By

Michael Adamson
About the author

Michael Hunter Adamson was born and partly raised in the Bay Area and spent his childhood balancing adventure with mischief. As an equally irresponsible adult he has worked for The Nature Conservancy, the arts and education nonprofit NaNoWriMo, taught English in Madrid-based High School equivalent, and volunteers with The Marine Mammal Center. As a writer for Estuary and the editor of the Bay Area Monitor, Michael employs his love for nature and his interest in people to help tell the unfolding story of the living Earth.

Articles by Michael Adamson

24
May

Michael Adamson

Writing for Estuary News was a years-long lesson in connectivity. Much like the Estuary links watersheds from across the state, the reliance on and protection of that water links otherwise disparate communities. I particularly enjoyed covering the effort to pass AB 2501 in 2018, where residents of rural San Joaquin Valley gathered in Sacramento’s Capitol to fight for access to clean drinking water. They succeeded, and in doing so cast a poignant light on the precarious future of water in the west years before it was a frequent headline in national news. Humans aren’t the only stewards of California’s waterways, and in 2021 I reported on the California Beaver Summit and “Beaver Queen” Heidi Perryman’s efforts to champion beavers’ critical...
Read More
Aerial view of Bouldin Island. Courtesy MWD
21
Mar

An Inclusive Vision for Bouldin Island

Over resistance from local governments and environmental organizations, in 2016 Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District purchased five islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. While it wasn’t immediately clear what the powerful water agency intended for these islands, the move reminded some Californians of the “Wild West” years of water rights claimed by surreptitious land purchases. Now, years later, it appears the District is making good on that purchase by taking a leading role in Delta restoration efforts. The Delta Islands Adaptations project, funded through a watershed-restoration grant from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, has zeroed in on Bouldin Island (the other four islands purchased at the same time were Webb Tract, Bacon Island, Holland Tract, and parts...
Read More
Adrienne Ernst among the Phragmites. Photo: Michael Adamson
16
Jun

Living with a Novel Landscape: Suisun Evolves

Morning at Suisun Marsh is a living watercolor with a soundtrack. Miles of tule and pickleweed populate the foreground, split by canals glinting silver from the sun. In May, the hills undulate across the northern boundary in classic California gold. A red-tailed hawk’s iconic hoarse screech punctuates the insectine buzz as it takes off from a powerline. At 7:40 AM, it’s already 72 degrees and there’s no trace of a breeze. I’ve come to visit the Marsh from downtown Oakland seeking to learn from biologists, hunters, and land managers what’s at stake in the myriad battles with rising seas, worsening drought, and, especially, encroaching invasive species and what makes it such a singular, attractive landscape.  Indeed, the pastoral foreground is...
Read More
25
Oct

Team Tackles Homelessness

“Homelessness is an experience, not an identity,” said Romie Nottage at the Summit’s afternoon session. Her organization seeks to “provide a path to recover from homelessness” rather than treating homelessness as an end-state of being. The “teams” of Downtown Streets Team are unhoused volunteers that work beautification shifts (cleaning streets and alleyways, for example) for a basic needs stipend (food or transportation assistance) and access to case management. Since 2005, when the program began, team members have on average spent about 6 months before finding housing and stable employment. By working towards community beautification and building a roadmap to stable, housed living, Downtown Streets Team is “changing the way the unhoused are perceived in the public eye,” says Nottage. <<...
Read More
20
Aug

When it comes to managing Delta salinity, a new research paper suggests we treat public policy like a science experiment.

As anthropogenic factors like salt accumulation through irrigation and freshwater storage combine with drought and sea-level rise, the Delta is headed for a saltier future. The June 2021 paper, published in San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, integrates biological and physical sciences to draw a comprehensive picture of Delta salinity and changing freshwater inflow. Changing salinity patterns could have a profound impact on the region’s ecology, affecting how and when fish like the Delta smelt or Coho salmon spawn, and which aquatic plants survive. The paper insists that the patterns observed suggest that the future will be difficult to predict, as extreme weather events will lead to bigger fluctuations in salt levels, and recommends that management agencies encourage interdisciplinary coordination when approaching future...
Read More
17
Jun

Ballpark Battlegrounds

McKelvey Park’s curious design reveals its double use: a baseball field that is also a flood detention basin designed to protect Mountain View from Permanente Creek's next major 50- to 100-year flood.
Read More
07
Jun

New insights into Delta smelt swimming behavior could help locate the increasingly elusive fish and prevent losses at the pumps.

