The California Legislature was the first in the country to
protect rare plants and animals through passage of the California
Endangered Species Act (CESA) in 1970, Congress followed suit in
1973 by passing the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA).
The federal ESA aims to, “protect and recover imperiled species
and the ecosystems upon which they depend.”
The state ESA states that, “all native species of fishes,
amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, invertebrates, and plants,
and their habitats, threatened with extinction and those
experiencing a significant decline which, if not halted, would
lead to a threatened or endangered designation, will be protected
or preserved.”
Imperiled species are defined as follows: “Endangered” if it is
in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion
of its range and “threatened” if it is likely to become an
endangered species within the foreseeable future.”
Water quality regulators let a Sonoma County-based quarry know
last week it could face a $4.5 million-fine for multiple
alleged violations of the Clean Water Act that threaten the
survival of endangered salmon populations in tributaries of the
Russian River. The proposed fine from the North Coast
Regional Water Quality Control Board is part of a legal
proceeding known as an administrative civil liability that
alleges the operator of Mark West Quarry, Dean Soiland, doing
business as BoDean Co. Inc., discharged highly turbid
stormwater from its quarry operations into Porter Creek from
September 2018 through May 2019.
The California Legislature released the final budget language
late on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. CalTrout remains
critical of the unnecessary delay in releasing critical budget
items like emergency drought funding, wildfire relief, and
climate resilience packages. As water curtailment orders go
live throughout the state, the legislature is still waiting to
officially approve these critical funding packages to combat
the effects of climate during this year’s especially dry
drought conditions.
[G]lobal warming is not going away. Last month, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most
alarming report yet: Earth is on the edge of ecological
bankruptcy. That’s what California is facing this summer
with record heat, severe drought, record fires, snow
sublimation, record low reservoir levels, dry wells,
communities without safe drinking water, deaths of salmon and
whales, poisonous algae growth in lakes and streams, and record
glacier melt. -Written by Martha Davis, the former assistant
general manager for policy at the Inland Empire Utilities
Agency and former executive director of the Mono Lake
Committee.
Murders of environment and land defenders hit a record high
last year as the violent resource grab in the global south
continued unabated despite the pandemic. New figures released
by Global Witness show that 227 people were killed in 2020
while trying to protect forests, rivers and other ecosystems
that their livelihoods depended on.
The razorback sucker fish could be downlisted from an
endangered species to threatened in the next year or so,
according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. This week,
environmental groups sent the agency a letter in opposition to
the move. The letter argues the razorback sucker is still in
trouble, despite recoveries it’s made in the last 30 years,
which is when it was first listed as federally endangered. The
fish is native to the Colorado River, which is facing historic
shortages due to the west’s megadrought.
With climate change-induced drought causing critical low flows
in the Scott and Shasta Rivers and threatening the survival of
multiple fish species, the State Water Resources Control Board
today approved an emergency curtailment regulation that
includes measures to help maintain minimum flows to protect
fish, ensure supplies for human health and livestock needs, and
encourage voluntary efforts that may be used in lieu of
curtailments.
For centuries, spring-run Chinook salmon, among California’s
most iconic fish, would rest for weeks in these historically
cold waters after their brutal upstream journey. Then they
would lay eggs and, finally, perish to complete one of nature’s
most improbable life cycles. No longer. What once was a place
where life began is now one of untimely death. The creek is
simply too warm, an astounding 10 degrees warmer than average
in some parts of these spawning grounds.
James Gilbert, an associate project scientist in the Institute
of Marine Sciences (IMS) at UC Santa Cruz, was recognized by
the NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center (SWFSC) with its
Staff of the Quarter award for the third quarter of fiscal year
2021. … The award recognizes his work as part of the FCP’s
Central Valley Salmon project.
The Oakdale and South San Joaquin Irrigation Districts have
joined in a lawsuit challenging the State Water Resources
Control Board’s authority to prevent the two water agencies
from diverting and storing Stanislaus River runoff in Donnells,
Beardsley, New Melones and Tulloch Reservoirs. The state water
board, in an emergency drought order issued Aug. 20, declared
that OID, SSJID and 4,500 other water rights holders in
California must immediately stop diverting water due to
unprecedented drought conditions.
Michael George is not a spy — but he does use some of the same
equipment. George, a gregarious talker, is a lawyer by trade,
and in his current role as Delta watermaster he oversees the
use of water in one of the country’s most contested waterways.
The Delta in this case is the Sacramento-San Joaquin, a jumble
of fertile land, diked islands, tidal flows, and meandering
sloughs that is the heart of California’s engineered water
system.
The state’s curtailment of river diversions has drawn lawsuits
from eight irrigation districts in and near Stanislaus County,
along with San Francisco. The three filings claim that
the State Water Resources Control Board exceeded its authority
with the Aug. 20 orders. The plaintiffs also said they did not
get enough chance beforehand to make their cases for continued
diversions.
As drought-stricken California considers constructing new dams,
a new study finds that many of the state’s existing structures—
despite efforts to prioritize healthy water temperatures— are
failing the cold-water ecosystems that depend on them. The
study, published in PLOS One, crunched data from 77 cold-water
streams across California to characterize their “thermal
regime” — that is, their annual temperature fluctuations over
an eight- to 12-year period.
The Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service today announced the Notice of Funding Opportunity for
projects that enhance Chinook salmon and steelhead trout
production and associated habitats in the Central Valley,
consistent with the Central Valley Project Improvement Act.
Reclamation and the Service plan to award up to $40 million
(subject to appropriations) in fiscal year 2022 through
multiple grants or cooperative agreements to projects
prioritized by the CVPIA Near-Term Restoration Strategy.
This morning’s operations missive from the federal-state-local
Middle Rio Grande operations group (by “Middle” here we mean
central New Mexico) notes a release of ~100 cubic feet per
second of imported San Juan-Chama Project water for
environmental flows, an effort to help the struggling Rio
Grande silvery minnow. SJC water is removed from the Colorado
River Basin in the San Juan mountains of southern Colorado,
through a series of tunnels beneath the continental divide, for
use in the Rio Grande Basin.
The California red-legged frog is a threatened species that has
been found on the UC Santa Cruz Coastal Science Campus, but has
not been known to breed there successfully. That may soon
change with the construction of a small pond designed to
enhance an existing seasonal wetland and provide potential
breeding habitat for the native frog.
Freshly cut off from their chief water supply, a group of
California water agencies in one of the state’s most fertile
farming areas sued on Wednesday to freeze the latest round of
emergency drought rules. In a lawsuit filed in Sacramento
County Superior Court, the suppliers argue they were denied due
process when state regulators ordered thousands of landowners
last month to cease diversions from the Sacramento-San Joaquin
River Delta due to drought conditions.
The historic drought in Marin County continues to affect a rare
species of elk. Last weekend, nearly a hundred people carried
water to replenish the drinking supply for tule elk at Point
Reyes National Seashore that are dying in the drought
conditions. Volunteers hiked six miles round trip on Saturday,
carrying gallon jugs of water to provide the animals at Tomales
Point with more to drink. The water drop was organized in part
by TreeSpirit Project, Save The Elk, and In Defense of Animals.
Like many farmers across California, Zack Andrade’s business is
being choked by an extraordinary two-year drought. Water cuts
could soon erase about a quarter of the irrigation he depends
on to grow leafy greens, carrots and beets on his family’s farm
in the rolling hills south of Silicon Valley, near Morgan
Hill. Andrade said the crisis has been made worse by
successive governors, including Gavin Newsom, who he says have
punted on damming rivers and building new reservoirs to help
California store more water during wet years.
One farmer has single handedly ramped up the pace of a program
trying to save native salmon in the San Joaquin River by
donating a key sliver of land to the federal government.
Connley Clayton donated about eight acres of his Madera County
riverfront land to the government’s San Joaquin River
Restoration Program. The land will provide crucial space for
the government to build a passage that fish can use to swim
around the Sack Dam, a significant impediment to salmon
returning upriver from the sea.
Sanctuary Forest recently broke ground on a restoration project
in McKee Creek between Whitethorn and Ettersburg junctions in
Southern Humboldt. The project aims to address historical
logging impacts and “recharge” groundwater storages to enhance
essential flows for threatened salmon species. Anna Rogers,
administrative director for Sanctuary Forest, said McKee Creek
was rated as a Priority 1 tributary for coho salmon recovery in
the Mattole Coho Recovery Strategy based on spawning and
rearing documented in the past decade.
In the midst of a climate crisis in California, another species
has been added to the endangered species list: the Sierra
Nevada red fox, a subspecies of red foxes found only in
California. With an estimated population of about 18 to 39,
California’s distinct red fox population is now in critical
danger of extinction, joining a list that includes the
California condor and salt-marsh harvest mouse.
Volunteers carried out an emergency water drop this weekend,
trying to help the rare tule elk that have been dying in
drought conditions on the Point Reyes National Seashore.
Saturday afternoon, nearly a hundred people carried water three
miles to a pond that is on the verge of drying up. The National
Park Service is embroiled in a lawsuit over the elk, one third
of the herd has died in the past year from lack of water or
sufficient foliage to eat.
Given the current drought, it’s no surprise that California’s
dams are struggling to provide cool water habitats to support
native freshwater ecosystems. But what if they were never able
to support them under any conditions? New research shows how
current stream management fails to provide the patterns of cool
water that California’s native ecosystems need. The challenges
stem from two issues: an oversimplification of stream
temperature targets and the assumption that dam regulation can
replicate desirable cold water patterns.
As Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge’s last remaining
wetland reduces to a mud puddle, California Waterfowl
Association’s efforts to secure a meager supply of water for
the refuge have cleared a regulatory hurdle. On Thursday, the
Oregon Water Resources Department accepted CWA’s application to
transfer several thousand acre-feet of water from a willing
Wood River Valley rancher to the refuge’s Unit 2.
It’s been a tough year for the Klamath River. The Klamath,
which flows through Oregon and Northern California and into the
Pacific Ocean, is suffering from drought and infrastructure
problems. That’s caused trouble, not just for the fish in the
river, but also for the tribes and farmers who rely on it for
day-to-day living. Drought conditions are so bad this year that
the U.S. Department of Agriculture allocated $15 million to
support farmers who don’t have enough water for their crops.
