long journey against the currents of the creek.
When the government declared an official “shortage” on the
river last year, an unprecedented step, it triggered major
water cuts in the central Arizona county. And those cuts have
caused some farmers in Pinal County to look for more
water-efficient crops, including Will Thelander, a third
generation farmer in Arizona, who is testing a crop called
guayule. Guayule, a desert-adapted shrub pronounced
“wy-oo-lee,” could be used for several products, most notably
as a natural rubber for tires. And it requires only about half
the water of cotton, alfalfa, and corn—the more water-intensive
crops Thelander typically grows. … Native to the
Chihuahuan Desert, it requires less water than many other
crops, for one. And after it’s established, it doesn’t require
any insecticides or tilling, limiting use of the chemicals and
supporting carbon storage.
Two decades of the Southwest megadrought have marked Arizona’s
driest period in 1,200 years. With climate change in full
swing, greenhouse emissions well above pledged targets and the
state facing cutbacks to its share of dwindling Colorado River
water, many wonder: Is drought the new normal? In an ideal
world, drought would be as simple as the settings on a hair
dryer: more heat, more evaporation. But it’s not an ideal
world, and less so every day, thanks to climate change, rising
water demand — and changing land use.
The question addressed in this blog comes from a new PPIC
report that calls for reforms in management of environmental
water stored behind dams in California. The report shows it is
possible to manage water in ways that are compatible with
maintaining a natural ecosystem in streams below and above dams
(Null et al. 2022). An appendix to this report focuses on
fishes (Moyle et al. 2022). It provides information on how dams
and reservoirs affect native fish populations and supports the
need for improved water management to avoid future extinctions.
Three of California’s biggest water suppliers, including the
city of San Francisco, have reached a deal with the state that
calls for reducing their immense consumption of river water but
not as much as the state had initially demanded. The
compromise, announced Thursday, is the latest breakthrough in a
years-long effort by state regulators to protect flows in
California’s once-grand but increasingly overdrawn rivers. The
toll on the waterways, where as much as 90% of the water is
pumped to cities and farms, has been exacerbated by drought,
leaving fabled runs of salmon and other plants and animals at
risk of perishing. … But whether Thursday’s deal, known
as “voluntary agreements,” will meaningfully increase river
flows — and protect fish and wildlife — remains uncertain.
As a society, what do we do when too little water has been
promised to too many people? What should we be doing
differently? In the United States, there is perhaps no
better to place to turn for answers to these questions than the
Klamath Basin. The Klamath Basin watershed is considered one of
the most complicated areas for water governance in the United
States owing to its transboundary location (the basin crosses
the Oregon-California border), its history of complex
litigation and persistent inter-institutional (and
interpersonal) conflict, and more than 60 different groups of
people who have an interest in the basin’s water
allocation.
The U.S. Geological Survey announced today it has signed a
cooperative agreement with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research
Institute, or MBARI, to develop portable robotic DNA samplers
capable of independently monitoring for living threats in the
rivers and streams without constant support from
researchers. With new investments from President Biden’s
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the partnership will help
advance detection of invasive species, pathogens and parasites
which cause ecological and economic damage to aquatic systems.
These organisms can wreak havoc on our waterways, threaten
commercial and recreational fishing industries and promote the
spread of zoonotic diseases that can impact humans.
By foot, horse, and canoe, European explorers centuries ago
undertook years-long expeditions to document the length and
breadth of major rivers. Today, satellites make the first pass
of discovery. Though rivers meander and melting glaciers birth
new lakes annually, the world’s major drainages have largely
been mapped. Yet one fundamental dimension remains largely a
mystery: the rise and fall of water bodies globally. Accurately
measuring, at low-cost, the weekly changes in rivers, lakes,
and wetlands would allow scientists to observe how much water
moves through them. Land-based gauges do some of this work. But
where gauges are scarce — Alaska, Africa, Asian headwaters —
these numbers are inaccurate or unknown.
The beaver dam showed up right in the middle of Christian
Dewey’s research site. As the lead of a Stanford study, Dewey
spent months looking at water quality along the Colorado River.
