The drought that has caused profound impacts on California’s residents and businesses has similarly taken a toll on the San Francisco Bay-Delta ecosystem. In a world increasingly sensitive to the warning signs of ecological crisis — including climate change — the effect of the drought on species in the Bay-Delta requires careful attention.
Biologists warn Delta smelt, once the Delta’s most abundant fish, is on the brink of extinction.
Like many people who work on forestry issues in California, Jim Branham, executive officer of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, is still trying to wrap his head around the drought’s toll on the region’s forests and the 66 million dead trees reported in the Sierra Nevada last month.
“It’s hard to comprehend,” he said, especially considering that in some areas of the Southern Sierra communities may see 85 percent of the trees around them dead or dying. “The magnitude of the problem is staggering,” he said.
Tribes are apprehensive, cities are more upbeat and farmers stand somewhere in between over a proposed plan to cut CAP water deliveries to keep Lake Mead from falling to dangerously low levels.
At separate meetings here this week, tribal officials, attorneys and irrigation officials grilled Central Arizona Project officials about the proposal. It would require a 33 percent cut in water deliveries once the lake dropped another 4 or 5 feet below where it’s expected to be at the end of this year, and cuts of up to 40 percent later.
Lake Tahoe is showing some severe impacts from the changing climate. Indicators released Thursday in the annual “State of the Lake” report packed a few surprises, even for scientists.
For one thing, the lake has been warming faster than ever recorded. In 2015 the lake’s average temperature rose 0.48 degrees Fahrenheit — and over the last four years, the rise was 15 times faster than the lake’s historic warming rate. “That came as a surprise to me,” says Geoffrey Schladow, a UC Davis freshwater scientist and lead author of the report.
California is the country’s second-largest rice producer, after Arkansas, and the $5 billion crop is particularly well suited to the Sacramento Valley’s clay soil.
The leaves atop giant sequoias in the Sierra Nevada are better at storing water than those closer to the ground, an adaptation that may explain how their treetops are able to survive 300 feet in the air, researchers at American River College and Humboldt State University have found.
“It can take over a week for water to get from the ground to the top of the tree,” says Alana Chin, who led the study and is an instructor at American River College. “When you’re that tall of a tree, you’re under tremendous water stress.”
It’s been 10 years since California enacted AB 32, which requires the state to reduce greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020.
The state is on track to meet its goal. A poll by the Public Policy Institute of California shows, despite a partisan divide, 62 percent of likely voters favor the law.
Fifty-nine percent of likely voters also favor a new law that requires greenhouse gases be reduced even more. For Californians who believe gas prices will rise as a result, 63 percent of voters still favor expanding the goals.
Around the world, vital wetlands are being destroyed. Researchers recently estimated that the planet has lost at least 54 percent and as much as 87 percent of these important habitats globally since 1700. As the wetlands disappeared, so have many of the species that once called them home.
At the same time, something else is going on. Agriculture and other types of development are creating some new wetlands where they may not have existed before.
A new Stanford University study recommends groundwater recharge and storage across the state of California as what it calls as “an affordable solution” against drought in recent years.
In addition to building more resilient water supplies in the Golden State, the study suggests that the process, known as “managed aquifer recharge,” or MAR, can incorporate co-benefits such as flood control, improved water quality and wetland habitat protection.
Backers of a new Monterey Bay desalination project think they have found a fix for the environmental problems posed by most seawater intakes: Instead of drawing seawater from the beach, they plan to draw from the one of the world’s deepest marine canyons.
The Deep Water Desal project is proposed at Moss Landing, exactly midway along the curving shore of Monterey Bay. As such, it may be ideally positioned to serve the chronic water shortages affecting the region.