Klamath Basin tribes are also struggling to feed their people,
but so far they haven’t received such support.
Substantial work occurs in the Sacramento Valley every year on
projects to develop and enhance habitat for the region’s
terrestrial and aquatic species. In-stream salmon
recovery projects, Pacific Flyway habitat improvements,
floodplain reactivation and many other types of habitat
projects all require environmental permits to be
implemented. There is general recognition that the work
necessary to acquire these permits greatly increases the time
and cost to get the projects done.
Extreme heat waves have made this a devastating summer for the
endangered salmon species of the U.S. West Coast. In mid July,
California wildlife officials warned that almost all of the
young Chinook salmon in the Sacramento River would likely die
because of lower water levels and higher water temperatures.
… But, amidst all the catastrophic headlines was a cool
spring of good news. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) is finally acting to protect more than two dozen
endangered West Coast salmon and steelhead species from
pesticides.
As climate-driven drought and wildfires rage in California, the
Biden administration is struggling to navigate the hard
politics that come with deciding who gets access to the state’s
precious — and dwindling — water supplies. … Now the Biden
administration is delaying action on the fundamental question
at the heart of California’s long-running water wars: How much
water should be reserved for species protections, at the
expense of the state’s powerful agricultural industry?
The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest estuary on the
West Coast, is a vital hub in California’s complex water
delivery system as well as a rich farming region, an important
wetlands area – and often, a source of conflict. Join us for an
engaging online journey on Sept. 9 to go deep
into the Delta and its 720,000-acre network of islands and
canals that supports the state’s two large water systems -
the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley
Project.
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s recall election in
mid-September, should he lose, will very likely terminate the
floundering politician’s career. A late-term gubernatorial
replacement would also mean a potentially major shift in
California environmental policies. … Budget spending
… could be directed away from hundreds of conservation
projects that are tentatively scheduled to begin, and directors
of wildlife, water, and resource agencies who were appointed by
Newsom would almost certainly be replaced.
Recently, the Interagency Ecological Program (IEP) — an
interagency consortium charged “to provide and integrate
relevant and timely ecological information for management of
the Bay-Delta” — released a report presenting data and studies
regarding a major conservation action for delta smelt, referred
to as the Fall X2 Action. The Fall X2 Action purports to
benefit the delta smelt during the autumn by increasing outflow
through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta during that period in
years where there is above normal precipitation in the
preceding winter and spring.
California’s ecosystems play an essential role in protecting
the state’s water supply, minimizing unwanted flooding, and
sequestering carbon—among many other benefits. But the
unintended consequences of more than a century of water and
land development—compounded by the impacts of a changing
climate—are pushing many of these ecosystems to the breaking
point.
When Bolinas farmer Peter Martinelli decided to help coho
salmon by boosting summer water levels in Pine Gulch Creek,
which runs through his land, he had no idea that the project
would take two decades to complete. Now he’s happy he saw it
through. Coho are endangered in most of their California range,
and droughts like the one we’re experiencing now are among the
biggest threats to these coastal salmon.
Water cuts aimed at farmers amid the West’s megadrought have
set the stage for bitter legal and political fights over one of
the most overlooked water uses—the right of water to remain in
streams to sustain fish and endangered species, lawyers say.
The drought is poised to call that right into question, pitting
drinking water providers and food growers against
conservationists who want to keep streams wet so that fish can
survive. … The Interior Department’s Bureau of
Reclamation this week announced a first-ever water
shortage in the Colorado River Basin …
Due to drought and poor water conditions at Lake Sonoma,
thousands of juvenile coho salmon have been relocated from the
Warm Springs Fish Hatchery in Geyserville. The fish were
trucked to a conservation facility at a high school in Petaluma
where they will be reared until conditions improve. Beginning
in late spring, rising water temperatures at Warm Springs
Hatchery increased the risk of heat stress and pathogen
outbreaks. Scientists developed the relocation plan as a
precaution to keep the hatchery coho safe.
Using the state of California as a case study, this article
shows that the California Water Board is empowered and
well-positioned to implement freshwater ecosystem-based
management in California. By demonstrating that existing state
and federal laws allow and even support ecosystem-based
management, this article lays out a new state-level legal
framework for better management of freshwater ecosystems. This
approach, which does not require controversial changes to state
and federal law, offers a reasonable and realistic way to
improve the state of freshwater ecosystems.
Another dry year is the last thing the suckers need. Two
species of the bottom-feeding sucker fish that inhabit the
Upper Klamath Lake and nearby rivers are struggling to survive
after a century of water management in the Klamath Basin has
all but drained the wetlands ecosystem where these fish once
thrived. … Now, the suckers are on the brink of
extinction. During the past century, wetlands surrounding
Upper Klamath Lake were converted to farmland, while waters
from the basin were allocated to irrigators.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Fisheries announced a Voluntary Drought Initiative recently
designed to protect populations of salmon, steelhead, and
sturgeon from the effects of the current unprecedented drought.
The initiative provides a framework for water users to enter
into individual agreements with the two agencies to maintain
enough water for fish spawning and survival, and implement
other collaborative actions like fish rescue, relocation,
monitoring, and habitat restoration.
It was just before sunrise in July when the botanists Naomi
Fraga and Maria Jesus threw on backpacks and crunched their way
across a brittle alkaline flat in the hottest corner of the
Mojave Desert. Their mission: to rescue a tiny plant teetering
on the brink of extinction. … Today, the species [Nitrophila
mohavensis] has dwindled to fewer than 150,000, and most of the
plants that still sprout from this salt-white playa have
stopped producing viable seeds — stressed victims of decreasing
rainfall, rising temperatures and the loss of groundwater due
to pumping.
Relief may be soon be arriving to salmon imperiled by
exceptionally low flows in the Scott and Shasta rivers this
summer. The California State Water Resources Control Board
adopted regulations Tuesday to limit irrigation diversions and
groundwater pumping in both watersheds, which produce a
significant proportion of the Klamath Basin’s salmon
populations.
California’s ecosystems form the bedrock of the state’s
wellbeing and prosperity. Yet many of these ecosystems—which
are vitally important to the state’s water supply, agriculture,
wildlife, and economy—are in dire health. Climate change and
accelerating biodiversity loss threaten to further disrupt
these natural systems and the benefits they provide. While the
state urgently needs to speed the pace of ecosystem
restoration, such projects often find themselves mired in
regulations that were originally intended to prevent
environmental destruction.
Only one water storage project remains a possibility in
California seven years after voters approved a bond to build
more dams. Sites Reservoir is the last proposed project
standing. State Senator Jim Nielsen of Red Bluff has spent
years fighting to build Sites Reservoir in Northern California.
It’s a $5-billiion project creating 1-point-8 million acres
feet of water storage.
Green algae blobs choke handmade gill nets that should be
filled with salmon. The Klamath River is warming, heated by
drought and dams, and that allows the algae to thrive, making
it harder and harder to catch fish. Some days, Yurok tribal
members capture nothing but green goop. … Warming conditions
have also encouraged the spread of Ceratonova shasta, which
infected 97% of juvenile salmon in the Klamath last spring,
killing 70%.
California’s ecosystems underpin the state’s economy: They
nurture and protect the state’s water supply, shorelines,
agriculture, fisheries and wildlife. But many of these
ecosystems are in dire health, and climate change is now
accelerating the loss of biodiversity already underway.
Ecosystem degradation is having ripple effects across the
state. Severe problems with water supply dwindling populations
of native wildlife, and the critical need to better manage and
store carbon require urgent and large-scale action. -Written by Letitia Grenier, program director at the
San Francisco Estuary Institute, and Jeffrey Mount, senior
fellow at the PPIC’s Water Policy Center.
The Owens pupfish, a small blue fish native to the springs in
the California desert, was spared from extinction on an August
afternoon in 1969 by Phil Pister and his two buckets. That
day Mr. Pister, a state wildlife biologist, had heard that a
marsh called Fish Slough, one of the few natural oases in the
arid Owens Valley, was on the verge of drying up. The marsh, he
knew, held the world’s last population of Owens pupfish. So he
grabbed the buckets, jumped in his pickup truck and sped
through ranch land toward water.
California’s salmon are suffering massive
die-offs this summer because of the excessive,
reservoir-draining water deliveries authorized by these
biological opinions. And Secretary Haaland has now had 90 days
times two for her review. It is time for her to act. Join us
in telling the Secretary that she must no longer
delay reversing the damage done by these Trump biological
opinions by reinitiating consultation now and putting strong
protections in place while new permits are being drafted.
Amid extreme drought, Gov. Gavin Newsom is asking for statewide
conservation of 15%, farmers are facing cutbacks in water
deliveries, and a mass die-off of salmon is expected. Drought
affects us all, so our response must improve the natural
systems that make our water, air and food — our existence —
possible. The State Water Resources Control Board has taken the
rare drastic step of adopting emergency regulations to curtail
diversions of water rights holders when water is not
available. -Written by Sandi Matsumoto, director of The
Nature Conservancy’s California Water Program, and Julie
Zimmerman, the lead freshwater scientist at The Nature
Conservancy in California.
Join us for a Sept. 9 virtual journey into
California’s most critical and controversial water
region in the state, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, and
learn how the drought is impacting water quality and supply.
The Delta, a 720,000-acre network of islands and canals,
supports the state’s two large water systems – the State Water
Project and the federal Central Valley Project – and, together
with the San Francisco Bay, forms an important ecological
resource.
A proposed management plan for Point Reyes National Seashore,
drafted during Donald Trump’s tenure as president, is
environmentally irresponsible, violates the public trust and
should be rejected by President Joe Biden’s Interior
Department. California tule elk once numbered 500,000 before
being nearly extirpated by hunting, their habitat destroyed for
cattle ranching. Restoring these iconic animals at Point Reyes,
the only National Park where they are found, is a significant
achievement we should celebrate. -Written by Todd Steiner, wildlife ecologist and
executive director of Turtle Island Restoration Network.