This river is a water source for numerous states aside from
Colorado, including Arizona, Utah and California. The dam
re-directed the study. In the end, researchers unearthed a
surprising finding: the beaver dam played an important part in
improving water quality in the river – so much so that in some
areas, it’s mitigating water degradation caused by drought and
climate change. Dewey observed the dam during the summer
of 2018, a drought year for multiple states, including
Colorado. Dewey said that when water levels are low, minerals
tend to become concentrated in the river. This deterioration of
water quality can have devastating ecological impacts.
A dozen independent fish scientists are calling for urgent
changes to sport fishing rules to save California’s largest
freshwater fish after an unprecedented red tide this summer
left hundreds of them dead in the estuary on Sacramento’s
doorstep. The fish is the white sturgeon — an ancient species
native to the West Coast. … But this summer’s deadly red
tide has independent scientists worried about the future of
this species. They’re calling on the state to change fishing
rules to require anglers release any sturgeon they catch — a
move that would likely be controversial for the state’s 46,000
sturgeon anglers.
You’ve probably heard by now, but the Great Salt Lake is drying
up. The lake reached record lows this summer, dropping to
4,190.1 feet in July. To put this in perspective, the lake was
flexing about 3,000 square miles in the 90s. Now, it’s withered
to less than 1,000. There are some obvious things we can
do about this, mostly on the agricultural side of things. But
now we’re hearing of all kinds of less obvious ways we could
save it, like amplifying snow storms or piping in water from
California, among other ideas. … One of those ideas is
called cloud seeding. The Utah Division of Water
Resources explains it this way: “Ground-based seeders
shoot silver iodide into winter clouds where it helps form ice
crystals.
For eight straight days this summer, farmers in far Northern
California drained almost all of the water out of a river in
defiance of the state’s drought regulations. The move
infuriated environmentalists and salmon-dependent Native
American tribes downstream. California now knows the cost of
the farmers’ blatant defiance: Less than $50 per farmer. It’s
the latest example of California’s lax water-use enforcement
process — problems that were first exposed in a sweeping
Sacramento Bee investigation published online last week.
As California wraps up a third consecutive dry year, dead and
dying trees are adding splotches of orange and brown to many
landscapes in California’s mountains this year. The
discoloration of familiar alpine forests is the result of tree
mortality due to drought, insects, or disease (everything other
than wildfire) that is tracked through annual aerial surveys
conducted by the U.S Forest Service. … Large-scale
tree mortality is mainly driven by abnormally high temperatures
and prolonged drought, as scarcity of water strains otherwise
healthy trees.
As climate change worsens water quality and threatens
ecosystems, the famous dams of beavers may help lessen the
damage. That is the conclusion of a new study by
Stanford University scientists and colleagues, publishing Nov.
8 in Nature Communications. The research reveals that when
it comes to water quality in mountain watersheds, beaver dams
can have a far greater influence than climate-driven, seasonal
extremes in precipitation. The wooden barriers raise water
levels upstream, diverting water into surrounding soils and
secondary waterways, collectively called a riparian zone. These
zones act like filters, straining out excess nutrients and
contaminants before water re-enters the main channel
downstream.
In October 2021, ecologists shattered the top of a dam on Mill
Creek, near Davenport, California, with a hydraulic hammer.
Within hours, the entire structure was down. For at least 110
years, the long-obsolete dam had kept threatened steelhead from
reaching important spawning habitat just upstream.
…. Then, in September 2022, [Ian] Rowbotham’s team
spotted juvenile steelhead above the former dam site. To their
surprise, they also found 15 juvenile coho salmon downstream.
It was the first time coho, an endangered species, had ever
been recorded in Mill Creek….The experience adds to a growing
body of research documenting the speedy recovery of fish and
other species after dams are removed
As the Great Salt Lake continues to shrink to unprecedented
levels, a key component of its landscape and food web is
missing. The lake is known for thick, black clusters of brine
flies by the billions, which pupate in its salty water then
gather in dense mats to reproduce on shore. The insectile
masses occasionally gross out beachgoers, but the bugs are
harmless to humans. Crucially, they provide a nutrient-rich
feast for millions of migrating birds. This year, however, the
fly swarms are gone. And something’s off about the few bugs
that remain. Scientists say it’s a sign the lake’s ecological
demise is here.
