Day

March 19, 2020
19
Mar

Remembering Bruce Wolfe

Bruce H. Wolfe, for 15 years the Executive Officer of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, suffered a fatal heart attack on February 25 while out on a run at Hilton Head, South Carolina. Doing what he loved, one inevitably notes; but family, friends, and long-time colleagues in the water world would have preferred to have him around much longer. Wolfe was an aficionado of the sport of orienteering, a kind of racing with map and compass...
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19
Mar

Microtrash Tiresome for Watersheds

By Jacoba Charles As many as 30 particles of microplastic smaller than five millimeters in diameter are discharged with every liter of stormwater, according to a report published by the San Francisco Estuary Institute and 5Gyres last October. “A big proportion of what we saw were black rubbery fragments,” says SFEI’s Diana Lin, a lead author of the report. Apart from these likely biproducts of tire wear and tear, hair-like threads of fiber were the other main type of microplastics...
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19
Mar

Urchinomics

By Alastair Bland As purple urchins have multiplied, kelp forests, already stressed by unusually warm water, have collapsed. Norwegian company Urchinomics proposes to capture the overpopulated urchins, fatten them up in circulating seawater tanks, and sell them to restaurants—hopefully in volumes sufficient to dent the urchin armies and allow a kelp comeback. Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary press liaison MaryJane Schramm says combatting the urchin takeover “goes directly to our mandate to maintain or restore ecosystem balance.” Citizen science, she...
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19
Mar

Time Travel on the Bay

By Aleta George “In day-to-day life we look at the world in a three-dimensional view,” Liam O’Donoghue, host and producer of the award-winning podcast East Bay Yesterday, says, “but when you know history, you can look at it through four dimensions because you can see into the past using your imagination.” On a recent boat tour of the East Bay shoreline led by O’Donoghue, Captain Andy threaded his vessel Pacific Pearl through the Berkeley pier as if it were a...
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19
Mar

Kinky Fish Spines Linked to Selenium

By Joe Eaton Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are using new tools to track selenium, with the Sacramento splittail, a California-endemic fish, as an indicator species. Robin Stewart, lead author of a new paper on splittail and selenium, is one of the region’s most seasoned current experts on bioaccumulation of metals in estuarine species. In some sampled splittail, selenium levels exceeded the proposed EPA protective criteria for fish ovaries. Liver levels, not...
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19
Mar

Toxins Flock to Beads in a Scientific Tea Bag

By Ashleigh Papp When a New Zealand scientist shared a novel method to test water quality in the early 2000s that didn’t involve harvesting shellfish, UC Santa Cruz’ Raphael Kudela and his team of researchers quickly adopted the idea. After some fine-tuning, they named their new technique Solid Phase Adsorption Toxin Testing (SPATT, for short). The technique takes advantage of custom-built plastic, or resin, beads that are designed to absorb specific things. “It looks a lot like a tea bag,”...
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19
Mar

Tracking Curlews Cross-Country

By Joe Eaton This winter, Jay Carlisle, director of the Intermountain Bird Observatory, teaming with Nils Warnock of Audubon Canyon Ranch and netting expert David Newstead of Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program, caught two long-billed curlews and outfitted them with transmitters. Those birds may reveal where the wintering curlews on the California coast and Bayshore are coming from. While many grassland birds are experiencing catastrophic declines, long-billed curlews had appeared to be an exception. “It’s such a habitat generalist...
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19
Mar

Taking a Break from the Corps

By Robin Meadows Corte Madera creek is an outsized problem for people in Ross and other towns built right up to its banks. “Our peaceful creek turns into a rushing torrent in winter,” says Chris Martin, who grew up in the small Marin County town. Finding a fix has been contentious since 1971, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put a mile-long concrete flood control channel through Ross. “It disconnected the creek from the floodplains, wrecked the Coho salmon...
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19
Mar

Rebooting the Klamath

By Lisa Owens Viani “There are bounds on this system and if you mismanage it, you can kill off what was once the third-largest salmon run on the entire West Coast,” says Amy Cordalis, general counsel for the Yurok Tribe. In 2002, more than 70,000 adult salmon died on the Klamath River when U.S. Bureau of Reclamation diversions caused water temperatures to spike, which led to the spread of diseases that wiped out the fish. In February, the Klamath River...
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19
Mar

Dam Tweaks Yield Results

By Alastair Bland “After one year of flows, we’re seeing lots of rainbow trout,” says Brian Sak of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC). For the first time ever, cold water is flowing steadily through Calaveras Dam in southern Alameda County, and into the creek canyon below. The return of rainbow trout to Calaveras Creek marks a milestone in an ongoing, multi-agency restoration of Alameda Creek, which drains more than 600 square miles of the East Bay. Since the...
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19
Mar

Regulatory Teams Coordinate

By Cariad Hayes Thronson In March the San Francisco Estuary Partnership released its Wetlands Regional Monitoring Program Plan, which lays out the science framework for a long-term program to monitor tidal wetlands around the Bay. “The focus of the plan is how we’re going to answer five guiding questions about the status and trends of our tidal wetlands,” says the Partnership’s Heidi Nutters. The framework is only the first phase of what will ultimately be a four-year planning process. Nutters...
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19
Mar

Where have all the Herring Gone?

Pete has fished San Francisco Bay for nearly all of his 60 years. A lifelong San Francisco resident who keeps his last name to himself, he recalls herring runs in the 1970s the likes of which rarely, if ever, occur anymore. “I remember herring spawns that went from Oyster Point all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge,” says Pete, a former commercial fisherman, referring to the point near Brisbane. He also remembers massive spawns that stretched contiguously from the...
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19
Mar

Sustaining Pajaro Valley’s Water

The Pajaro Valley enjoys a temperate microclimate, in part because it is situated at the hip of Monterey Bay. It lays like an east-west-oriented horseshoe, with the open end settling around the coastal plains of Elkhorn Slough and its various tributaries and side sloughs. Rimmed by the Santa Cruz Mountains to the north, the Gabilan Range to the south, and the San Andreas Fault at its head, the Pajaro Valley is a unique place in California. Marks from the state’s...
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19
Mar

Opening the Mouth of Walnut Creek

Paul Detjens is driving us from his Martinez office to a restoration site near the mouth of Walnut Creek on Suisun Bay, a project he spearheads as an engineer for the Contra Costa County Flood Control District. These lower reaches of the creek — straightened, widened, and leveed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — have been a sluggish, silt-filled problem for more than half a century. Detjens has worked to find a solution for the last 17 years....
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19
Mar

Network Listens for Passing Salmon

It’s a cold morning in early February, and Chris Vallee of the U.S. Geological Survey is motoring upriver along Steamboat Slough. His two-man crew is hunched in the bow with backs to the wind, wrapped to the ears in water-resistant jackets above warm layers. Vallee pilots the vessel in relative comfort behind the shelter of the windscreen. The boat passes the usual Delta sights: greenish-brown water drifting past road-crowned levees, the occasional dock and house, a greater egret the color...
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About Us

The San Francisco Bay-Delta is named in the federal Clean Water Act as one of 28 “estuaries of national significance." For over 20 years, the San Francisco Estuary Partnership has worked together with local communities and federal and state agencies to improve the health of California’s most urbanized estuary.

San Francisco Estuary Partnership 1515 Clay Street, Suite 1400 Oakland, CA 94612 (510) 622-2304

Association of Bay Area Governments