You are now in San Diego County category.

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.

 

San Diego County will continue to have a safe and reliable water supply for decades because of the development of drought-resilient water resources and emphasis on water-use efficiency, according to the San Diego County Water Authority’s draft Urban Water Management Plan.

The draft plan was released for public review, starting a public comment period that will include a public hearing on May 26 during the regular meeting of the Water Authority Board of Directors. The board will consider adoption of the plan during its regular meeting on June 23.

 

California has long known that its groundwater problem would reach crisis level. Now the crisis has indeed arrived, and as officials in Sacramento roll out rules in an effort to gradually balance water demand and supply, it’s easy to see why they waited for so long to take action.

Drought-weary Californians breathed a sigh of relief because another “March Miracle” series of storms soaked much of the northern half of the state. Sadly for the people of the Golden State, their relief is mostly misplaced. The state reported that the statewide snowpack is only 87 percent of normal and El Niño was mostly a disappointment. Farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley will receive only 5 percent of their allocation from the Central Valley Project this year. It looks like we are heading into the fifth year of a historic drought.

 

A battle is raging over one of the most fundamental aspects of San Diego County’s future: how folks get around.

Will commuters overwhelmingly continue to drive their cars to work, as they’ve done for decades? Or will lawmakers fashion a public transportation system — consisting largely of bus, trolley and train lines — that’s efficient and sexy enough to appeal to millennials and perhaps their parents?