Five years ago, when ExxonMobil came calling, city officials
eagerly signed over a large portion of their water supply so
the oil giant could build a $10 billion plant to make plastics
out of methane gas. A year later, they did the same for
Steel Dynamics to build a rolled-steel factory. Never
mind that Corpus Christi, a mid-sized city on the semi-arid
South Texas coast, had just raced through its 50-year water
plan 13 years ahead of schedule. Planners believed they had a
solution: large-scale seawater desalination. According to the
plan in 2019, the state’s first plant needed to be running by
early 2023 to safely meet industrial water demands that were
scheduled to come online. But Corpus Christi never got it done.
In February 2020, Andrea Jones scrambled up Obsidian Butte, a
lava dome on the southeastern corner of Salton Sea. Amid the
expanse of dry, exposed lakebed, the result of decades of water
diversions and ongoing drought, she also saw a glimmer of
green—unexpected reeds and cattails taking hold around the edge
of the sea, signs of budding wetlands. … Agricultural
drains—dozens of ditches and pipes directing water off nearby
farmland—once flowed directly into the sea. But as the sea
shrinks, their outflow now trickles and meanders across exposed
playa, allowing wetlands to form. They are a happy
surprise amid an otherwise desperate scene at the Salton
Sea, a 343-square-mile inland saltwater lake and the largest
remaining body of water in California.
Thirty years ago, President George H.W. Bush signed an
ambitious California water reform known as the Central Valley
Project Improvement Act, or the CVPIA. The bill responded to a
drought, crashing salmon runs, threats to Central Valley
wetlands and antiquated water policies. California is again
suffering from drought and low fish counts. The CVPIA’s
successes and failures provide lessons to help ensure a healthy
environment and more reliable water supplies. It is time
to take the next steps. … Although the CVPIA funded
habitat restoration, it failed to provide the river flows
salmon needed. This was partly because the law applied to the
federal Central Valley Project, not other diverters. -Written by U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman and former
Democratic U.S. Rep. George Miller, who coauthored the
Central Valley Project Improvement Act.
California’s water officials plan to impose a $4,000 fine on
Siskiyou County ranchers for violating orders to cut back their
water use during a weeklong standoff last summer. State
officials and the ranchers agree: A $4,000 fine isn’t much of a
deterrent to prevent illegal water diversions during
California’s droughts. The proposed fine would amount to about
$50 per rancher. A rural water association serving about
80 ranchers and farmers — facing mounting costs from hauling
water and purchasing hay to replace dried out pasture — turned
on their pumps for eight days in August to divert water from
the Shasta River. State and federal officials said the pumping,
which violated an emergency state order, threatened the river’s
water quality and its salmon and other rare species.
In California, sturgeon populations have persisted through
periods of extreme overfishing, sedimentation and mercury
contamination from hydraulic mining, species invasions, and
alteration of rivers by dams and levees (Zeug et al. 2014,
Gunderson et al. 2017, Blackburn et al. 2019). … Suddenly,
the future of these ancient fish does not seem so secure.
Between late August and early September, 2022, hundreds of
sturgeon perished in the San Francisco Estuary. According to
Jim Hobbs, program manager for the Interagency Ecological
Program at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife
(CDFW) Bay Delta office, “the white sturgeon carcass count
total will be over 400 and the total for green was 15. ”
The Marin Headlands’ unique offering of breathtaking landscapes
mixed with former military bases dating back to World War II
has been a draw for millions of visitors through the decades.
But the combination has not been without downsides. In the
hills overlooking Rodeo Beach, the remnants of former U.S. Army
buildings of Fort Cronkhite have slowly been eroding parts of
the landscape, gouging deep trench-like gullies into the
hillside that have drained natural wetlands. The National Park
Service is now working to reverse the damage and restore more
than an acre of wetlands that can be used as home to species
such as the endangered red-legged frog, said park service
ecologist Darren Fong.