Both Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir might have applauded a
bold proposal currently being fought over in California: Shift
control of the 1.3-million-acre Sierra National Forest to the
National Park Service, which would manage it as a national
monument benefiting species, helping combat climate change, and
inching the Biden administration’s “30 by 30 initiative” a bit
closer to fruition. … It’s a stunning
landscape that rises to nearly 14,000 feet atop Mount
Humphreys. Deep canyons cut through the High
Sierra here and drain the boulder-strewn Kings, San
Joaquin, and Merced rivers.
6-PPD is a chemical widely used to protect car tires from
ozone. However, when rainwater washes it into freshwater, 6PPD
degrades into 6-PPD quinone, a contaminant that a recent study
has linked to the mass deaths of Coho salmon in the Pacific
Northwest of the US. Researchers from Northeastern University
and the University of Washington found that even small doses of
6PPDq were lethal for the salmon. … According to the
California Water Board, Coho populations today are
probably less than 6% of what they were in the 1940s, and there
has been ‘at least’ a 70% decline since the 1960s.
California has big environmental problems to address — extreme
drought, wildfires, species extinction — but the fate of a few
herds of tule elk also invokes raw emotions more than four
decades after they were reintroduced to Point Reyes National
Seashore, about 100 miles from Sacramento. Now, climate change
and extreme drought have added urgency to the dispute between
environmentalists, the National Park Service, ranchers and
indigenous tribal interests in this stunning part of the
Northern California coast.
When Bureau of Reclamation water managers decided not to
perform a surface flush of the Klamath River this year, they
knew there might be an explosion of a parasite that could all
but wipe out salmon populations. That’s exactly what
happened in northern California, where the Yurok Tribe depends
on fishing for income and food. Salmon are also an important
part of their culture. On the first Friday in
June … Barry McCovey, director of the Yurok Tribe’s
fisheries department, and his colleagues, fished 361 dead
juvenile Chinook salmon out of a monitoring trap on the Klamath
River.
They are land rich and resource poor. Most have hundreds of
acres of fertile soil, some thousands, but little money in the
bank and – most importantly – no water. Now the young farmers
of the Klamath Basin, an agricultural community on the border
of Oregon and California, fear they might be the last
generation of their kind. … The area has struggled with
water scarcity for years – but this year has been unlike any
other. Amid a historic drought, in May the federal government
cut off all irrigation to farmers for the first time in more
than a century…
A federal judge has denied a request by environmental groups to
require the Biden administration to immediately provide food
and water for the largest herd of tule elk in the Point Reyes
National Seashore. The groups, represented by Harvard Law
School’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic, allege the National Park
Service failed to provide adequate resources at the Tomales
Point Tule Elk Preserve, which lost 152 elk between the winters
of 2019-2020 and 2020-21. The herd is now below 300 animals.
A deeply troubled group of high-ranking state officials, tribal
leaders, environmentalists and fishermen met July 27 to discuss
the triple whammy that is threatening some species of Pacific
salmon with extinction — a combination of record-breaking heat,
drought and disastrous federal water policies — particularly
those of the Trump administration, which drained mountain
reservoirs of cold water, sending it to the Central Valley.
Gualala Redwood Timber LLC can proceed with its logging project
in California, a federal court in the state ruled after
agreeing with the company that one plaintiff already challenged
the environmental impacts of the project in state courts.
Friends of Gualala River and the Center for Biological
Diversity argued the Dogwood Timber Harvesting Plan that
authorized logging in a private forest on the border of Sonoma
County threatened four protected species. The species include
the California red-legged frog, northern spotted owl, the
Northern California steelhead, and the California Central Coast
Coho salmon.
If you’ve gone north out of Klamath Falls on Highway 97 in the
last month, you might have seen the construction project on the
southeast side of Upper Klamath Lake. The Oregon Department of
Transportation is partnering with the Klamath tribes to restore
40 acres of former wetland into fresh habitat suitable for
native flora and fauna including C’waam and Kaptu, two species
of endangered suckerfish endemic to Klamath Lake. ODOT is
involved with the project as part of their wetland restoration
offset program.
Greater buffer zones around bodies of water and more consistent
enforcement of water protection regulations are needed to
reduce agriculture-based pollution in the Western U.S., a
recent review from Oregon State University found. Prior
research has shown that agricultural pollution, both from
croplands and rangelands, is the cause of 48% of water-quality
impairment in U.S. surface waters, which in turn disrupts
habitat for fish and insects and reduces biodiversity in
aquatic environments.
Environmentalists are pressing forward with a fight to
protect a small fish that inhabits desert
springs and streams in California’s Death Valley region. The
Center for Biological Diversity on Friday announced it
has filed a notice of intent to sue the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service to seek Endangered Species Act protection
for three populations of speckled dace, a minnow-like
species that evolved to live in dry areas. The fish is
threatened by excessive groundwater pumping for farms and
residential development and geothermal energy
development, they say.
We are excited to introduce Dr. Sarah Null —Associate Professor
of Watershed Sciences at Utah State University — as the latest
appointed Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) CalTrout
Ecosystem Fellow! We recently got to know Sarah through an
interview. Check out her answers in our latest post. Thanks to
the donors that helped us launch this program: Gary Arabian,
the Morgan Family Foundation, Nick Graves, John Osterweis, and
the Rosenberg Ach Foundation.
“Bleak” and “grim” were words frequently used Tuesday morning
as part of a joint legislative hearing on the crisis in
California’s salmon fisheries amid the historic drought. How
bad it is during the current drought in the West, however, was
up for debate. “There is no way that this year isn’t going to
be worse than it was in 2014-15, when we saw 95% (of salmon)
dying off,” said North Coast state Sen. Mike McGuire, who was
the chair of the hearing.
One of the greatest lessons of the pandemic is that we can meet
the challenges of existential threats when we combine the
collective power of our creativity, innovation and industry. As
the climate crisis worsens, we need to address protecting and
preserving water with the same urgency that we put into
creating vaccines. We need to act like lives are hanging in the
balance—because they are. Water is already shaping our
politics, our economy and our national security too. - Written by José Andrés, a chef, activist and creator of
the documentary Undiscovered Haiti, and Caryl Stern, executive
director of the Walton Family Foundation
Facing another summer of catastrophic fish kills, California
lawmakers and fisheries managers on Tuesday blamed a Trump-era
water policy and climate change for the sizzling water
temperatures threatening to erase an entire run of Chinook
salmon. … Chinook salmon die-offs on the state’s rivers have
happened routinely over the last two decades. But a pending
disaster on the Sacramento and Klamath rivers has elected
officials, regulators, Native American tribes and fishermen
scrambling to save the keystone species from extinction.
Ben DuVal knelt in a barren field near the California-Oregon
state line and scooped up a handful of parched soil as dust
devils whirled around him and birds flitted between empty
irrigation pipes. DuVal’s family has farmed the land for three
generations, and this summer, for the first time ever, he and
hundreds of others who rely on irrigation from a depleted,
federally managed lake aren’t getting any water from it at all.
… [T]his summer there is simply not enough, and the
farmers, tribes and wildlife refuges that have long competed
for every drop now face a bleak and uncertain future together.
The news reports about the California salmon wipeout got a good
chunk of the story right: Record-breaking heat waves made
Northern California rivers too warm to sustain migrating
Chinook salmon, and virtually all of the salmon in the
Sacramento River this summer have died, or will die, before
reproducing. Any eggs that were successfully laid, or the fry
hatched from those eggs, are also likely doomed. So a
generation of the rare and endangered winter-run Chinook, and
the spring-run as well, are virtually gone.
It’s no secret that California’s ecosystems suffer during
droughts. In times of water scarcity, environmental uses are
often low priority, leading to fish die-offs and other negative
outcomes. For the next year, Professor Sarah Null of Utah State
University will be working with a diverse team of experts to
study how to better manage water stored for the environment, to
better protect vulnerable ecosystems during a time of
biodiversity loss and accelerating climate change. Null, an
expert in environmental water management and water systems
modeling, is a PPIC CalTrout Ecosystem Fellow.
American culture is reckoning with some of the negative impacts
of our history. … In the past few weeks alone, St. Paul,
Nashville, and St. Louis governments and activists are having
substantive policy discussions about making reparations –
including direct payouts of money – to African Americans, to
atone for the historic sin of slavery. Reparations
discussions also have included making necessary amends to
indigenous people. … The concept of “ecological
reparations” takes the conversation another step forward.
– Written by Gary Wockner, who lives in Colorado and
is active in river protection around the world.
The Delta smelt is either extinct in the wild or close to it
… This coming winter, the UC Davis Fish Conservation and
Culture Laboratory will have as many as 40,000 smelt ready for
release, when temperatures are low and the smelt are likely to
spawn naturally. Such releases will be ‘experimental’ so not
subject to the take provisions of the federal Endangered
Species Act. In this blog, I support the concept that success
of re-establishing smelt in the wild requires using multiple
approaches.
The Klamath water rights issue dates back decades and is as
complex and nuanced as it is lengthy but when boiled down it
seems to come back to one primal animal instinct that all
living beings share: to ensure the survival of our spawn. For
the Lost River and Shortnose Suckerfish in the Klamath basin,
that continuum was disturbed somewhere along the line. The
adult fish are healthy but aging while their spawn has been
failing to thrive. Pending on their survival are the identity,
traditions, culture, and livelihood of the Klamath tribes.
As the summer grinds on, farms, towns and a critical native
salmon restoration program that all rely on water from
Millerton Lake near Fresno continue to hope their water won’t
be needed to fulfill irrigation contracts further up the San
Joaquin Valley. But in this parched year, nothing is
certain. If water is required out of Millerton, which
happened in drought years 2014 and 2015, that could be
especially detrimental for the San Joaquin River Restoration
Program, which is already taking unprecedented steps to nurture
its endangered spring run Chinook salmon population.
This tour guided participants on a virtual journey deep into California’s most crucial water and ecological resource – the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The 720,000-acre network of islands and canals support the state’s two major water systems – the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project. The Delta and the connecting San Francisco Bay form the largest freshwater tidal estuary of its kind on the West coast.
