Month

March 2020
19
Mar

Remembering Bruce Wolfe

Bruce H. Wolfe, for 15 years the Executive Officer of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, suffered a fatal heart attack on February 25 while out on a run at Hilton Head, South Carolina. Doing what he loved, one inevitably notes; but family, friends, and long-time colleagues in the water world would have preferred to have him around much longer. Wolfe was an aficionado of the sport of orienteering, a kind of racing with map and compass that requires both speed and accurate navigation. Maintaining precision under time pressure: that could be a pretty good metaphor also for the professional life of this gifted man. Raised in Piedmont, Wolfe attended Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, where he ran,...
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19
Mar

Microtrash Tiresome for Watersheds

As many as 30 particles of microplastic smaller than five millimeters in diameter are discharged with every liter of stormwater, according to a report published by the San Francisco Estuary Institute and 5Gyres last October. “A big proportion of what we saw were black rubbery fragments,” says SFEI’s Diana Lin...
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19
Mar

Urchinomics

By Alastair Bland As purple urchins have multiplied, kelp forests, already stressed by unusually warm water, have collapsed. Norwegian company Urchinomics proposes to capture the overpopulated urchins, fatten them up in circulating seawater tanks, and sell them to restaurants—hopefully in volumes sufficient to dent the urchin armies and allow a kelp comeback. Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary press liaison MaryJane Schramm says combatting the urchin takeover “goes directly to our mandate to maintain or restore ecosystem balance.” Citizen science, she adds, may be an important part of implementing any action plan, “since eradication or control efforts are likely to be ongoing and work-intensive.”
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19
Mar

Time Travel on the Bay

By Aleta George “In day-to-day life we look at the world in a three-dimensional view,” Liam O’Donoghue, host and producer of the award-winning podcast East Bay Yesterday, says, “but when you know history, you can look at it through four dimensions because you can see into the past using your imagination.” On a recent boat tour of the East Bay shoreline led by O’Donoghue, Captain Andy threaded his vessel Pacific Pearl through the Berkeley pier as if it were a time portal. “History makes me feel more emotionally connected to myself and where I live,” says Jozefina Logu, one of the women at the bow. At one point the tour stopped at the Brothers Islands to view the lighthouse-turned-bed-and-breakfast and...
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19
Mar

Kinky Fish Spines Linked to Selenium

Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are using new tools to track selenium, with the Sacramento splittail, a California-endemic fish, as an indicator species. In some sampled splittail, selenium levels exceeded the proposed EPA protective criteria for fish ovaries.
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19
Mar

Toxins Flock to Beads in a Scientific Tea Bag

By Ashleigh Papp When a New Zealand scientist shared a novel method to test water quality in the early 2000s that didn’t involve harvesting shellfish, UC Santa Cruz’ Raphael Kudela and his team of researchers quickly adopted the idea. After some fine-tuning, they named their new technique Solid Phase Adsorption Toxin Testing (SPATT, for short). The technique takes advantage of custom-built plastic, or resin, beads that are designed to absorb specific things. “It looks a lot like a tea bag,” says Kudela. So far, SPATT has been used to measure water quality from the Santa Cruz Wharf to the Berkeley Marina and at the mouths of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers.
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19
Mar

Tracking Curlews Cross-Country

This winter, Jay Carlisle, director of the Intermountain Bird Observatory, teaming with Nils Warnock of Audubon Canyon Ranch and netting expert David Newstead of Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program, caught two long-billed curlews and outfitted them with transmitters. Those birds may reveal where the wintering curlews on the California coast and Bayshore are coming from.“It’s such a habitat generalist that adapts well to humans,” Carlisle notes...
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19
Mar

Taking a Break from the Corps

Corte Madera creek is an outsized problem for people in Ross and other towns built right up to its banks. “Our peaceful creek turns into a rushing torrent in winter,” says Chris Martin, who grew up in the small Marin County town. Finding a fix has been contentious since 1971, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put a mile-long concrete flood control channel through Ross.
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19
Mar

Rebooting the Klamath

In 2002, more than 70,000 adult salmon died on the Klamath River when U.S. Bureau of Reclamation diversions caused water temperatures to spike. In February, the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, including the Yurok and Karuk Tribes, filed to take over management of four hydroelectric dams in the upper watershed. “There’s never been a project that has considered removing four dams at the same time on the same river...
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19
Mar

Dam Tweaks Yield Results

By Alastair Bland “After one year of flows, we’re seeing lots of rainbow trout,” says Brian Sak of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC). For the first time ever, cold water is flowing steadily through Calaveras Dam in southern Alameda County, and into the creek canyon below. The return of rainbow trout to Calaveras Creek marks a milestone in an ongoing, multi-agency restoration of Alameda Creek, which drains more than 600 square miles of the East Bay. Since the dam’s construction in 1925 by the Spring Valley Water Company, no measurable flows have been allowed through the barrier. But facing legal action, the SFPUC agreed to overhaul its operations in the interests of steelhead recovery as part of its...
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19
Mar

Regulatory Teams Coordinate

By Cariad Hayes Thronson In March the San Francisco Estuary Partnership released its Wetlands Regional Monitoring Program Plan, which lays out the science framework for a long-term program to monitor tidal wetlands around the Bay. “The focus of the plan is how we’re going to answer five guiding questions about the status and trends of our tidal wetlands,” says the Partnership’s Heidi Nutters. The framework is only the first phase of what will ultimately be a four-year planning process. Nutters says the team planning for wetlands monitoring is also working closely with the Bay Restoration Regulatory and Integration Team (BRRIT), which comprises representatives from each of the agencies that permit projects.
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19
Mar

Where have all the Herring Gone?