Nearly a decade ago, a California law required manufacturers of
plastic bags to make their bags recyclable. The state’s top cop
says this doesn’t appear to be happening. On Wednesday,
Attorney General Rob Bonta sent letters to seven plastic bag
producers that supply the bulk of California’s grocery stories,
demanding they provide proof that their bags can really be
recycled. The move is among the strictest enforcement actions
yet for a major state recycling law aimed at tackling the
scourge of plastic pollution in oceans, soils and skies.
As Northern California finds itself between two desperately
needed rounds of rain, compounding years of drought have taken
a toll across the state and particularly on our
watersheds. For several years now, researchers have been
trying to understand more about how the Russian River watershed
is responding to all of the dry years. It is a study focusing
on the effects of a changing climate and how fish might survive
those conditions. … Nossaman and two other team members
were sloshing their way through Dutch Bill Creek in the hills
of Western Sonoma County, trying to understand this stream like
a doctor knows a patient; Assessing its health in another dry
year.
About three-quarters of $1 million in federal funds is headed
to three North Coast tribes to help build climate resiliency.
On Wednesday, the Department of Interior announced $45 million
in investments to tribal climate resilience projects across the
country, including $4.2 million to support nine tribes in
California. … The $1.2 trillion Bipartisan
Infrastructure Law was signed into law about a year ago and
includes a host of funding to repair the country’s bridges,
roads and railways. The law also included funds for climate
projects, including millions in funds for Klamath River
restoration projects, but nowhere near the amount of funding
that would have been made available had the law’s companion
bill, the Build Back Better Act, been passed.
For the seventh September in a row, the California
Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has caught zero Delta
smelt during its Fall Midwater Trawl Survey of the
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The last September when
Delta smelt, an indicator species that demonstrates the
relative health of the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary, were
found in the survey was in 2015, when 5 were caught by CDFW
biologists. The last year when any Delta smelt were caught
during the entire four-month survey was in 2016, when a total
of 8 Delta smelt were reported.
Jay Wilde has worked on his Preston, Idaho, ranch just north of
the Utah border for most of his life. Growing up, one of its
biggest pests were beavers. … But after moving back in 1995,
he experienced a major “paradigm shift.” With the help of Utah
State University’s Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center, he
opened his property as a haven for the species in 2015. Now,
the area is home to over 200 beaver dams — which have increased
the ranch’s creek flows and helped a vulnerable fish species
thrive. … Utah State’s beaver relocation program
re-homes an average of 75 beavers each year, restoring
ecosystems where beavers have played a crucial role for
thousands of years — all with support from the Utah Division of
Wildlife Resources and the U.S. Forest Service.
State and federal biologists and engineers, in partnership with
the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, have begun testing an experimental
system in Shasta Reservoir. It could help collect young salmon
from the McCloud River in future years and return them to their
historic habitat. The Juvenile Salmonid Collection System is a
pilot project 6 years in the making. It is part of a long-term
effort to help fish better survive California’s hotter, drier
future and more extreme droughts. The collection system will
float in the McCloud River arm of the reservoir and guide cold
water toward a collection point. This cold water flows down
from the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. The initial testing is
running from September to mid-November.
Jim Scala needed the water. So he took it. As the third
devastating summer of drought dragged on, the Siskiyou County
rancher knew his irrigation district could be fined up to
$10,000 a day if he and his neighbors defied a state cutback
order and pumped water from the Shasta River onto their lands
east of Yreka. … While the Shasta River rebellion might have
been the most brazen, a Sacramento Bee investigation reveals
that farmers and other water users frequently ignore state
drought regulations…. The Bee’s findings reveal a state
regulatory system dramatically unprepared to address chronic
water shortages and an ecosystem collapse.
As Lake Tahoe watercraft inspections shift to winter
operations, inspectors report intercepting far fewer vessels
this year with aquatic invasive species (AIS) onboard. They
credit improvements to the program as part of the reason. The
Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) and the Tahoe Resource
Conservation District (Tahoe RCD) announced today that out of
5,800 boats, jet skis, and trailers inspected since January, 56
were found to have AIS onboard and eight of those were carrying
quagga or zebra mussels, making this one of the lowest years on
record for intercepting the prolific invader.