It’s a strange place to find fish, deep in the high desert,
where drought-baked earth butts against scrubby mountains. But
water spews from the hot springs on Ron Barnes’ land near the
California-Oregon border, pure and perfect for rearing c’waam
and koptu, two kinds of endangered suckerfish sacred to Native
American tribes. Barnes, who holds an advanced degree in
aquaculture from UC Davis, has dug dozens of ponds on his
property and filled them with thousands of young suckerfish.
Environmentalists say the San Joaquin watershed needs more
water. So do state officials, who in 2018 ordered water users
to give a large share of water back to the San Joaquin and its
tributaries, notably the Tuolumne. But the fight to restore
this ailing ecosystem has turned political, and
environmentalists leading the effort are facing an unlikely foe
the water service provider for one of the most liberal cities
in the country.
California’s ongoing drought and predicted heatwave is causing
overly warm and low level waters and threatening to kill off
the entire populations of already endangered species like the
chinook salmon. Negotiations between the State Water Resources
Control Board and the federal Bureau of Reclamation approved a
plan for managing water levels. However, experts predict that
releasing water into the irrigation system this early will
disrupt salmon spawning season and could kill as many as 88% of
the salmon in the river.
The third and final Flood Walk, sponsored by Sustainable
Solano, took 12 participants on a journey through the
marshlands, by the docks and through some residential areas in
Suisun City. All are spots that could be affected by flooding.
… Sustainable Solano is a grassroots movement to unite people
in working toward a future that is ecologically regenerative,
and economically and socially supportive of local
communities.
Millions of waterfowl and other birds are going to have a tough
year due to the ongoing drought in the West. Not only is there
less water for ducks and geese, but the agriculture fields
these migrating birds depend on for food will be significantly
smaller, which means less waste grain. … That
potentially can negatively impact Pacific Flyway waterfowl
flights and hunting this year. Farmers report only 25
percent of the fields usually flooded in autumn will have
water. With reduced water, ducks and geese are impacted. They
concentrate more and diseases and bacteria can spread more
readily, including bird botulism.
Joey Gentry hesitates before she drives through the fields of
alfalfa and wheat that line the roads in the Klamath
Basin. ”It’s not safe for Natives to be out in farmland
during a drought year,” [Gentry said.] Like much of the
American West, this dry, hilly, high-elevation landscape
straddling the California-Oregon border is experiencing a
summer of extreme drought. But when the federal government
announced in May that, for the first time ever, it would cut
irrigation water to about 180,000 acres of agriculture in the
basin, tensions ignited between farmers and the Klamath tribes.
California officials are warning nearly all juvenile chinook
salmon in the Sacramento River could die due to abnormally hot
underwater conditions as heat waves continue to bake the West.
There could be a “near-complete loss” of the young endangered
species of salmon because temperatures above 100 degrees for
extended periods of time are overheating the river, making it
uninhabitable for the fish to grow beyond their egg stage, the
California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) confirmed to
CNN on Tuesday.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife, in conjunction
with their state and county partners, are preparing for the
2021 cannabis enforcement season. As authorized by Fish & Game
Code section 12029, CDFW, in coordination with the State Water
Resources Control Board, or SWRCB, and the state licensing
authority, established a watershed enforcement program to
address environmental violations associated with unlicensed
cannabis cultivation. The environmental impacts associated with
illegal cannabis cultivation can have a detrimental effect on
fish and wildlife and their habitats…
The California Endangered Species Act (CESA) is one of the most
impor- tant legal tools available to the Fish and Game
Commission and Department of Fish and Wildlife to protect the
State’s wildlife resources. … Listing decisions can be the
difference between persistence and extinction of a species.
They can also cause severe economic disruption and, for this
reason, should in our view be made with due deliberation and
based on the best available scientific information.
Yet despite its ecological richness, very little of the land on
either side of the [Eel River] has been protected, as 90
percent of this land remains in private hands, and very little
of it is currently accessible to the public. This could change
soon, however, if two ambitious initiatives to protect this
wild country bisected by the Eel and make it accessible to the
public come to fruition. And both those initiatives received a
boost from the new state budget just passed by the California
Legislature (and, as of this writing, still awaiting Governor
Newsom’s signature).
[A] long-stalled plan to save Sacramento winter-run chinook
salmon, a critically endangered species, proposes trucking them
twice in their lifetimes. Spawning adults would get a lift from
the too-hot Sacramento River over Shasta Dam and be driven up
Interstate 5 to a cold mountain habitat in the McCloud River.
Later, their offspring would catch a ride back to the
Sacramento and head to the ocean to start the cycle again.
In recent decades Americans’ attitudes about environmental
issues have become polarized along partisan lines. Yet, while
significant research demonstrates this broad trend, we know
less about the meso-level processes producing and sustaining
such divisions. Drawing on over 3,000 news articles, nearly
14,000 Tweets, and Google search data, Dr. Caleb Scoville, an
Assistant Professor of Sociology and a 2020-2021 Neubauer
Faculty Fellow at Tufts University, analyzed the public sphere
controversy surrounding the Delta smelt, an endangered species
of fish caught in the center of California water
politics.
The confluence of the tiny San Pedro River and the much larger
Gila was once one of the richest locales in one of the most
productive river ecosystems in the American Southwest, an
incomparable oasis of biodiversity. The rivers frequently
flooded their banks, a life-giving pulse … The
confluence now is a very different place, its richness long
diminished. A massive mountain of orange- and dun-colored
smelter tailings, left from the days of copper and lead
processing and riddled with arsenic, towers where the two
rivers meet. Water rarely flows there, with an occasional
summer downpour delivering an ephemeral trickle.
The drought is making the Sacramento River so hot that “nearly
all” of an endangered salmon species’ juveniles could be cooked
to death this fall, California officials warned this week. In a
brief update on the perilous state of the river issued this
week, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife made a
dire prediction about the endangered winter-run Chinook salmon
and its struggles against consistently hot weather in the
Sacramento Valley.
An environmental group dedicated to promoting healthy waterways
around California is taking Sonoma County to court over
permitting policies it says too liberally allow people to drill
groundwater wells, potentially endangering Russian River stream
flows. California Coastkeeper, an affiliate of the locally
based Russian Riverkeeper and a dozen or so other organizations
around the state, filed the first-of-its-kind lawsuit late last
month amid the intensifying drought and a surge in well
drilling around the region.
Today the Karuk Tribe filed a formal petition with the
California State Water Resources Control Board demanding that
it use its emergency powers to curtail water use in the Scott
River to prevent the extinction of the Southern Oregon-
Northern California Coho Salmon (Coho). … The Scott
River is home to most of the native Coho salmon left
in the Klamath Basin. Coho were added to the endangered species
list in 1997. While federal agencies have forced water users on
the federal Klamath Irrigation Project along the
California/Oregon border to allow downstream flows to protect
the fish, other water users’ impacts have been ignored.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday it plans to
propose reclassifying a rare Colorado River Basin fish called
the razorback sucker from endangered to threatened status after
a multiyear and multistate effort throughout the Southwestern
U.S. to replenish its populations. A proposed formal relisting,
to be published Wednesday in the Federal Register, would
classify the fish as no longer on the brink of extinction. But
it would require continued management of the razorback’s
survival in the Colorado River and several key tributaries. The
Fish and Wildlife Service first said it would recommend the
change in 2018.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to
downgrade a Colorado River fish, the razorback sucker, from
“endangered” to “threatened.” The razorback sucker was listed
as endangered in 1991 due to habitat loss and predation by
introduced exotic species. Wildlife officials say the
population has recovered to tens of thousands of fish in the
Green, San Juan, and Colorado rivers, meeting the criteria for
downlisting. However, the Fish and Wildlife Service
acknowledges many razorback suckers born in the wild do not
reach adulthood.
The San Francisco Estuary (estuary) is sometimes called the
most invaded estuary in the world, and for good reason. Through
many avenues, hundreds, if not thousands, of species have been
introduced to San Francisco Bay, the Delta, and their rivers.
Some introductions were byproducts of human activity and
include organisms that “hitchhiked” on the bottom of boats or
as stowaways in ballast water carried by international shipping
vessels. Others were deliberate and undertaken either legally
by the government or illicitly by individuals for biocontrol,
fisheries, or disposal of unwanted pets.
A threatened species of frog have been found to be
independently breeding at two sites severely burned by the 2018
Woolsey Fire, National Park Services biologists said Tuesday.
The California red-legged frog, which are listed as federally
threatened under the Endangered Species Act and are considered
a species of special concern by the state of California, have
not bred in the wild since the 1970s, according to National
Park Services. But a recent stream survey has uncovered egg
masses at two sites – one in Los Angeles County and another in
Ventura County.
Our leaders must take bold action to adapt to our new reality
and create a system that can support healthy rivers and
wildlife, communities with access to safe drinking water and a
thriving agricultural economy. Unfortunately, that’s not what
we’re seeing today. The state’s water regulators are draining
our reservoirs and depleting our rivers to deliver vast volumes
of water to a small number of powerful agricultural interests
during a historically dry year. Protecting fish and
wildlife and water quality for Sacramento-San Joaquin River
Delta communities does not mean eliminating agriculture in the
Central Valley. -Written by Rachel Zwillinger, water policy advisor
for Defenders of Wildlife in Sacramento.
In the drought-stricken Klamath Basin along the
California-Oregon border, water is precious. This year, Native
American tribes and farmers are competing for this shrinking
resource. It’s an indicator of future water wars in the West.
Jefferson Public Radio’s Erik Neumann explains.
At almost 30 miles long, Upper Klamath Lake is the home to
several types of fish that live only here. Two of them are
called C’waam and Koptu in the Klamath Tribes’ traditional
language or, in English, the Lost River and shortnose sucker.
They have a stubby face and wide lips, and can live to be
50-years-old. … In recent years, the juvenile fish have been
dying, causing the overall population to crash. Five years ago,
when Gonyaw started working for the tribes, there were about
20,000 shortnose suckers in the lake. Estimates today put them
at just 3,400. The Lost River sucker is disappearing at a
similar rate.
