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A cellphone video that has been seen more than 5 million times after KCRA 3 shared it on Facebook Tuesday. It shows a mother bear and her two cubs swimming at Pope Beach in Lake Tahoe, near Camp Richardson. It’s not every day you see a family of bears playing in a public lake — unless you’re a biologist. “At Lake Tahoe, we get bears down at the lake frequently,” said Jason Holley, a supervising wildlife biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

 

Last week, University of California Davis Professor Geoff Schladow broke the news gently before a crowd of residents and scientists that Lake Tahoe is still getting warmer, regional winters are still getting shorter, and overall snowfall is still on the decline. “Hopefully you’re not like me where you’ve been investing in skis each year,” said Schladow. The news — highlighted by the fact that 2015 was the warmest year yet for Lake Tahoe — came with the release last week of the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center’s 10th annual “Tahoe: State of the Lake Report.”

Understanding California’s balance sheet for water—how much there is, who has claims to it, and what is actually being “spent”—is key to effective and sustainable water management, especially during droughts. But the state’s system of accounting is outdated and ineffective for managing some of our biggest water challenges, according to new research from the PPIC Water Policy Center. A group of water management experts gathered to discuss the topic at a PPIC event last week. These weaknesses make it harder to manage groundwater, water for the environment, surface water allocations, and water trading, he said.