Defenders of Wildlife applauded a decision by the U.S. Bureau
of Reclamation to request a renegotiation of a decades-old use
contract for the San Joaquin River that could spark stronger
protection for wildlife and drought management. Defenders and
the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) urged the Bureau
of Reclamation to reform its water supply contract with the San
Joaquin River Exchange Contractors Water Authority before the
conclusion of the renegotiation period. On Oct. 14, the Bureau
sent a letter to the Exchange Contractors, four days before the
deadline, with its intent to renegotiate. Though the contract
may be reviewed every five years, it has not been reviewed
since 1968.
Congressman Raul Ruiz is calling on the U.S. Department of the
Interior to uphold its commitments to the Salton Sea, including
millions in federal funds from the Inflation Reduction Act.
According to Ruiz’s office, the Inflation Reduction Act
includes $4 billion in funding specifically for water
management and conservation efforts in the Colorado River Basin
and other areas experiencing similar levels of drought. The
funding includes $12.5 million to mitigate the effect of
drought on Tribes. Last week, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly,
an Arizona Democrat, wrote a letter calling for the federal
government to withhold money for environmental cleanup at the
Salton Sea until California agrees to use less of its
share of the Colorado River.
Highlighting the growing problem of plastic pollution in the
world’s oceans, whales swimming off the California coast are
ingesting millions of tiny pieces of plastic every day, a new
study led by marine biologists at Stanford University has
found. Blue whales, the largest animals on Earth, are each
consuming about 10 million pieces of “micro-plastic” daily — or
as much as 95 pounds a day in some cases — nearly all of it
found in the krill and other tiny organisms they eat. Smaller
fin whales are ingesting roughly 6 million pieces of the
confetti-like litter a day as they feed. And humpback whales
that primarily eat fish are eating about 200,000 pieces a day,
the study estimated.
The San Joaquin River that passes Manteca and Lathrop just as
it reaches the Delta is ground zero for yet another fight over
water. This time it’s to reduce the growing threat of toxic
algal bloom in the Delta that pose a threat to humans and pets
alike. And if emergency petitions filed last month with the
State Water Control Resources Board succeed, it will throw a
major wrench into state efforts to deal with allocating
dwindling water supplies as California enters its fourth year
of drought.
As climate change continues to transform California’s landscape
in staggering and often irreversible ways, researchers have
zeroed in on yet another casualty of the shift: the forests of
the southern Sierra Nevada. Between 2011 and 2020, wildfires,
drought and bark beetle infestations contributed to the loss of
nearly a third of all conifer forests in the lower half of the
mountain range, according to a recent study published in the
journal Ecological Applications. Eighty-five percent of the
southern Sierra’s high-density mature forests either lost
density or became non-forest vegetation. The losses could have
grave consequences for California wildlife, including protected
species such as spotted owls and Pacific fishers that rely on
mature tree canopies for their habitats.
Surface-water availability, defined as precipitation minus
evapotranspiration, can be affected by changes in vegetation.
These impacts can be local, due to the modification of
evapotranspiration and precipitation, or non-local, due to
changes in atmospheric moisture transport. However, the
teleconnections of vegetation changes on water availability in
downwind regions remain poorly constrained by observations. By
linking measurements of local precipitation to a new
hydrologically weighted leaf area index that accounts for both
local and upwind vegetation contributions, we demonstrate that
vegetation changes have increased global water availability at
a rate of 0.26 mm yr−2 for the 2001–2018 period.
It all started in 2012 when Otto Walker Willis approached me at
my Mermaid Festival asking for help with the overwhelming
garbage created by multiple encampments along Fife Creek in
Guerneville. Together, we walked the creekbed of this seasonal
tributary to the Russian River to see how this important creek
and habitat was being destroyed. I had been working with
Riverkeeper, Don McEnhill, when he recommended I talk to David
Morton (Horticulturist /Riparian Ecologist), who was working on
the Riverkeeper Park restoration project near downtown. David
immediately made a commitment to restore Fife Creek.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Congress passed a series of
laws that profoundly affected Western ecosystems and human
relationships to them. The Clean Air Act, designed to reduce
air pollution, led the way in 1963, and in 1970, the National
Environmental Policy Act, sometimes called the Magna Carta of
environmental protection, created a review process for federal
projects. In 1972, the Clean Water Act established requirements
for the restoration and maintenance of waterways, and one year
later, the Endangered Species Act created protections and
required recovery plans for fish, wildlife and plants deemed
threatened or endangered. Conservation finally seemed to have a
solid legal foundation. Six decades later, that foundation
is in serious need of retrofitting.