California is home to 131 kinds of native fishes that require
freshwater for some or all of their life-cycle. Most of these
fishes are found only in California and most (81%) are in
decline (Moyle et al. 2015, 2020). Thirty-two (24%) are already
listed as threatened or endangered by state and/or federal
governments. Declines are usually the result of fishes losing
the competition with humans for California’s water and habitat
(Leidy and Moyle 2021). This competition is heightened by the
ongoing severe drought.
The diversion of water from the San Francisco Bay Delta, for
example, is one of the forces famously driving the delta smelt
to extinction. Now, a new study published in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences this month shows another
counterintuitive way in which human water use in California is
putting its unique riverside woodlands at risk. By
diverting water in ways it would not otherwise flow, human
management is providing some stream-side, or riparian,
ecosystems with excess water that gives them a short-term
boost, but undermines their long-term sustainability.
We are excited to announce that a CalTrout project to Reconnect
Habitat is moving forward thanks to grant funding from the
California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW)
voter-approved Proposition 1 Watershed Restoration Grant. This
project is part of the South Coast Steelhead Coalition
portfolio to recover this endangered trout from the brink of
extinction.
An ongoing fish kill has been plaguing the Klamath River since
early May. The Klamath flows through Oregon and northern
California, and like many water sources in the West, has seen
water levels drop considerably due to extreme drought. A lower
river means a slower and warmer river, which is what some
parasites need to thrive. The parasite C.Shasta is expected to
kill off nearly all of this year’s juvenile Chinook salmon in
the Klamath.
The move to end mining in a Tri-Valley lake became official
this week. Alameda County planning commissioners on Monday
approved plans for restoring the Eliot Quarry, where more than
a century of rock mining in the unincorporated area between
Livermore and Pleasanton will eventually be turned into lakes
surrounded by open fields and recreation trails. … [T]he
project will include the planting of native trees and shrubs,
creating passages for fish, and reducing the amount of
groundwater lost to San Francisco Bay by deepening the lake so
it can hold more water.
A federal lawsuit filed Tuesday is alleging the Point Reyes
National Seashore was negligent in its wildlife management and
violated federal law after more than 150 tule elk died in a
park preserve last year. … Environmental groups and
activists allege the Tomales Point elk died because of a lack
of drinking water. Park staff said there were adequate water
sources within the enclosure when the population decline
occurred.
For decades, an agonizing war over [water] has divided
indigenous people and the descendants of settlers of [the
Klamath basin], which like much of the American West, is now
plagued by drought. Family farmers often describe the conflict
as one that pits them against federal bureaucrats who protect
the suckerfish, imperiled as the lake grows more inhospitable.
That portrayal, say members of the tribes, dismisses a tougher
truth … about race, equity and generational trauma to a
people whose history includes slaughter, forced removal of
children, federal termination of their tribal status and loss
of land …
In early April, just over 700 Owens pupfish were relocated by
the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) to River
Spring Lakes Ecological Reserve in Owens Valley. The move is
seen as a significant step forward for the rare North American
fish, once declared extinct in 1940, that has been considered
on “life-support” since it was re-discovered in
1964.
California is in a megadrought, with its key reservoirs falling
to their lowest points in history. Wildfire season is already
here, and officials are bracing for yet another catastrophic
year. Meanwhile, rural communities remain in desperate need of
viable, sustainable economic futures. One climate-smart
solution that addresses all these needs is watershed
restoration.
In April of 2017, PGE began moving forward with its plans to
relicense the Potter Valley Project (PVP)—with, as of yet, no
designs to remove any of the infrastructure—and in August of
2019, Congressman Jared Huffman created the PVP Ad Hoc
Committee, a Two Basin Solution for the Eel and Russian River
basins, whose more than 20 members were tasked with the
relicensing process of the PVP to improve fisheries and fish
migration, minimize adverse impacts to water supply
reliability, respect tribal rights and minimize and mitigate
adverse impacts to Lake County including Lake Pillsbury.
[T]he problem goes way beyond grazing. Dozens of tributaries
and hundreds of springs feed Upper Klamath Lake, supplying
plenty of good, clean water. A century of mismanagement has
caused erosion of high phosphorus soils that accumulate in the
bottom of Upper Klamath Lake. Now, annual algae blooms kill
entire generations of young endangered fish every year.
… All the problems in the Upper Klamath Lake flow
downstream, affecting endangered salmon in the Klamath River as
it runs to the Pacific Ocean. The Karuk, a Klamath River tribe,
are worried that this could be another year marked by a
historic fish kill.
A proposal to bring down four hydroelectric dams near the
California-Oregon border cleared a major regulatory hurdle
Thursday, setting the stage for the largest dam demolition
project in U.S. history to save imperiled migratory salmon.
A tiny fish native to Southern California streams will be
studied to determine if it qualifies for protection under the
federal Endangered Species Act, a conservation group said
Wednesday. The Center for Biological Diversity said the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it will begin a status
review of the Santa Ana speckled dace in response to
a petition filed by the group last year. The minnow
is found in the Santa Ana, San Jacinto, San Gabriel and Los
Angeles river systems.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) today
announced the selection of 28 projects to receive funding for
projects to restore and protect multi-benefit ecosystem
restoration and protection projects under its Proposition 1
grant programs. The awards, totaling $39 million, were made
under CDFW’s 2021 Proposition 1 Watershed Restoration Grant &
Delta Water Quality and Ecosystem Restoration Grant Program
Proposal Solicitation Notice.
Santa Cruz Water Department staff is completing its annual
spring fish survey, and with it comes some important
dispatches. Steelhead numbers are low with drought
conditions plaguing Santa Cruz for a second consecutive year.
But coho salmon, a species at-risk of extinction, were spotted
off Santa Cruz’s North Coast in the Laguna Creek estuary.
Documenting coho anywhere in Santa Cruz County is a relatively
rare event, explained Chris Berry, watershed compliance manager
with the city.
The seriousness of California’s drought is being driven home to
thousands of farmers in the Central Valley. State regulators
warned 6,600 farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
watershed on Tuesday that they’re about to lose the right to
pull water from the estuary’s rivers at some point this summer.
The watershed covers a major swath of the Central Valley.
The intensive engineering of the river exacted a huge toll on
its native ecosystems. No species suffered more than the
Chinook salmon, whose epic migration from the Pacific Ocean to
its spawning grounds in the High Sierra was cut short by
numerous choke points, not the least of which was Friant’s
impenetrable barrier of concrete. … Rife with
compromises, [a 1988] settlement mandated that a mere half of
the San Joaquin’s original flow be restored. The river’s many
dams would remain, but alternative passages would be built and
new spawning areas added in the lower river.
A study of woodland ecosystems that provide habitat for rare
and endangered species along streams and rivers throughout
California reveals that some of these ecologically important
areas are inadvertently benefitting from water that humans are
diverting for their own needs. Though it seems a short-term
boon to these ecosystems, the artificial supply creates an
unintended dependence on its bounty, threatens the long-term
survival of natural communities and spotlights the need for
changes in the way water is managed across the state.
The California water board has approved a plan for water
releases into the Sacramento River that could kill off an
entire run of endangered chinook salmon and put at risk another
population that is part of the commercial salmon fishery. …
Because the [Bureau of Reclamation’s] plan involves releasing
water to irrigation districts earlier in the season, the river
will be lower and warmer during salmon spawning season and
could result in killing as many as 88% of endangered winter-run
chinook eggs and young fish.
California never has enough water to meet all demands and even
when supplies are relatively robust there’s a triangular
competition over their allocation. Farmers, municipal users and
environmental advocates vie for shares of water that has been
captured by California’s extensive network of dams and
reservoirs. … When California experiences one of its
periodic droughts and reservoirs shrink from scant rain and
snowfall, its perpetual conflict becomes even sharper. -Written by Dan Walters, a CalMatters columnist
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland released a letter Friday to
the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee in support of Klamath
dam removal. … The four hydroelectric dams clogging the
Klamath River are slated to be removed in 2023 under an
agreement forged between the states of California and Oregon,
the dams’ owner PacifiCorp and the Karuk and Yurok tribes. And
Haaland’s letter comes as conditions in the Klamath River Basin
are the worst they’ve been in years due to drought conditions.
California’s drought highlights the importance of an
appointment sitting on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk – filling the
final seat on the State Water Resources Control
Board. This is a critical agency appointment at a
critical time. The drought highlights many inequities in
California water policy. Disadvantaged communities in Stockton
face the prospect of a drought summer plagued by harmful algae
blooms in Delta rivers. Those algae outbreaks, which can
harm children and kill pets, are caused by excessive nutrients
and inadequate freshwater flow. -Written by Belinda Faustina, a strategic advisor
with Los Angeles Waterkeeper, and Barbara
Barrigan-Parilla, the executive director of Restore the
Delta.
After years of drought, salmon in Northern California are
facing extinction. Conservation groups in the region have
drafted a water management plan that, if adopted, would send
less water to Central Valley farmers and keep more cold water
for fish. Last week, fishery advocates in Northern
California submitted their temperature management plan to the
State Water Resources Control Board. They want to change water
operations in the Shasta, Trinity, Sacramento and Lower Klamath
Rivers so the region’s salmon runs have enough cold water to
survive.
The Ventura County Public Works Agency commemorated the start
of the Santa Ana Boulevard Bridge replacement project with a
groundbreaking ceremony Monday afternoon. The ceremony took
place at 2 p.m. and was attended by the county supervisor, Matt
LaVere, as well as representatives from the California
Department of Fish and Wildlife and California State Coastal
Conservancy.
Among the nearly one hundred development projects pending on
the county of Napa Current Projects website comes a sleeper of
a project likely to go unnoticed by Napa city residents and
businesses who will be most negatively impacted. The remote
vineyard development project, proposed deep in the
headwaters above Lake Hennessey, seeks to clear 156.8 acres of
existing vegetation including oak woodlands, foothill pine
communities, and grasslands in order to construct a vineyard in
the Conn Creek/Lake Hennessey watershed. -Written by Kellie Anderson, resident of Angwin.
The Klamath Basin is suffering the worst drought in the state.
