The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California approved the annexation of 454.41 acres within the Pechanga Indian Reservation.

The April 12 MWD board vote also approves the annexation of that area into the Eastern Municipal Water District and authorizes MWD general manager Jeff Kightlinger to enter into a service area extension agreement with EMWD and Pechanga. The MWD annexation approvals forward that process to Riverside County’s Local Agency Formation Commission, which has the actual authority over jurisdictional boundary changes.

After months of flagging water conservation, Californians rebounded in March, cutting their urban consumption by 24.3% compared to the same month in 2013.

The savings percentage, announced Tuesday, was more than double the state’s effort in February and offered a strong signal that people in cities and towns remain cognizant of California’s drought, despite a year of average rain that fell mostly in Northern California. The data also appeared to demonstrate that Californians will continue their thrifty water ways even without a mandate to slash usage by 25%.

Scientists in the US have identified the factors that make a tree more likely to perish in a drought, after conducting an exhaustive examination of 33 separate scientific studies of tree mortality involving 475 species and 760,000 individual trees.

The answer they come up with is that the deciding factor is how efficiently trees draw water from the ground to their leaf tips. This is not a surprising conclusion, but scientists don’t trust the obvious: they like to check these things.