Scientists know that smelt use tidal ebbs and flows to migrate landward to spawn, but the degree to which external cues influence behavior remains unclear. In a new study published in the March 2021 issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, researchers used computer modeling to predict smelt distribution based on hypothesized swimming behaviors. Six increasingly complex behaviors were tested. For example, the “passive” category assumes that smelt do not swim at all, simply drifting with currents and tides. At the other end of the spectrum, the smelt respond to both turbidity and salinity cues. After assigning a behavior to simulated smelt distributed across the Delta, researchers ran a 133-day simulation of water year 2002, then compared the modeled...
Read More
23
Mar

Beavers Make Good Neighbors

Much like when tech money reshapes an historical neighborhood, a beaver’s move downtown can cause the locals to worry. In Napa, the animals’ sprawling waterfront complexes create worrying pools along the riverbank, while the native cottonwoods are whittled down and threaten landowners’ roofs. It seems destined that two species known for their environmental engineering would struggle to live in unison. However, municipalities like Napa and Martinez in Contra Costa County have learned to live with their beavers, and the upcoming California Beaver Summit aims to set the record straight. “Our approach is hands-off,” says Jeremy Sarrow, a resource specialist with Napa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, describing the county’s tack toward managing beaver dams built along inhabited waterfronts....
Read More
01
Mar

Human activity could undermine the success of efforts to reintroduce sea otters to San Francisco Bay.

 Although past studies have found that the Bay could support 1.5 times the entire current southern sea otter population, a new study from the Estuary & Ocean Science Center at San Francisco State University and published by PeerJ last November indicates that anthropogenic risks like contaminants, vessel traffic, and oil spills may constrain the otter’s ability to gain a foothold. The study, led by Jane Rudebusch, at the time graduate student at SFSU, looked at the types of human stressors present and ranked them according to factors like temporal overlap (frequency of its interaction with otters), intensity (consequence of that interaction), and management effectiveness (how well the stressor is mitigated by human regulation). The study concluded that high-speed vessel traffic,...
Read More
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...
Read More
05
Mar

Rainer Hoenicke is optimistic about the changes he saw in his five years as the Delta Stewardship Council’s Science Director.

“People are coming to the table and realizing we need to be anticipating and forecasting how to adapt,” he says. Prior to joining the Science Program, Hoenicke served for nearly a decade as deputy and executive director of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, where he managed two Boards of Directors and reorganized the Institute’s program areas. “I felt challenged to do something different,” he says of the move, “since the Delta is much more controversial territory.” In Hoenicke’s eyes, the capstone to his career came in October 2018. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation increased its science allocation for California, and it and the Council were able to use pre-existing proposal submittal and evaluation infrastructure developed by the California Department of...
Read More
19
Sep

Drones Pilot Vegetation Mapping

By Michael Hunter Adamson In the world of conservation, as attested to by multiple speakers at a late summer UC Davis event, drones, or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) may be the vehicle of choice for mapping the future of invasive plant management in the Delta. The California Department of Water Resources began using UAVs in earnest after the Oroville dam failure in the winter of 2017, when drones offered visuals no one could get near on the ground. The Blacklock Ranch, a leveed island in Suisun Marsh, offers a more current example of how drones are now being employed at restoration sites. “We are using our UAVs and multispectral [red, blue, green, and infrared spectrums, for example] capabilities to map...
Read More
08
Aug

While it’s been a tough year for marine mammals along the California coast, local San Francisco Bay conditions may have afforded scientists a unique opportunity to study emerging ocean problems.