In just 10 years, fires, drought, and insect infestations have
devastated close to a third of forests in the southern Sierra
Nevada mountains, a new study finds. The region, which extends
from Lake Tahoe in the north to the Sequoia National Forest in
the south, has been hit by persistent drought, made more severe
by climate change, which has left pines more vulnerable to
wildfires and bark beetle infestations. From 2011 to 2020, 30
percent of conifer forests in the southern Sierra Nevada
succumbed to these threats, according to an analysis of U.S.
Forest Service data on tree cover, tree height, and the extent
of recent wildfires.
If the climate crisis is coming, the water crisis is already
here. As rice fields were fallowed in California, Lake
Mead water levels almost sunk so low that Hoover Dam could no
longer generate power … Thirty percent of the world
population will face water shortages of some kind by 2025.
… The water crisis will only be solved if we realize the
once quixotic vision of desalination, turning seawater into
freshwater. Today, roughly 18,000 desalination plants produce
around 1% of the world’s freshwater, with production
concentrated in regions of high water scarcity such as Israel
and Australia. … The desalination process is so
energy-intensive that desalination plants often require
carbon-emitting power plants right next door, which can
increase costs up to 10 times higher than groundwater. -Written by Dr. Grayson Zulauf, a clean energy
entrepreneur and CEO of Resonant Link.
In 1994, under court orders, the state finalized a plan to
repair the damage to the 780-square mile Mono Basin watershed
driven by the human-caused drought. Without protection, the
lake’s ecosystem probably would have collapsed sometime early
in the 2000s under the combined pressure of water diversions
and global warming. Its persistence suggests that protected
ecosystems are more resilient than vulnerable ones, and that
helping nature heal itself more effectively prevents their
decline than drastic technological and engineering
interventions.
The Hoopa Valley Tribe alleged in a lawsuit Monday that the
federal government is violating its sovereignty and failing to
collect money from California farms that rely on federally
supplied water to pay for damages to tribal fisheries. The
tribe, which has a reservation in northwest California, says in
its lawsuit against the Biden administration that the Trinity
River that it relies on for food and cultural purposes has been
decimated by decades of the federal government diverting water.
The suit alleges the U.S. Department of the Interior has failed
to follow laws that require the contractors who use that water
to pay money for habitat restoration projects. It says those
contractors owe $340 million for environmental restoration work
along the Trinity River and other places damaged by water
diversions.
This is no ordinary witch’s brew. It’s one part of the recipe
to study thiamine deficiency in our California Central Valley
Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) populations. In 2019,
hatcheries noticed an eerie and shivering change in juvenile
Chinook salmon. Offspring were laying on their side at the
bottom of tanks, swimming in corkscrew motion (see video
below), or not surviving at all. In other words, for many
juvenile salmon, they were not quite dead, only slightly alive.
… But now, we are left with a major question: how did
these fish became thiamine deficient in the first place? And if
this is being seen in our hatchery fish, what about the fish in
the wild? To understand thiamine deficiency in salmon, we need
to understand the past, present, and future using an array of
different samples.
If it wasn’t for the sun low on the horizon or the sparrows
singing quickly from nearby shrubs, one would barely realize it
was morning. The heat along the Salton Sea, with some
added humidity, already felt slightly oppressive. Our
shorebird survey route included the shoreline along the State
of California’s Species Conservation Habitat (SCH) 4,100 acre
wetland remediation project on the southwest corner of the Sea,
near the New River mouth. We found ourselves in a
construction site, and after asking for access permission, were
given hard hats and sent along our way to navigate a series of
levees and dirt roads and look for birds.
A local environmental group is suing the county in order to get
it to better regulate groundwater in the lower Eel River.
