Putah Creek Pipeline for Salmon

By Robin Meadows

“The dream is to reestablish a natural run of salmon in Putah Creek,” says UC Davis professor emeritus Peter Moyle. In 1972 Putah creek was a trickle of water between heavy machinery mining gravel for the campus roads. Moyle and others urged the university to cease mining and by the end of the decade the machinery was gone and the administration designated a riparian reserve along the creek on campus. After droughts and an ensuing long legal battle, the Solano County Water Agency, which manages the dam upstream, eventually appointed Rich Marovich as Streamkeeper to lead the creek’s restoration. Since then “there’s been an incredible increase in salmon,” Marovich says. Adult counts for recent years have hovered between 500 and 1,000. “That’s in the range where they could be self-sustaining.”

Read More

Related Content

About the author

Robin Meadows is an independent science journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s a water reporter at Maven's Notebook, a California water news site, and contributor to Chemical & Engineering News, Ka Pili Kai, KneeDeep Times, and Scientific American. Robin is also a Pulitzer Center grantee, an Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources fellow, a contributor to The Craft of Science Writing, a mentor with The Open Notebook, and a UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program graduate. Find her on Tumblr and Twitter.