Competing need for the water by local tribes seeking to sustain
endangered fish populations, farmers and ranchers, and
commercial and tribal fisheries has been a persistent issue,
and has led to conflicts in the past. The Klamath Basin
Restoration Agreement, which took 10 years to plan, was a
turning point and a compromise for the parties needing access
to the water.
When the Palo Alto City Council publicly backed the Bay-Delta
Plan in 2018, it was swimming against the political tide. The
plan, formally known as the San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta Estuary plan, sets limits on how much water
agencies can siphon from the three tributaries of the San
Joaquin River. While it aims to protect salmon, steelhead and
other river species, it has also attracted intense opposition
and litigation from water districts that claim that the new
restrictions will undermine the reliability of their water
supply.
Tribes and environmental advocates fear flows along the Klamath
River could be reduced to a trickle if the State Water
Resources Control Board doesn’t take action on water use
upstream on the Scott and Shasta rivers. Andy Marx, board
president of Friends of the Shasta River, said the river
“virtually dried up” over Memorial Day weekend as a result of
excessive irrigation diversions.
A gene-editing tool that has led to new cancer therapies and a
rapid test for COVID-19 is now helping scientists find
endangered species of salmon in the San Francisco Bay. The
CRISPR-based Sherlock tool can identify four types of Chinook
salmon, including Sacramento winter-run and Central Valley
spring-run, which are both protected under the federal
Endangered Species Act.
The Biden administration is taking aim at Trump-era rollbacks
to endangered species protections, though environmental
advocates have raised concerns about how long their actions
could take. In a statement on Friday, federal agencies said
they would “initiate rulemaking in the coming months” to either
rescind or revise Trump-era rules that lessened protections for
these species, or reinstate pre-Trump language that provided
additional protections for endangered animals and plants.
Flows into the San Joaquin River under a program to bring back
native salmon will be stopped now through early September to
try and protect fish already upstream. The flow reduction being
instituted by the San Joaquin Restoration Program is in
reaction to rapidly dwindling runoff coming out of the Sierra
Nevada mountains this year.
Water Audit California is suing to make Napa County increase
oversight of groundwater pumping for vineyards, wineries, and
other uses, claiming that the pumping affects the Napa River.
The lawsuit said the county has a “public trust” duty to care
for the river. The idea is that too much groundwater pumping
from wells can keep groundwater from seeping into the river
during dry months, to the detriment of fish and other aquatic
life.
This May, while collecting live fish for their annual aquatic
pathogen assessment on the Klamath River in Northern
California, Yurok Tribe biologists made a shocking discovery:
over 70 percent of the young, ocean-bound Chinook salmon
captured in their traps were dead. Almost all of the fish
tested upstream were infected with Ceratonova shasta, a
parasite that relies on both fish and annelid worms as hosts.
Barry McCovey, senior fisheries biologist for the Yurok Tribe,
expects most of the infected fish to die.
Salmon and steelhead in Northern California have been in
trouble for more than 100 years, primarily because of habitat
damage and loss resulting from human activities. Climate change
has only worsened these habitat problems. For the last 50
years, communities have worked to restore this habitat in hopes
of reversing the fortunes of these fish. Scientists and local
restoration communities are seeking new ways to maximize the
benefits of habitat restoration so that rivers and streams can
support healthy fish populations again.
In response to record low precipitation in the Klamath Basin,
the Karuk Tribe has declared a state of emergency. This
emergency declaration acknowledges the reality that climate
change is upon us, and the dangers that it poses to rivers,
forests, wildlife and communities.
Migratory steelhead and Chinook salmon have access to six more
miles of historic spawning sites in a refurbished creek on
California’s Beale Air Force Base. All thanks to a unique
cooperative effort between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service (USFWS) and the Air Force Civil Engineer Center
(AFCEC).
Tensions have been building in Klamath Falls in recent weeks
over a drought that is devastating farmland, fish deemed sacred
to native tribes, and wildlife. The Klamath Basin, along the
Oregon-California border, has a complex history. Drought and
fights over water aren’t new. Here are five things to know
about the unfolding Klamath water crisis:
As the extreme drought causes various agencies to squabble over
dwindling water supplies, conservationists say the state is
still not doing enough to prevent an endangered run of salmon
from dying in the Sacramento River. At issue is how the federal
Bureau of Reclamation manages water flows from Shasta Lake into
the Sacramento River, which is both the spawning grounds for
chinook salmon and the main water source for Central Valley
farms. If the bureau releases too much water to irrigation
districts, the river level could drop low enough and warm
enough to kill off 50% of the eggs …
The brewing battle over the century-old Klamath Project is an
early window into the water shortfalls that are likely to
spread across the West as a widespread drought, associated with
a warming climate, parches watersheds throughout the
region. In Nevada, water levels have dropped so
drastically in Lake Mead that officials are preparing for a
serious shortage that could prompt major reductions in Colorado
River water deliveries next year. In California, Gov. Gavin
Newsom has placed 41 counties under a state of emergency.
In August of 2018, Congressman Jared Huffman created the Potter
Valley Project (PVP) Ad Hoc Committee for the Two-Basin
Solution for the Eel and Russian River basins with parties
working toward the relicensing process of the PVP that reflects
the following primary goals and principles: improve fish
passage and habitat on the Eel River sufficient to support
recovery of naturally reproducing, self-sustaining and
harvestable native anadromous fish populations including
migratory access upstream and downstream at current project dam
locations…
Assembly Joint Resolution 4 passed both houses of the Nevada
Legislature. The resolution now urges Congress and the
President to protect certain land containing swamp cedar trees
in Spring Valley, Nevada by designating the site a national
monument or expanding the Great Basin National Park to include
the area.
The appeal filed by Gordon Bennett of a proposed well outside
of Point Reyes Station was rejected on Monday by planning
commissioners, who said they did not have the expertise to
evaluate it. Mr. Bennett says he will now appeal the
project to the Board of Supervisors, and will keep appealing
until someone addresses his concerns about maintaining a
minimum flow for endangered coho salmon in Lagunitas
Creek.
Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,
NOAA funded 125 habitat restoration projects in coastal areas
throughout the country. Now, more than a decade later, we’re
taking a look back at some of the projects we funded. We’ll
explore the benefits this restoration work continues to bring
to communities and ecosystems across the country. … NOAA
partnered with the Yurok Tribe to restore habitat for
salmon and steelhead in Terwer Creek and McGarvey Creek,
tributaries to the Lower Klamath River.
The delta smelt could be declared endangered if Chris Mathys, a
Republican primary challenger to David Valadao, gets his way.
“Federal and state mandated rules related to the delta smelt in
California are severely restricting the releases of surface
water relied upon by California’s farmers and ranchers.
Agriculture products are vital to California’s economy and
farmers depend on an adequate water supply to grow nuts, fruits
and vegetables that provide food for Americans and the rest of
the world,” Mathys wrote in a statement.
California is dry. Bay Area counties have declared drought
emergencies and imposed restrictions. State and federal
officials are trucking baby salmon to the ocean. But San
Franciscans are still using their primary water source, the
Tuolumne River, which feeds the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in
Yosemite National Park. Last week, City Attorney Dennis Herrera
— who Mayor London Breed recently tapped to head San
Francisco’s water agency — filed a lawsuit challenging the
state’s efforts to protect salmon and the overall health of the
river. -Written by Robyn Purchia, an environmental
attorney, environmental blogger and environmental
activist.
The Marin County Planning Commission voted on Monday to reject
an environmental group’s petition to block a West Marin water
supply project over potential impacts to Lagunitas Creek flows
and endangered wildlife. The decision allows the North Marin
Water District to build a new well that it says is necessary to
ensure its West Marin customers have adequate water supply in
the face of the worsening saltwater contamination at some of
its existing wells.
Late Friday the State Water Resources Control Board appeared to
tentatively approve a temperature management plan for Shasta
Dam that sacrifices salmon and fishing jobs for agribusiness
profits this year, violates water quality standards, and leaves
California woefully unprepared if next year is also dry.
Specifically, the State Water Board indicated that they would
approve a temperature management plan if it achieves 1.25
million acre feet of water in Shasta at the end of September.
As the State Water Board knows, allowing storage to drop
that low is estimated to kill more than 50% of the endangered
winter run Chinook salmon and … the vast majority of the
fall run Chinook …
The water crisis along the California-Oregon border went from
dire to catastrophic this week as federal regulators shut off
irrigation water to farmers from a critical reservoir and said
they would not send extra water to dying salmon downstream or
to a half-dozen wildlife refuges that harbor millions of
migrating birds each year. In what is shaping up to be the
worst water crisis in generations, the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation said it will not release water this season into the
main canal that feeds the bulk of the massive Klamath
Reclamation Project, marking a first for the 114-year-old
irrigation system.
Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,
NOAA funded 125 habitat restoration projects in coastal areas
throughout the country. … Through the Recovery Act, NOAA
partnered with the [California Conservation Corps] to support
more than 30 coastal habitat restoration projects. These
projects benefitted threatened and endangered salmon and
steelhead throughout coastal California. More than 200 corps
members worked to open waterways to fish migration, stabilize
stream banks, conduct project monitoring, and more.
California’s Governor Newsom recently declared a drought
emergency throughout much of California and announced over $5
billion in new water program investments. These twin
emergency and funding announcements are a classic “bad-news
creates good news story” (and potentially vice versa) for
California’s water problems. They are opportunities for
innovation and making long-term improvements for California’s
water problems. They also can reward and entrench less
effective programs and approaches.
At its May 20, 2021 quarterly meeting, the Wildlife
Conservation Board (WCB) approved approximately $23.5 million
in grants to help restore and protect fish and wildlife habitat
throughout California. Some of the 35 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.
As Elizabeth “Izzy” Martin retires after 19 years as CEO of The
Sierra Fund, the foothills celebrate the legacy and lament the
loss of one of their greatest advocates. The fund is a
nonprofit dedicated to restoring the ecosystem and building
community resiliency in the Sierra Nevada. In a year marred for
many by financial strain, the nonprofit is in a strong and
stable position to transition to new leadership, Martin
explained, which is part of the reason she’s leaving. Martin
said her career and mission have evolved with society’s
understanding and appreciation for environmental issues since
she began her vocation as an advocate on the very first Earth
Day celebration in the San Francisco Bay area in 1970.