The Marine Mammal Center participated in 12 necropsies of deceased gray whales in and around the Bay. Later in the year, malnourished Guadalupe fur seals stranded along the coast at a historically high rate. In June, a surprisingly early toxic algae bloom off the coast of San Luis Obispo caused a rash of cases of Domoic Acid Toxicity among pregnant and yearling California sea lions. Dr. Cara Field, staff veterinarian at The Marine Mammal Center, has some theories as to why these events have occurred. Whale necropsies showed significant emaciation, consistent with studies done on gray whales in Mexico this past winter showing that many were already in poor body condition after returning from their summer feeding grounds in the...
Read More
17
Jun

A Tricky Ballet

Malea G., a fourth grader in Mr. Moore’s class at Bayview’s Malcolm X Academy Elementary School, shows me her Tower of Power. It’s a wooden, trapezoidal structure roughly two feet high and decorated with stickers naming personal qualities she’s proud of. I ask her which of these she might turn to when dealing with climate change. “Leadership,” Malea answers after a brief pause. “If there was a flood, someone would need to take charge.” Working in partnership with a program called Y-PLAN...
Read More
26
Sep

San Joaquin Communities Access Cleaner Water Due to New Legislation

The only water easily available to many low-income inhabitants of the San Joaquin Valley’s smaller, non-incorporated settlements is well water tainted with arsenic and nitrates from surrounding activities. But two state bills ensure that these communities – and everyone else in California – not only have the right to safe, clean, and affordable drinking water, but also get access to public water infrastructure and services as needed. Assembly Bill 2501, approved this fall, “makes sure the state’s consolidation authority can order a city or special district to extend clean drinking water services to people in domestic dwellings,” says Phoebe Seaton of the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability. Advocacy on the part of affected communities, with help from organizations like...
Read More
13
Aug

Help may be on the way for critically endangered southern resident killer whales.

NOAA Fisheries and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife have partnered to produce a list of the west coast Chinook salmon stocks most important to the whale’s survival. This list comes as a part of a special action plan by NOAA to address the three primary threats to the southern resident killer whales: Chemical contaminants, vessel traffic, and lack of prey. The salmon, themselves endangered, are the preferred food source for the whales, and identifying the salmon runs—which include Sacramento River and San Joaquin River runs—that most overlap with the range of the southern residents could be crucial to their eventual recovery. “Those fish support not only the commercial fishery but the whales that migrate north after they leave...
Read More
02
May

Infrastructure improvements could provide safe drinking water to tens of thousands of Californians currently living without it, but funding such improvements remains a challenge.

Many communities in rural, unincorporated San Joaquin Valley are served by water systems high in nitrates and arsenic, or private wells not subject to inspection. But according to a new UC Davis study, about 99,000 valley residents live near public systems with clean water and could access it if service extensions, piping and other infrastructure improvements were implemented. Pending state legislation would create a fund for such projects through fees imposed on water districts. While the bill faces opposition from water agencies, it is supported by groups typically at odds, including environmental advocates and farmers. “This is a problem generations in the making, and we need long-term solutions,” says Jonathan London of UC Davis’ Center for Regional Change and lead...
Read More
18
Mar

Hopeful Outlook for Pacific Herring

Cold water, essential for the life cycle of Chinook salmon, is all too often in short supply along the Sacramento River. A primary cause: California’s massive water conveyance system, using reservoirs, dams, and hydroelectric plants to divert water and deliver power to farms and cities. “When we started releasing water in spring, we let cold water out too early. None was left by fall, when salmon really needed it,” says USBR hydraulic engineer Tracy Vermeyen. Two clever innovations have been implemented to conserve cold water into the autumn. First: A 300 foot tall, 250 foot wide “adjustable straw” possessing a series of intake gates enables power plant operators to draw water from behind the dam at three different depths. Second:...
Read More
13
Dec

Searching for a Few Good Weevils

“They’re pretty charismatic,” says Julie Hopper of the tiny herbivorous weevil N. bruchi. Native to Argentina, these weevils were first brought to North America to combat the spread of the invasive weed water hyacinth.
Read More
1 2