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...
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By Joe Eaton Researchers like Point Blue Conservation Science ecologist Tom Gardali have equipped Swainson’s thrushes, weighing just over an ounce, with tiny, one-gram GPS tags. If recovered, the tag shows the thrush’s exact winter destination, information vital to border-crossing conservation efforts. “You only get a few readings,” says Gardali, “and you still need to get the tag back. But GPS goes to a spot on the map. This is Holy Grail stuff.” Sierra/Cascade thrushes were presumed to migrate to Mexico like their coastal cousins. When researchers included thrushes from Mount Lassen and Lake Tahoe in their GPS tracking, they learned otherwise. “The mountain birds are going from Mexico to Panama, possibly as far as Columbia.”
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Delta smelt had a bad year in 2017. Although scientists are still analyzing the data, the message seems to be that strong freshwater flows alone are not sufficient to allow the population to increase. The resulting sense of urgency has led fish biologists to consider how cultured smelt, raised in hatcheries, could be used to supplement the wild population.
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In the early days, when the wetland protection and restoration landscape was less complex, the JV “could be everywhere and do everything.” Now it needs to be more strategic. “I’m a listener, a synthesizer, and I’m pretty good at herding diverse interests toward shared goals,” says Scoggin, who is taking over the 20-year-old wildlife habitat venture after 16 years in second seat. “The JV is built on deep and lasting relationships,” she says, both awe and pride in her voice. Scoggin grew up in Los Angeles. After early work studying songbird nesting, she developed a soft spot for the Swainson’s thrush: “It’s like a ghost of the riparian forest, with an ethereal, beautiful song that comes out of nowhere.” In...
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While we were cooped up inside waiting out February’s storms, many animals were on the move. Cameras positioned along a creek in the Pacheco Pass wildlife corridor captured footage of animals passing through a culvert under a bridge on SR-152 that crosses Pacheco Creek. “We caught a bobcat on camera walking through the creek,” says Tanya Diamond...
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In 2016, restoration managers with The Nature Conservancy discovered that western sycamores planted along the Sacramento River had hybridized with the non-native London plane tree. The native sycamore is “kind of a messy tree,” says project manager Ryan Luster. “The branches break off and create cavities that wildlife love to use.” Concerns about the tree’s status first arose in the 1990s...
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A fall flight over the Mexican coast where the Colorado River meets the Sea of Cortez offered me a gut-punching, eye-screwing, visual on the results of impaired flow. The semantics of ‘unimpaired’ and ‘impaired’ flow have laced the language of California water management debates since some engineer invented these politically ‘neutral’ terms long ago. The terms refer to our alteration of freshwater flows from snowmelt and runoff by dams and diversions. But whatever the labels, or whichever estuary you’re referring to, keeping these flows from reaching the sea via rivers can starve these aquatic ecosystems of their liquid life force. Whether it’s the vast yellowing salt flats that are all that remain of the mighty marshes of the pre-dam Colorado...
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Although grebes are primarily fish-eaters (they swallow their own feathers to cushion the sharp bones), this species also consumes significant numbers of crayfish, sometimes detaching the pincers before swallowing the good part. Native to southern swamps and bayous, the red swamp crayfish has been introduced in the Sacramento Valley and San Francisco Delta. According to the US Geological Survey, the species is established at Coyote Hills Regional Park and elsewhere around the Bay. The crayfish preys on the larval stages of native frogs (including the endangered California red-legged frog) and newts. Recent research led by Gary Bucciarelli at UCLA suggests that red swamp crayfish in Southern California streams interfere with the ability of aquatic dragonfly nymphs to control mosquito larvae, including...
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The finding, by UC Davis graduate student Tasha Thompson and colleagues, helps distinguish between spring- and fall-run fish—and could help save spring-run salmon from human-hastened extinction. Fall-run populations enter rivers in autumn and spawn immediately. By contrast, spring-run fish return during peak snowmelt, linger in tributaries through summer, and spawn around the same time as their fall-run brethren. “Spring-run fish are special for a lot of reasons,” Thompson says. Spring-run salmon historically spawned in the upper portion of watersheds, nourishing ecosystems with marine nutrients when they died. Today, these habitat preferences have left spring-run Chinook vulnerable thanks to dams, logging, climate change, and other human-caused alterations to their habitat. “People once thought spring-runs would easily evolve from fall because they’re...
