Day

October 12, 2022
12
Oct

The Long Haul to Restore San Joaquin Spring-Run Chinook

When a team of fish biologists was tasked with restoring spring-run Chinook salmon in the San Joaquin River in 2006, none of them quite knew where to begin. The riverbed had been parched for so long that someone even built a house in it. The salmon that once thronged up-river by the hundreds of thousands had vanished, and there was no precedent for jumpstarting a population from scratch.
Read More
12
Oct

Rocky Road to a Fresh Enough Delta

Nothing reveals just how much the upper Estuary's seesaw of tides and freshwater flows is micro-managed than prolonged drought, and the resulting fiddling with barriers, gates, and water quality standards to prevent the ocean tides and salinity from intruding too far upstream. Come summer, managers begin to talk fearfully of "losing control of the Delta" and the dreaded outcome: salt water too near the export pumps...
Read More
12
Oct

Science in Short: The Hullabaloo About HABS

Dead fish belly up in Lake Merritt and San Francisco Bay this past August sent scientists like Keith Bouma-Gregson scrambling to pinpoint the cause. A harmful bloom of marine algae had taken up residence in the Bay. Bouma-Gregson discusses his observations of the event in this podcast.
Read More
12
Oct

Key Facility’s Fuzzy Future

There are 14 marine laboratories in California. Just one of them is on San Francisco Bay: the Estuary and Ocean Science Center (EOS), on the rugged eastern shore of the Tiburon Peninsula in Marin County. EOS has trained generations of leading figures in estuary science and management. It possesses a site and facilities that no possible alternative could match. The research community swears by it. And in two years it might close. In the 1970s, after decades as a U.S. Navy property, the 53-acre parcel was considered for inclusion in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Instead, in 1977, it passed—for one dollar—to San Francisco State University (SFSU). But the bargain has devolved into a burden, and today a budget...
Read More
12
Oct

South Bay Fish Fight

Two decades after the South Bay’s main water supplier agreed to restore aquatic habitat in the streams that flow from its reservoirs, fish in the region remain in dire straits, and local river advocates say it’s the Santa Clara Valley Water District’s fault. Chinook salmon and steelhead in Coyote Creek, Stevens Creek, and the Guadalupe River remain as scarce as ever.
Read More
12
Oct

Resurrecting the Carmel River Floodplain

When the storm hit, it was lucky that my parents had a habit of leaving one car on each side of the Carmel River as they commuted from Big Sur into Monterey each day. The 1995 El Niño rainfall had pushed the Carmel River into hundreds of homes, and destroyed the Highway 1 bridge that connected Big Sur with the rest of the world. Most Big Sur residents were trapped during the week it took the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to repair the freeway bridge. But in the era before Zoom, my mother couldn’t just stay home from nursing school. So my parents trekked past the mud of submerged artichoke fields on the river’s south bank and onto the...
Read More
12
Oct

Drought Strains Stormwater Monitoring Endeavors

When it rains, it pours. This old saw passes for an apt description of the new precipitation regime that climate change has wrought for the Bay Area: larger winter storms, but fewer of them. The implications of this shift for ecosystems, infrastucture, and water storage are widespread, and often highly visible. But behind the scenes, it is also complicating efforts to monitor pollution inputs to the San Francisco Bay and other local water bodies from stormwater runoff. The Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality in San Francisco Bay (RMP) has been collecting data in Bay water, sediment, and biota since 1993. RMP monitoring of stormwater flows after rain events, which began in 2006, has shown that runoff is a major...
Read More