Pete has fished San Francisco Bay for nearly all of his 60 years. A lifelong San Francisco resident who keeps his last name to himself, he recalls herring runs in the 1970s the likes of which rarely, if ever, occur anymore. “I remember herring spawns that went from Oyster Point all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge,” says Pete, a former commercial fisherman, referring to the point near Brisbane. He also remembers massive spawns that stretched contiguously from the Tiburon peninsula out the Golden Gate to Point Bonita. Today, the fish still return. Each year between December and March, schools of Pacific herring, Clupea pallasii, lay and fertilize their eggs in the Bay’s shallow waters. When the fish gather...
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19
Mar

Sustaining Pajaro Valley’s Water

The farms that create the economic engine of Pajaro Valley operate at different scales. Some growers are small, while others have labels you might recognize from the grocery store: Martinellis, Driscolls, California Giant, to name a few. Regardless of the amount of acreage under management, one thing that the farmers share is that most of their water comes from the ground. How to best handle the area’s diminishing supply of groundwater has occupied local water managers for decades.
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19
Mar

Opening the Mouth of Walnut Creek

Paul Detjens is driving us from his Martinez office to a restoration site near the mouth of Walnut Creek on Suisun Bay, a project he spearheads as an engineer for the Contra Costa County Flood Control District. These lower reaches of the creek — straightened, widened, and leveed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — have been a sluggish, silt-filled problem for more than half a century. Detjens has worked to find a solution for the last 17 years. Now that the district has taken the unusual approach of parting ways with the Corps in favor of local control, a fix is finally in sight. Goals include protecting people from floods, restoring habitat, reconnecting the creek with its historical...
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19
Mar

Network Listens for Passing Salmon

It’s a cold morning in early February, and Chris Vallee of the U.S. Geological Survey is motoring upriver along Steamboat Slough. Vallee and his team are here to maintain an array of hydrophones used to track migrating native fish. The work is part of a multi-agency effort to provide more timely and detailed information about the movements of salmon, steelhead, and sturgeon in the Central Valley.
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05
Mar

Dennis McEwan finished work on the 430-acre Yolo Flyway Farms Tidal Habitat Restoration Project in September 2018. A month later, he retired.

The timing was no accident; he’d delayed his departure from the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) to see the project through after helping to launch it ten years earlier. But even from the very beginning of his career, McEwan had been committed to doing all he could for declining species in and around the Delta. That “calling,” as he put it, began with 25 years at the California Department of Fish and Game (now Fish and Wildlife) supporting Pacific salmon and steelhead trout—including protecting valuable freshwater habitat upstream of the Delta and helping to get the coho salmon listed under the California Endangered Species Act. In 2007, McEwan jumped to DWR and was soon leading an effort to restore...
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05
Mar

A career spent monitoring imperiled fish has given Randy Baxter a strong sense of the vulnerability of aquatic ecosystems.

“We’ve overtaxed the system,” he says. Baxter officially retired from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife last August, but still works two or three days a week as a “reemployed annuitant”—a big change from supervising a staff of 14 studying the threatened longfin smelt and other native fish. The reduced schedule gives him more time to fish, in California and on British Columbia’s Skeena River, and tend his orchids and carnivorous plants. Chicago-born Baxter grew up in Pacifica with San Pedro Creek in his back yard; watching fish from the creek bank sparked a lifelong interest that led him to a bachelor’s degree from Humboldt State University’s fisheries program and a master’s thesis on salmon spawning behavior. An early...
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05
Mar

Jan Thompson has always been most interested in what happens down at the bottom of the Bay.

The zone of interaction between the critters in the oozes and the water column above—where specks of sediment, nutrients, and fish food cycle through clam siphons into the Estuary—is the particular specialty of this US Geological Survey scientist. “I’m most proud of the research I’ve done establishing a solid connection between bivalve grazing and phytoplankton growth,” she says. When USGS first hired Thompson, who retired in October 2019, most women in the Menlo Park office were secretaries. She’s since trained dozens of female and minority scientists, and also received the Survey’s first ever diversity award. “I learned a lot from hiring a bunch of kids who weren’t like me,” says Thompson, who describes herself as “middleclass white bread.” As a...
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05
Mar

After nearly 30 years in refuge management on public lands, Anne Morkill is leaving government, but not wildlife, behind.

Following her February 2020 retirement from managing the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge Complex, which she led for nearly a decade, Morkill is taking the helm at the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation, a nonprofit that stewards one of the largest freshwater wetlands complexes on the northern California coast. Morkill believes that San Francisco Bay provides unusual potential for restoring habitat for wildlife in a highly urban environment. “That’s what makes it so special,” she says, citing the Bay Area’s history of environmental activism, the broad coalition of groups that support wetland restoration for both its ecological and economic benefits, and a citizenry that recognizes the value of a healthy ecosystem and is willing to provide funding to achieve...
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05
Mar

Bob Fujimura spent his entire career with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Bob Fujimura spent his entire career with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. From 1987 until his retirement in late 2018, Fujimura served in a variety of roles at the department—but he is likely best known for heading up its long-term monitoring of native fishes in the Bay and Delta. Beginning in the mid-2000s, he oversaw annual smelt surveys with far-reaching implications for management and conservation, including the Spring Kodiak Trawl, which determines the relative abundance and distribution of spawning Delta smelt; the Smelt Larva Survey, which provides near real-time distribution data for longfin smelt larvae; and the 20mm Survey, which tracks post-larval juvenile Delta smelt throughout their historical spring range. “My goal was to provide good science throughout...
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