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This does not mean the fish is extinct—yet—but it does mean that the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem is in disarray. The species, which lives its entire life in the estuary, is a key ecological indicator—and it was prolific until just a couple of decades ago. According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fall Midwater Trawl survey, which provides an annual index on abundance for several fish species in the Delta, the Delta smelt index generally averaged several hundred fish into the early 2000s. Then, in about 2003, numbers of Delta smelt, as well as several other native fishes, began to plunge. To Jonathan Rosenfield, the lead scientist with The Bay Institute, it’s clear what’s going on. “The one thing...
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Local green sturgeon are struggling. The population that spawns in the Sacramento –San Joaquin River Delta was declared federally threatened in 2006. Researchers at UC Davis, which hosts the world’s only green sturgeon rearing program, are now trying to figure out why the fish is in trouble. “If we knew how large they are when they’re moving through each portion of the system, we’d know a lot more about the threats they face at each life state, and where we need to put our energy,” says postdoctoral fellow Anna Steel.
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Harbor Seals “have this dual existence,” says Sarah Allen, National Park Service ecologist. “They’re tied to the land physiologically and tied to the bay waters for food and travel.” From rocky islets to tidal marshes, the Bay shoreline offers respite to these native marine mammals. Rocky islets like the Castro Rocks, located near the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, are particularly important refuges -- but more than half the islets that exist throughout the Bay are likely to be erased by sea-level rise this century. Meanwhile, the ability of tidal marsh habitats to naturally respond to rising waters offers hope.
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In the spring and summer months, anglers armed with heavy line and large hooks drop anchor in the murky, current-torn waters between Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge seeking the elusive, and occasionally gigantic, broadnose sevengill shark. As social-media hype stokes excitement among trophy seekers, some other fisherfolk and conservationists want to see the pursuit ended before it depletes shark numbers. While interest in catching large, breeding-age sevelgills has risen in recent years, it remains unclear whether the population can sustain such fishing. “There hasn’t been any long-term monitoring study of the population, so we have no baseline estimate,” says Sean Van Sommeran, founder of the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation.
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The nonprofit, headed by Stockton tomato packer Dino Cortopassi, is suing TNC and the California Department of Water Resources, which holds a conservation easement on Staten Island, alleging farming practices that cause soil subsidence and threaten levee integrity, and misuse of revenue from farm operations. The 9200-acre farm, acquired by TNC in 2001, is a major destination for migratory greater and lesser sandhill cranes (the latter a California endangered species) as well as Aleutian cackling geese and other birds. As habitat is replaced by houses, orchards, and vineyards, a third of the state’s crane population converges on the island to feed in corn and triticale fields and roost at night. While corn cultivation is recognized as depleting the Delta’s peat...
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For 20 years, Tom Quinn, a professor in Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, waded in southwestern Alaska’s Hansen Creek with his students, counting and measuring sockeye salmon carcasses in the stream. Quinn asked his students to toss the bodies on the north bank of the creek to avoid double counting; over the years, they tossed close to 295 tons of salmon onto the north bank. In 2016, Quinn and his colleagues and students took core samples from the white spruce growing on both sides of the creek. The samples revealed that over the course of the study the salmon-fertilized trees on the north bank had caught up in growth with the taller trees on the south...
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For years, scientists monitoring water quality in streams and rivers have collected mixed samples of aquatic invertebrates from riffles, pools, and transition zones. But UC Santa Barbara stream ecologist David Herbst and his colleagues recently finished a 15-year study of the benthic life in small streams of the central Sierra that examined pools and riffles separately. They found that during flood and drought events, these habitats and their inhabitants become more uniform. But while floods come and go, droughts can have longer-term effects on the biodiversity in the stream. “As stream flows go down, the riffles go dry first,” says Herbst. “The riffle habitat, the richest place in the stream, can be depleted during drought conditions. The habitat itself is...
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Salmon once flourished in California despite huge swings in climate that were far more extreme than those today. But then people re-engineered the state’s waterways to meet their own needs. “Complexity is what salmon thrive on, and we’ve been making their habitat simpler and simpler,” says biologist Bruce Herbold. “We haven’t been playing to their strengths.”
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From a bird’s eye view, the area between the Santa Cruz and Diablo mountain ranges looks like any typical valley. But the work being done by Tanya Diamond, a wildlife biologist with Pathways for Wildlife, shows that the Coyote Valley offers much more to native wildlife and conservationists than mere open space.
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Development agreements were already in place for three parcels of land around Dutch Slough when John Cain first took a hike in this West Delta area in the spring of 1999. “It was clear as day to me that removing the levee would be a great way to restore freshwater wetlands at the mouth of Marsh Creek,” says Cain. Almost two decades later, earthmoving equipment is now preparing 1,178 acres for conversion to marsh habitat.
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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...
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Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
4th California Climate Change Assessment Blues
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.