Friends of the Eel River filed a civil suit against Humboldt
County on Thursday in Humboldt County Superior Court “to secure
protection for the public trust values at risk when groundwater
pumping depletes surface flows in the Lower Eel River,”
according to a release from the group. … Friends of the
Eel River sent the county a letter in mid-August threatening
legal action if it failed to take the public trust doctrine
into account when deciding how to allocate water from the Eel
River.
The Eel River Recovery Project (ERRP) has monitored water
temperature throughout the Eel River watershed, checked flow
conditions and also documented fish life since 2012. The
group’s temperature monitoring program is driven by volunteer
interest and energy, and streams surveyed include the South
Fork Eel River and selected tributaries in southern Humboldt
and northern Mendocino County. In southern
Humboldt, we have partnered with retired California Department
of Fish and Game warden Larry Bruckenstein to monitor lower
Sproul Creek where he and his wife Darcy reside, and the South
Fork Eel downstream of Sproul Creek. Bob and Barbara
Froelich own land in Little Sproul Creek just upstream and are
also ERRP monitoring partners.
After about a decade of grinding its way through the federal
permitting process, Ormat, a geothermal company, was building a
new power plant in Dixie Valley to produce renewable energy.
… But soon came another legal snag. The company
halted construction in August while federal agencies meet to
discuss whether the project should move forward. The
rugged, remote corner of Nevada’s Great Basin region found
itself at the epicenter of a confrontation between some of
President Biden’s, and the nation’s, most pressing priorities:
renewable energy, wildlife conservation and Indigenous
rights…. environmentalists and tribes are pressing the
Biden administration to begin land and water protections at
Dixie Valley and elsewhere. The administration’s decision could
affect not just Ormat’s plans and this patch of Nevada but also
projects and landscapes across the country.
New research from Stanford’s Remote Sensing Ecohydrology group
published earlier this week in Nature improved the accuracy of
earth systems models that examine the impact of droughts on
ecosystems through considering plants’ breathing patterns.
Droughts are increasing around the world: More than 29 million
acres of land are lost to drought and desertification annually,
according to a 2022 UN report. Better understanding of how
plants contribute to droughts is critical to planning
adaptation response.
The most disputed parkland in Palo Alto isn’t known for its
sports courts, playgrounds or sweeping vistas. Located next to
the Regional Water Quality Control Plant, the 10-acre parcel
commonly known as the “Measure E” site is best known as a place
of opportunity. In 2011, Palo Alto residents voted to
“undedicate” the parkland and make it available for a
waste-to-energy plant that would treat local organic waste, but
that the project never materialized. Now, the city is looking
to rededicate the 10 acres as parkland, a move that is once
again fomenting division within the city’s environmental
community.
Audubon California is advising bird lovers to remove feeders
and to empty bird baths as a precaution to spreading avian flu.
“We know this comes at a time when drought-stressed birds need
birdbaths and fountains more than ever. It is disappointing to
many of us, but as this virus spreads, it’s important to keep
birds healthy,” Gaylon Parsons, interim executive director of
Audubon California, said in a statement released Thursday.
… There have been cases of avian flu reported in 19
counties in the state, and cases in backyard flocks in Butte,
Calaveras, Contra Costa, El Dorado, Fresno, Sacramento and
Tuolumne counties. The most recent discovery was Sept. 29 in
Calaveras County.
Save the Redwoods League has secured an opportunity to purchase
a conservation easement on Mendocino County’s 3,862-acre Weger
Ranch, in a deal that would be the “cornerstone of the
Montgomery Woods Initiative.” Weger Ranch has
historically been managed with timber harvest every 12 years,
ensuring a “multi-aged, diverse forest structure” meant to
enhance wildlife and riparian habitat while continuing to allow
productivity. Save the Redwood League hopes to further
cultivate those habitats with new restrictions.
Hundreds of wild pigs are destroying yards, flower beds and
more in the Lake area. However, this isn’t exactly a new thing
for Shasta County. The county has had a large population of
wild pigs for years—from Redding all the way to the Bay Area.
