Day

September 22, 2020
22
Sep

Small Farmers Shortchanged by SGMA

When governor Jerry Brown signed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) into law in September 2014, he said that “groundwater management in California is best accomplished locally.” With the first round of plans made available for public comment this year, it appears that, while the state certainly ceded control to local management agencies, those same agencies have prioritized the interests of big agriculture and industry over small farmers and disadvantaged communities. A June 2020 paper from UC Davis published in the international journal Society & Natural Resources, as well as work done by the Fresno nonprofit Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, have shed light on the procedural inequities. During the 2011-16 drought in California, declining rainfall, snowpack, and availability...
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22
Sep

Nursing Salmon on Flooded Farms

In 2012 a team of salmon researchers tried a wild idea: putting pinky-sized Chinook on a rice field in the Yolo Bypass, a vast engineered floodplain designed to protect the city of Sacramento from inundation. The team found that rearing fish on farms works better than they had ever dreamed.
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22
Sep

Londons Roam and Feast on the Bay circa 1910

Jack London usually sailed west whenever he left the Oakland Municipal Wharf, but on December 18, 1913, he headed east — because he could. Although the canal connecting the Oakland Estuary to San Leandro Bay had been completed in 1902, it wasn’t until the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers widened and deepened the canal in 1913 that it became navigable. Aboard the Roamer, a 30-foot yawl London bought used in 1910, Jack and his wife, Charmian, approached the Park Street Bridge. “Mate has to hustle for an hour or so to get Park St. Bridge open + we’re first boat that it ever opened for,” Charmian wrote in her diary. The Fruitvale and High Street bridges also swung open, and...
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22
Sep

Heavy Lifting for Fish

Ted Frink recalls watching Jacques Cousteau’s television specials when he was growing up in coastal Orange County. “I envisioned myself as Cousteau,” says Frink, a fisheries biologist with the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) now approaching retirement. “My folks encouraged my interest in science. I knew I could be a biologist.” That early inspiration sparked a long and varied career, culminating in his work as chief of DWR’s Special Restoration Initiatives Branch and his role in mitigating obstacles to salmon and steelhead passage in streams all over the state. Frink focused on salmonids and other anadromous fish early on, graduating from Humboldt State in 1984 with a degree in fisheries ecology and a minor in hydrology. His first professional...
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22
Sep

Covid Clues from Wastewater

As COVID-19 continues its unrelenting rampage, wastewater plant managers and university researchers are ramping up their efforts to monitor wastewater for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease. Their goal is to give public health departments a powerful tool: an early warning system for new outbreaks in communities. In Yosemite Valley, for instance, wastewater testing revealed the presence of the virus in the community before swab testing of individuals showed a problem. “There’s a time delay before cases appear in a community and in the medical system,” says Katy Graham, a graduate student at Stanford University who is leading development of laboratory methods that will link trends and concentrations of the virus’ RNA (ribonucleic acid) in wastewater to the virus’...
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22
Sep

Creeks & Quilts for Climate

The Estuary News team has been working behind the scenes with partners on a cool new build out of our sister Acclimatewest project called the California Climate Quilt. Acclimatewest.org is a pilot storytelling site that gathers stories about creeks, sloughs, and shorelines adapting to sea level rise, describing who lives around them and what concerns they have about their environment, as well as exploring the local natural and human history of the area. At the same time, in a world driven by short attention spans and social media, we realized that you may have a lot of individual stories of resilience or climate adaptation action to share! So this summer we began digitally sewing a California Climate Quilt and issued...
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22
Sep

A Fragile Fleet

Watching Bay-Delta science unfold, we take for granted the little armada that keeps it all going. Nobody has a firm count, but it appears there are about 100 vessels supporting research in the Estuary. They range from a few large craft that can work outside the Golden Gate to little “trailerable” skiffs and Adirondack rowboats that ply Delta shallows. Like many of the systems that quietly sustain our society, this one is showing signs of strain.
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22
Sep

More Grants for Real People

Even as “environmental justice” and “community engagement” have long been watchwords of restoration and resilience efforts, economically disadvantaged communities on San Francisco Bay’s shoreline have often felt sidelined by them. But that may be changing: the summer of 2020 saw new initiatives to give communities more power to shape and participate in restoration projects in their own backyards. In July, the San Francisco Bay Restoration Authority kicked off its new Community Grants Program, allocating $200,000 of its $25 million 2020-21 budget to projects led by community-based organizations in economically disadvantaged bayside communities. “This program will welcome new voices and partnerships, and work with community leaders to develop projects that empower and benefit communities that historically have been excluded from habitat...
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22
Sep

The Delta’s Blooming Problem

Bright-green blotches of algae have been popping up all over the Delta since early summer, from Discovery Bay to the Stockton waterfront, befouling the air and poisoning the water with toxins that can sicken or even kill humans and animals. Veteran Delta watchers believe that this year’s harmful algal blooms may be the worst ever, and worry that some features of Governor Gavin Newsom’s recently released Water Resilience Portfolio for California will aggravate the problem. “We don’t have enough data to know if this is the worst year ever, because we haven’t been out there every single year for years and years monitoring,” says Meredith Howard, an environmental program manager with the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. “I...
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22
Sep

Match Points in Stormwater Soup

Effluent from wastewater treatment plants is often seen as the primary source of emerging contaminants in San Francisco Bay. But a report published in July by the Regional Monitoring Program challenges that assumption by highlighting the importance of urban stormwater runoff as another major source.
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22
Sep

Trolling for Salmon by Kayak

Whales scare us much more than sharks. They erupt from the ocean with a rush of displaced water and a poof of air. A collision could be disastrous. “Whale – go-go-go!” I shout. We pedal double-time to dodge the humpback, behind us and approaching from the left. A moment later it surfaces again, with another poof, now off to our right, moving away. We relax and slow back to our standard trolling speed of about 2.5 miles per hour, and we plod forward. My brother Andrew and I are in a pedal-powered kayak two miles from shore off the Marin County coast, where anchovies so thick they darken the water have attracted birds, porpoises, sea lions, thresher sharks, humpback whales...
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22
Sep

Retrofitted Houseboat IDs Fish in the Shallows

On a hazy Delta morning at Isleton’s B & W Resort, more than a dozen trucks are already neatly arrayed in the double-long parking spaces with empty trailers facing the boat launch: evidence of fishers and boaters getting an early start on their Labor Day weekend. Randy Mager, sporting a flannel shirt and worn baseball cap, radiates earnest enthusiasm, which for a 20-year state government veteran is as refreshing and rare as a Delta smelt. “I am more excited about this than I have been about pretty much anything else in my career,” says Mager, a senior environmental scientist with California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR). Randy Mager. Photo: Isaac Pearlman The subject of his palpable excitement lays in the...
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22
Sep

Makeover for Delta Weed Patch & Salt Trap?

What began as a project to convert a submerged Delta island into habitat for endangered native fish has morphed into a multi-benefit package with additional payoffs for water quality and recreation. The collaborative design process for the Franks Tract Futures project brought initially skeptical local stakeholders on board and is being hailed as a model for future initiatives. Yet major uncertainties remain as interested parties explore the challenges of implementing a complex redesign of a big chunk of the Delta. The proposed project would take a big shallow lake full of weeds, deepen some parts, fill in others with new lands and fish habitats, add beaches and recreational amenities, and stanch the spread of salt water from the ocean toward...
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