On May 18, 2021, deputies with the Humboldt County Sheriff’s
Office Marijuana Enforcement Team (MET) served one search
warrant to investigate illegal cannabis cultivation in the
Blake Mountain area of Eastern Humboldt County. The California
Department of Fish and Wildlife, Humboldt County Department of
Health and Human Services Environmental Health – HazMat Unit,
Humboldt County Code Enforcement and the California State Water
Resources Control Board assisted in the service of the warrant.
As more of California sinks into extreme drought, Gov. Gavin
Newsom has asked the Legislature to appropriate billions of
dollars to address critical water needs. In the “May revise”—an
update to the budget proposal he initially submitted to the
Legislature in January—Newsom proposes to spend nearly $3.5
billion on water supply and resilience projects, with total
investment reaching $5.1 billion over multiple years.
With the driest year in memory, the water resources managers
and landowners in the Sacramento Valley are working hard to
serve multiple benefits throughout the region with limited
water supplies. This has required all hands-on deck and
creative management within the region as all surface water
supplies have been significantly reduced, with hundreds of
thousands of farmland acres idled throughout the region, urban
suppliers working with their citizens to implement various
conservation measures to reduce water use and there will
undoubtedly be challenges for domestic groundwater wells.
Facing extended drought, diminishing snowpack, and depleted
aquifers, California water managers face a harsh reality: our
20th century water systems – essentially linear designs in
which fresh water is extracted, centrally treated, distributed
to users, returned as wastewater, and finally treated and
discarded – are breaking down. Although this approach has
served us well for decades, we can no longer sustain ourselves
with a paradigm that uses water once and throws it away. -Written by Peter Fiske, a scientist at
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and executive director of
the Department of Energy’s National Alliance for Water
Innovation.
Last week, the Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA)
held their spring conference virtually. Keynote speakers
included Wade Crowfoot, Secretary of Natural Resources, and
Karla Nemeth, Director of the Department of Water
Resources. In his speech, [Crowfoot] discussed the Newsom
Administration’s priorities, calling this the ‘decade of
resilience’, and giving three principles for going
forward. He also discussed the Voluntary
Agreements. Director Karla Nemeth gave the Thursday
morning keynote speech, touching on the Department’s response
to drought, SGMA implementation, the Delta Conveyance Project,
and the water use efficiency regulations.
The Shasta-Klamath Region organizes work around protecting
California source water and volcanic aquifers, working with
family farms to improve water management, and protecting legacy
fly-fishing waters like the McCloud River, Hat Creek, and Fall
River. In 2021, we are heavily invested in conservation
projects in the Shasta and Scott watersheds. These key Klamath
tributaries will be critical for recovering salmon populations
in the Mid-Klamath Basin after dam removal.
What was already forecasted to be a historically bleak water
year in the Klamath Project has quickly become a living
nightmare for farms and ranches fighting for survival in the
drought-stricken basin. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation shut
down the Project’s A Canal for the entire irrigation season May
12 in response to worsening conditions — allotting zero surface
water from Upper Klamath Lake for thirsty crops and livestock.
It is the first time in more than a century the A Canal will
deliver no water. Meanwhile, irrigators are left to wonder how
they will pay the bills as fields turn to dust.
The seven members of the Delta Stewardship Council were seated
in 2010. The Council appointed ten prominent scientists to the
Delta ISB. Over the next decade, the Delta ISB produced over 30
scientific reviews, averaging over 3,000 hours of work per
year. But in 2020, the work of the Delta ISB stalled. The Delta
Stewardship Council reduced funding for the Delta ISB by over
90%.
Delta smelt have nearly ceased to appear in “pelagic” fish
surveys carried out in their narrow geographic range in the
upper San Francisco Estuary. As trawl-generated index values
for delta smelt have declined over the past quarter century –
understand there is no reliable estimate of the size of the
delta smelt population — the chorus of voices advocating for
captive rearing and releases of the species has grown
louder.
A group of protesters gathered at Sugarman’s Corner in downtown
Klamath Falls on Saturday, preparing to welcome a 25-car
caravan of mostly Klamath Tribal members calling for solutions
to the Klamath Basin’s water crisis. A man walked by the
demonstrators, eyeing their signs with statements like “Peace
and Healing in the Klamath Basin,” “Water Justice is Social
Justice” and “Undam the Klamath.”
California — already in the clutches of another drought
emergency — is looking over its shoulder at what happened
last time, anticipating the worst and evaluating the strategies
that worked and those that failed. So is California in a
better position to weather this drought? Some things are
worse, some better: Groundwater is still being pumped with no
statewide limits, siphoning up drinking water that rural
communities rely on. In northern counties, residents are
reliving the last disaster as water restrictions kick in again,
but in the south, enough water is stored to avoid them for now.
… The upshot is California isn’t ready — again.
As California descends deeper into drought, state regulators
are planning to do something they’ve done few times in modern
history: order thousands of people, farms, and even cities and
towns that hold historic water rights to stop drawing water
from the rivers, lakes and ponds they rely on. The move is
intended to make sure the dwindling flows in California’s
waterways are reserved for those with the most senior water
rights, as well as for fish and other wildlife. Many of those
with lesser rights would have to turn to storage, groundwater
or another source, if they have it.
The city of San Francisco is reviving a long-simmering feud
with the state over water, filing a lawsuit Friday that charges
state regulators with trying to take away the city’s coveted
Sierra Nevada water supplies. The suit claims the state water
board is demanding the city forfeit too much water from the
Tuolumne River as part of a licensing deal for two dams in the
faraway basin. State regulators have said the water is needed
to maintain proper river flows and support struggling salmon,
but city officials contend the demands would leave Bay Area
residents and businesses vulnerable to water shortages.
The water crisis along the California-Oregon border went from
dire to catastrophic as federal regulators shut off irrigation
water to farmers from a critical reservoir and said they would
not send extra water to dying salmon downstream or to a
half-dozen wildlife refuges that harbor millions of migrating
birds each year. In what is shaping up to be the worst water
crisis in generations, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said it
will not release water this season into the main canal that
feeds the bulk of the massive Klamath Reclamation Project,
marking a first for the 114-year-old irrigation system.
The Colorado River is flowing again in its delta. This is a big
deal for a river that has not flowed through its delta in most
years since the 1960s, resulting in an ecosystem that is
severely desiccated and devastated. Thanks to commitments from
the United States and Mexico in the Colorado River binational
agreement—Minute 323 – 35,000 acre-feet of water (11.4
billion gallons) dedicated to create environmental benefits
will be delivered to the river from May 1 to October 11. The
expectation is that this will create and support habitat for
birds like the Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Yuma Ridgway’s Rail, and
Vermilion Flycatcher, and give life to the many plants and
animals in this ribbon oasis of green in the midst of the
Sonoran Desert.
Rural, low-income Latino communities across California were
hardest hit by the last drought and could see drinking water
shortages again this year as extreme drought spreads across the
state, according to a report released Thursday by non-partisan
advisors to California’s lawmakers. The report from the
Legislative Analyst’s Office warns state officials to prepare
by ramping up monitoring of wells in vulnerable communities and
lining up emergency drinking water supplies to send
there.
Climate change is exacerbating problems like habitat loss and
temperatures swings that have already pushed many animal
species to the brink. But can scientists predict which animals
will be able to adapt and survive? Using genome sequencing,
researchers from McGill University show that some fish, like
the threespine stickleback, can adapt very rapidly to extreme
seasonal changes. … Stickleback found in different
estuaries along coastal California provide a rare opportunity
to study natural selection in real-time.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced Wednesday that
more than 1,000 farmers in the Klamath Basin will not receive
any reserved water from Upper Klamath Lake — a devastating
prospect for farmers who have already planted fields, hired
crews and made plans for the growing season ahead. … Farmers
in Klamath, Siskiyou and Modoc counties were already reeling
over the prospect of receiving less than 10% of their
allotment, or a total of 33,000 acre-feet of water. The
latest announcement feels “like a punch to the gut,” farmers
said …
During a typical spring, the silver young salmon swimming in
long tanks at the Nimbus Fish Hatchery east of Sacramento would
be released into the American River and then make their way out
to the Pacific Ocean to grow to adulthood. But with extreme
drought now gripping California and much of West Coast, the
rivers are too warm for the salmon to survive. This week, the
3.5-inch (90-mm) smolt, as the young fish are known, embarked
on a much different journey when they were loaded on to trucks
and driven to the San Francisco Bay for release into cooler
waters.
May is American Wetlands Month and this year also marks the
50th anniversary of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of
International Importance. This intergovernmental treaty is
focused on the conservation and wise use of important wetlands
and their resources. … Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine
Research Reserve … provides habitat for a diversity
of wildlife species, including more than 100 species of fish,
500 species of invertebrates, and the region’s iconic southern
sea otters. … Tomales Bay is a marine-coastal
wetland consisting of estuaries, eelgrass beds, sand dune
systems, and tidal marshes.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) recently announced
its finding that three salamander species do not warrant
listing as endangered or threatened species under the
Endangered Species Act (ESA). The Service’s announcement
follows a court-approved settlement agreement in which the
Service agreed to make a 12-month finding for the Shasta
salamander (Hydromantes shastae), Samwel salamander (H.
samweli), and Wintu salamander (H. wintu). The finding comes
despite concerns from some environmental groups that a proposed
project to raise the height of the Shasta Dam and enlarge the
reservoir would impact the three species due to inundation and
loss of habitat.
An entire run of endangered winter-run chinook salmon, as well
as the fall-run salmon that make up the core of the California
fishery, are in danger of being wiped out this year if the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation keeps diverting water to farmers at its
current rate. With state water resources constrained by the
extreme drought, that’s the alarm that environmental, fishing
and tribal groups are sounding after reports show the
Sacramento River will reach dangerous temperatures during
spawning season, based on federal scientific scenarios that
analyze the bureau’s planned water releases.