… Wild pigs are also nothing new for California as a
whole. In fact, even though the pigs are a nonnative species,
they have been around for years and are now as common as deer
in some places; causing chaos in local communities and forcing
residents to get creative while protecting their yards.
… There have been a lot more pigs within the Lake
community than ever before, but this can be another result of
California’s infamous drought.
For millennia, communities throughout North America have
adapted to the ebb and flow of waterways. Water infrastructure
provides reservoirs for times of drought and flood control for
instances of deluge…. Long-term shifts in streamflow could
signal a fundamental change in climate that scientists believe
the country’s infrastructure is not designed to endure.
Unfortunately, such a trend is emerging. In the first
comprehensive picture of streamflow in the United States,
scientists reported that streams in the South and West have
gotten drier in the past 70 years.
Admirers of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains are familiar
with the swaths of blackened trees flanking its sprawling green
forest ranges. A new UC Berkeley study quantifies that
devastation, finding nearly a third of southern Sierra conifer
forests have died in the last decade. California has seen
devastating bouts of drought and record-breaking wildfire
events in the last several years…. Healthy forests
support critical biodiversity and ecological function, like
storing water that melts into our reservoirs. They also provide
key carbon storage in our fight against the extreme weather
dangers posed by climate change.
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.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the Delta explores the competing
uses and demands on California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Included in the guide are sections on the history of the Delta,
its role in the state’s water system, and its many complex issues
with sections on water quality, levees, salinity and agricultural
drainage, fish and wildlife, and water distribution.
As part of the historic Colorado
River Delta, the Salton Sea regularly filled and dried for
thousands of years due to its elevation of 237 feet below
sea level.
The Pacific Flyway is one of four
major North American migration routes for birds, especially
waterfowl, and extends from Alaska and Canada, through
California, to Mexico and South America. Each year, birds follow
ancestral patterns as they travel the flyway on their annual
north-south migration. Along the way, they need stopover sites
such as wetlands with suitable habitat and food supplies. In
California, 90 percent of historic wetlands have been lost.
The construction of Glen Canyon Dam in 1964 created Lake Powell.
Both are located in north-central Arizona near the Utah border.
Lake Powell acts as a holding tank for outflow from the Colorado
River Upper Basin States: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
The water stored in Lake Powell is used for recreation, power
generation and delivering water to the Lower Basin states of
California, Arizona, and Nevada.
This issue of Western Water looks at the BDCP and the
Coalition to Support Delta Projects, issues that are aimed at
improving the health and safety of the Delta while solidifying
California’s long-term water supply reliability.
This printed issue of Western Water examines the issues
associated with the State Water Board’s proposed revision of the
water quality Bay-Delta Plan, most notably the question of
whether additional flows are needed for the system, and how they
might be provided.
This printed issue of Western Water examines science –
the answers it can provide to help guide management decisions in
the Delta and the inherent uncertainty it holds that can make
moving forward such a tenuous task.
This printed issue of Western Water provides an overview of the
idea of a dual conveyance facility, including questions
surrounding its cost, operation and governance
This printed copy of Western Water examines the native salmon and
trout dilemma – the extent of the crisis, its potential impact on
water deliveries and the lengths to which combined efforts can
help restore threatened and endangered species.
This printed copy of Western Water examines the Colorado River
Delta, its ecological significance and the lengths to which
international, state and local efforts are targeted and achieving
environmental restoration while recognizing the needs of the
entire river’s many users.
In the world of water, biology and engineering often clash -
especially when it comes to resolving the Delta dilemma. How do
we manage such an altered system to ensure water supply
reliability while restoring the ecosystem? How do we measure the
results of efforts to restore endangered species and habitat? Why
is biodiversity important?
Balance between ecosystem restoration and water supply
reliability is key to a Bay-Delta solution. Everyone agrees on
this concept. But the demands of the competing interests can tilt
the scales. So, too, can the member agencies’ conflicting
missions. For more than three years, the joint state-federal
CALFED Bay-Delta Program has been searching for equilibrium among
the Delta’s complex problems and its contentious stakeholders. In
December, it released its latest blueprint for resolving the
Delta dilemma — the Revised Phase II Report.
