Day

September 19, 2019
19
Sep

Scarce Shark Tough to Tag

Basking sharks were once so abundant along the California coast that a thrill-seeking trophy hunter reportedly harpooned a half-dozen in under three hours in Monterey Bay. That was in 1947. Today, the big fish are so rare that it’s taken a team of scientists between San Diego and Santa Cruz eight years to put tracking tags into just six animals. Their numbers are so low, in fact, that researchers, working with tiny sample sizes, can scarcely study them at all or draw firm conclusions about population trends, threats to their survival, typical behavior, or how global warming may affect them. There is even concern that the sharks—filter feeders that may grow to 40 feet, the size of a small whale—are...
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19
Sep

Tire Melt in Salmon Stream?

On the morning of November 8, 2018, Allen Harthorn, a farmer who lives near the town of Paradise, watched a dark cloud of smoke forming in the east and began to worry about the safety of his home. He also began to worry about some other residents of the Butte Creek watershed—the largest run of naturally spawned spring Chinook in California.
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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...
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19
Sep

State Plan Doubles Down on Alignment

The California Water Plan Update 2018—released by the Department of Water Resources in July—is meant to guide state policy and investment over the next 50 years to maximize the benefits squeezed out of every drop of the water supply. The timing of Update 2018 is fortuitous: In April, Governor Newsom ordered the California Natural Resources Agency, California Environmental Protection Agency, and California Department of Food and Agriculture to develop a portfolio of water resilience strategies.
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19
Sep

Clout and Cool Science Push Land-River Connection

Statewide, 13,000 miles of levees disconnect our rivers from their floodplains, which once served as nurseries for young salmon migrating to the ocean. California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot wants to help restore this connection: “It’s a win-win-win―it’s a way we can reconnect water with land, create habitat, and provide flood protection.”
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19
Sep

Paddlers Monitor Plovers

By Ashleigh Papp “It sounds fun and glamorous to kayak to work, but it’s not always the case,” says Ben Pearl, plover program director for the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory. Pearl spends six months of the year in the field researching predator threats, habitat status, and breeding behavior of the local snowy plover population. “All of this habitat used to be tidal marsh and was converted to salt ponds, so the ground is sometimes soft and nearly impossible to walk through,” says Pearl. “At some breeding sites, a kayak is almost always required to reach the nests.” Protecting these areas for plovers and other species requires ongoing work, but the habitat improvements are worth the effort, even if the...
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19
Sep

Just Shy of Splendor in the Grass

Tobias Rohmer and Ben Chen’s careful work in Hayward’s Cogswell Marsh represents one small moment in the massive, nearly 20-year-old Invasive Spartina Project. Treatment of the southern section of Cogswell marsh was halted in 2011, however, due to concerns about Ridgway’s rails who’d made homes in the invader. “Complete eradication has been and still is our goal,” says Marilyn Latta...
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19
Sep

New Regional Rainmaker

Environmental issues were important to Michael Montgomery as a young man. Montgomery’s career path led to 33 years with the United States Environmental Protection Agency, where he gained a wealth of experience in navigating complex regulatory landscapes to protect water resources, and ultimately to the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, where he is now executive officer.
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19
Sep

Bay Not BPA-Free

By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto “BPA is globally detected in human urine,” says scientist Ila Shimabuku of the San Francisco Estuary Institute. BPA, one of a chemical group called bisphenols, is a clear, stable, durable ingredient in plastic bottles, can liners, cash register receipts and many other things we use and touch every day. In 2017, the RMP collected and analyzed 16 bisphenols (including bisphenol A, or BPA) in 22 water samples from around San Francisco Bay. Concentrations of BPA found were similar to those found in other marine and estuarine environments, and at levels approaching the threshold of ecotoxicity. “It’s an intriguing compound in terms of its mechanism for action on our health,” says the Institute’s lead scientist on emerging...
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19
Sep

True to the Trail

A small group of friends are walking the entire San Francisco Bay Trail by tackling one segment at a time, in order, once a month. After two years, they have covered more than half the trail, both the finished, and as best they can, the unfinished portions.
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