Don’t be fooled. Governor Gavin Newsom’s decision Monday to
declare drought in most of California, including here, is no
reason for most farmers in Stanislaus County to break out the
party hats. They know full well that words on a declaration
will not generate an extra drop of water for their orchards and
row crops. They also know that a drought declaration could take
some power over the water we do have from our locally elected
irrigation leaders — who represent institutions guiding us
through periodic droughts for more than 100 years — and hand it
to nonelected Sacramento bureaucrats.
Spring is generally a time of renewal for the watersheds of the
western United States. Warmed by the lengthening days, the
region’s towering mountain ranges shed their mantle of snow,
releasing freshets of water into welcoming streams and
reservoirs. This year, though, the cycle is in disarray.
Outside of the Olympic and Cascade ranges of Washington state,
winter snows were subpar. The spring melt has been a dud. From
the Klamath to the Colorado and Rio Grande, watersheds are
under stress once again, and water managers face difficult
tradeoffs between farms, fisheries, and at-home uses.
Today, the Bureau of Reclamation announced a plan to increase
flow releases from New Melones Reservoir to assist with meeting
Delta salinity and outflow requirements. Additional flow
releases will begin on the
lower Stanislaus River
on May 10 and will reach a total
flow of 1,000 cubic feet per second and again
on May 11 to reach 1,500 cfs. This
increased flow of 1,500 cfs will likely
occur for an extended duration. During the increased
releases, water levels will be higher and currents
faster. Visitors should use caution when near or
on the Stanislaus River during these increased
flows.
On Friday, a coalition of conservation groups, fishing
organizations, stakeholders in the Delta, and the Winnemem
Wintu Tribe sent this letter to the Biden Administration,
urging the Administration not to endorse the so-called
“Voluntary Agreements” for the Bay-Delta watershed.
Unfortunately, the State of California continues to negotiate
backroom deals with the biggest water users in the State that
fail to protect and restore water quality in the
Bay-Delta, threatening thousands of fishing jobs, farms and
communities in the Delta, and the health of this watershed and
its native fish and wildlife.
As California enters what could be a record-breaking drought, a
just-completed nine-year floodplain restoration project at the
confluence of the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers offers an
ambitious attempt at one mitigation solution. At a 1,600-acre
former dairy ranch called Dos Rios, the conservation
organization River Partners removed berms that farmers had
originally constructed to protect their alfalfa and wheat crops
from the river. It turned fields into seasonal pools where
endangered baby salmon and migratory birds can rest, and water
can trickle down to refill aquifers.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said Thursday that her
department is pushing forward with its efforts to conserve 30
percent of U.S. land and waters by 2030, even as the
administration’s own findings highlight the need to define what
it means for an area to be considered conserved. Haaland cited
a recent move by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to expand
hunting and fishing opportunities and previewed an upcoming
announcement of $150 million for a program that builds parks in
underserved communities.
The North Marin Water District failed to adequately study
whether there will be enough water for endangered fish in
Lagunitas Creek if it builds a new well in West Marin, an
environmental group alleges. The well is intended to address
worsening saltwater contamination in the water supply. Save Our
Seashore, a nonprofit in Inverness, filed an appeal against the
project with the Marin County Planning Commission. … The
commission is expected to hold a hearing on the issue on May
24.
A U.S. District Court judge has ordered McKinleyville-based
construction firm Kernen Construction Co. to pay over
$2,087,750 in civil penalties after it was found to have
violated the Clean Water Act by discharging contaminated storm
water into a nearby tributary creek of the Mad River. The order
was issued by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on May 2 after the
company was found to have discharged storm water without
engaging in pollution control measures mandated by the
CWA.
At a rare joint meeting between all three of their leadership
boards, Klamath, Siskiyou and Modoc Counties discussed ways to
support agricultural communities during the Klamath Basin’s
historic drought this year. Farmers and ranchers in the Klamath
Project will receive 33,000 acre-feet of water, less than 10%
of their normal allocation, more than a month later than
normal. Irrigators on tributaries to the Lower Klamath River,
like the Scott River, are also expecting water deliveries to be
curtailed during the summer.
At the April meeting of the California Water Commission, as
part of their continuing work on examining the state’s role in
financing conveyance projects that could help meet needs in a
changing climate, the Commissioners heard from a panel of
speakers about state policy considerations for conveyance and
the cross-cutting issues of flood-managed aquifer recharge
(flood-MAR), green infrastructure, collaborative partnerships
and governance, and innovation. … Michael George, Delta
Watermaster, … pointed out that it’s physically,
ecologically, and economically impossible to squeeze water out
of the Delta for export.
It’s that time of drought again. During one of the driest years
on record, once again curtailing water deliveries to local
farms, Fresno-area lawmakers wasted little time trotting out
one of their favorite falsehoods. That every year, including
the parched ones like 2021, California “wastes” millions of
gallons of water by “flushing it to the ocean.” Central San
Joaquin Valley residents have heard this declaration so often
and for so long, from the mouths of politicians and parroted on
talk radio, that many of us believe it’s true.
In a hotter climate, dirt is a hot commodity. With sea levels
expected to rise 3 to 6 feet by the end of the century, coastal
communities are moving fast to construct major shoreline
projects to protect themselves. As the size of these projects
expands, the primary building materials — dirt and mud — are
getting scarce. … [Parts of San Francisco Bay
were] once used for industrial salt making, and giant
evaporation ponds were built here more than a century ago. Now,
its marsh habitat is being restored as part of the Eden
Landing Ecological Reserve. The old salt pond levees still
stand between the bay and hundreds of thousands of people on
the shoreline. But waves and weather have eaten away at them.
On Monday May 3rd, the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s
Associations (PCFFA), the West Coast’s largest trade
organization of small-scale commercial fishermen and women,
signed on to a letter asking Representative Katie Porter (D –
Ca 45th) in her capacity as Vice Chair of the Subcommittee on
Government Operations and Chair of the Subcommittee on
Oversight and Investigations, to open an investigation into
Reclamation’s manipulation of government cost accounting
standards and its own longstanding criteria for allocating
costs owed by Central Valley Project water and power
contractors (Contractors).
The federal government is strictly curtailing irrigation this
year in an attempt to protect endangered fish important to
Indigenous tribes. Farmers say this will make it all but
impossible to farm, while tribal groups say the plan doesn’t go
far enough to save their fisheries. In mid-April, a farming
region in southern Oregon began to release water from the
Klamath River into its irrigation canals. … [A]ccording to
the federal government, it was an illegal maneuver that could
further jeopardize the survival of multiple endangered species
and food sources important to Indigenous tribes and fisheries
in the region.
California’s drought is forcing hatcheries to truck young
salmon to the San Francisco Bay because the fish would
otherwise likely die trying to swim on their own
downstream to the Pacific Ocean. The Coleman National Fish
Hatchery along Battle Creek in Shasta County plans to drive
about 950,000 fall chinook salmon smolts in May to increase
their chances of survival.
In many American communities, rivers irrigate the farms that
feed families, quench people’s thirst—rivers are the source of
more than two-thirds of the drinking water in the U.S.—sustain
wildlife habitat, and provide an economic boost for
communities. Yet only a very small portion of those waterways
are protected from threats ranging from pollution to damming,
which would wreck the water’s natural flow.
… California’s Regional Water Quality Control Boards
have authority to designate ONRWs but to date have done so for
only two bodies of water: Lake Tahoe and Mono Lake. However,
the state did initiate an analysis of the Smith River as
an ONRW but has not completed the effort. The Smith is a
Pacific salmon stronghold.
In our latest effort to ensure that our water management and
farming practices both protect and enhance environmental
benefits in our area, Garden Highway Mutual Water Company
(Garden Highway) recently completed a project to screen its
diversion on the Feather River. This project allows us to
protect Chinook salmon and other fish species from entrainment
while diverting water year-round to irrigate crops and to
provide Pacific Flyway habitat during the fall and winter
months. The project was a cooperative effort between Garden
Highway, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau
of Reclamation U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Family
Water Alliance.
Phase 3C of the Lower Clear Creek Floodway Rehabilitation
Project has been completed, attracting fish and wildlife to new
habitats and people to new recreation opportunities. This phase
concludes the extensive and decades-long effort to restore more
than 2 miles of stream channel on Bureau of Land Management
property below Whiskeytown Dam. It was led by the Clear Creek
Technical Team, which includes BLM, Bureau of Reclamation, U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service, Yurok Tribe and other federal,
tribal, state, local agencies and stakeholders.
California’s current drought is already off to a strong start,
with some major challenges already looming just two years in.
Compared to the drought of 2012‒16, the normally wetter
Sacramento and North Coast regions have been hit much harder
than the rest of the state. Beyond the local challenges this
poses, drought in the Sacramento region is already having
statewide implications, given its key role in supplying water
to farms and cities further south.
The Fish and Wildlife Service said today it will deny federal
protections to three salamander species that environmentalists
fear could be put in danger by a proposed California dam
project. Pressed by a lawsuit to make a decision, the federal
agency concluded the Shasta salamander, Samwel Shasta
salamander and Wintu Shasta salamander don’t need to be listed
under the Endangered Species Act even if plans proceed to
expand the Shasta Dam by raising it.
Experts say a statewide drought declaration … could bring
significant consequences for the regulatory structure governing
California’s complicated water-delivery system. Many farmers
believe an emergency order could loosen environmental
regulations and free up water supplies for them. Environmental
groups fear the very same thing – that more of California’s
dwindling water supply could be directed to farming at the
expense of fish and wildlife.
A federal judge’s decision rebuffed environmental groups’
effort to increase water flow from California’s Twitchell Dam,
stating that wildlife conservation was not among the dam’s
authorized purposes and that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
(Bureau) had no authority to modify the water releases for
conservation purposes. U.S. District Judge André Birotte Jr.
sided with defendants in San Luis Obispo Coastkeeper v.
Santa Maria Valley Water Conservation District, rejecting
plaintiffs’ claim that by failing to release enough water to
benefit protected steelhead trout, the Bureau and local water
district were in violation of the ESA.
