You are now in California and the U.S. category.

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.

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. 

Much of the country has experienced record-setting temperatures this summer, thanks in large part to a weather phenomenon known as the heat dome. And while San Francisco and Los Angeles lucked out with mostly average temperatures in early July, much of California right now is in the midst of what the National Weather Service is calling triple digit heat. That means increased fire danger at a time when two massive wildfires have burned more than 60,000 acres in California in the past seven days. Let’s break down what exactly the heat dome is and how it’s affecting weather in the state.

In the Sierra Nevada, it’s estimated that tens of millions of trees have died as a result of drought, many of which succumbed to infestations from bark beetles. As a result, we’ve been told our risk of wildfire is far higher than normal, but FM89’s Kerry Klein says the science doesn’t necessarily agree. Gaze across a hillside at 5,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada, and that landscape, usually a wash of green pines, firs and cedars, is probably smudged with reds and browns.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to build twin tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta was hailed Tuesday as the long-awaited salvation for the damaged estuary and California’s shaky water delivery network. It also was lambasted as a nightmarish boondoggle that would rob water from Northern California and bring more environmental harm to the Delta itself.

And that was just Day 1. Known as California WaterFix, the tunnels project effectively went on trial as a key state agency began months of formal hearings on details of the $15.5 billion proposal.