Bay Area native Kathleen M. Wong is a science writer specializing in the natural history and environment of California and the West. With Ariel Rubissow Okamoto, she coauthored Natural History of San Francisco Bay (UC Press, 2011), for which she shared the 2013 Harold Gilliam Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting. She reports on native species, climate change, and environmental conditions for Estuary, and is the science writer of the University of California Natural Reserve System.
My favorite writing for Estuary News has enabled me to witness firsthand people’s heroic efforts to enable humans, plants, and wildlife to thrive alongside one another again in the San Francisco Bay-Delta. I rose in the dark to traipse through Mowry Marsh behind biologists conducting the first region-wide survey of endangered salt marsh harvest mice. I peered into bubbling tanks at the UC Davis Fish Conservation and Culture Laboratory to admire Delta smelt whose futures are murky if efforts to revive their habitat aren’t successful. I’ve quashed pervasive seasickness to accompany scientists into the Delta to track the passage of migrating Chinook in real time. These immersive reporting experiences helped me to evoke the reality of conservation work, and the...Read More
It’s five in the morning, and Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge remains in the tight velvet grip of night. All is peaceful and quiet, despite the fact that the toll plaza of the Dumbarton Bridge is less than a quarter-mile away. By 5:15, car dome lights and slamming doors have transformed this lonely spot at the watery edge of Newark into a hub of activity. People are taking last sips of coffee, strapping headlamps to their foreheads, and swapping civilian footwear for rubber muck boots. The occasion that’s roused everyone from bed more than an hour before sunrise? The first survey of the salt marsh harvest mouse conducted across the rodent’s entire San Francisco Bay-centered range. In...Read More
As a source of flowing water, upper Coyote Creek is unreliable at best. Though storms swell its banks in winter, Mediterranean-climate summers shrink this South Bay stream to a series of isolated pools by August. “By October right before the rains come, we’re down to these really small pools that have all the fish in them,” says retired U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ecologist Rob Leidy. Leidy and UC Berkeley fish ecologist Stephanie Carlson began monitoring the annual dry-down of upper Coyote Creek in 2014, with the help of Hana Moidu and other graduate students. The creek itself originates in Henry W. Coe State Park and flows to the Bay through Coyote and Anderson lakes south of San Jose. The scientists...Read More
The CRISPR technique used to edit DNA has been formulated into a tool that can distinguish between similar-looking California fish species for conservation research. Called SHERLOCK (Specific High-sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter unLOCKing), the tool can tell the difference between species with speed and accuracy. Better yet, it is both inexpensive and can be run while researchers are in the field. “It puts the power in the hands of the field biologist to make the most informed decision versus waiting sometimes days or weeks for lab results,” says Melinda Baerwald, an environmental program manager with the California Department of Water Resources. Traditionally, scientists wishing to verify the identity of a salmon or a smelt had to send samples of fish tissue to...Read More
Such practices also hasten the destruction of an important and dwindling habitat. Melissa Rohde of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF) and colleagues analyzed five years of high-resolution satellite and water resource data showing vegetation greenness along California rivers. Trees growing alongside the 30 percent of state rivers with natural flows decreased in greenness from the wet spring through the dry summer months, the scientists report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrating they rely on groundwater to make it through the dry season. By contrast, woodlands along the 70% of streams receiving water from dams, wastewater treatment plants, and other human sources kept up the same vigorous levels of...Read More
Miniscule polymer pieces the size of a sesame seed or tinier, microplastics pose a growing pollution threat to marine environments worldwide. To understand how microplastics accumulate in nearshore, urbanized environments, researchers quantified the prevalence of microplastics in and around the Zostera marina meadows of Deerness Sound, in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. Mark Hartl and colleagues at Heriot-Watt University found that microplastic flakes, fibers, and fragments were twice as concentrated in the water above eelgrass meadows as in adjacent control areas of sandy sediments. Sediments within the meadows contained 40% more microplastics than in the sandy areas. The scientists also found plastics attached to every one of the 60 blades of eelgrass they examined; in fact, microplastics were 20% more...Read More
A resurgence of dinoflagellates, which can cause harmful algal blooms, may be in the cards for some bays along the U.S. West Coast. Scientists at UC Santa Cruz have been monitoring phytoplankton weekly at the town’s Municipal Wharf since 2002. In 2018, Alexis Fischer, then a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz, augmented these observations with an Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) that photographed wharf phytoplankton hourly. She also developed a machine learning classification algorithm to automate identification of the organisms. In 2004-2007 and 2017-2018, the scientists noticed that diatoms, typically dominant, were getting upstaged by dinoflagellates. To get to the root of this role switch, Fischer examined local and regional environmental patterns. She now reports in Limnology and Oceanography that both...Read More
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.Read More
“We know from a decade of doing survival studies that migrating juvenile salmon are dropping out of the system pretty much everywhere in the Delta,” says UC Santa Cruz fisheries biologist Brendan Lehman. “Physical habitat features are potentially aggregating predators and prey in ways detrimental to salmon smolts and steelhead.” The scientists report in the December 2019 San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science that artificial light and submerged aquatic vegetation pose the most severe and widespread risks to native fishes. Plants like Brazilian waterweed form dense underwater mats across vast reaches of the Delta. These mats have nurtured a rise in predatory bass populations and force prey fish into exposed channel centers. The artificial lighting pervasive along docks and buildings...Read More
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...Read More
The Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) takes water samples around the clock and photographs phytoplankton cells floating within. “It’s got a huge amount of potential for figuring out what plankton is in the water column and monitoring for HABs,” says Alexis Fischer, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz with Raphael Kudela. Fischer and colleagues are building a phytoplankton image classifier already capable of identifying more than 90 percent of cells photographed by IFCB at the Santa Cruz Wharf. The bad actors really stand out in the crowd, Fischer says. “Many of the harmful algal bloom species tend to be larger and more uniquely shaped, which fortunately makes it easier for our classifier to distinguish them.” Phytoplankton from San Francisco...Read More
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.Read More
For three years, Kyle Hemes of UC Berkeley and colleagues kept tabs on the heat flux and air flow above three restored Delta wetlands on Twitchell and Sherman islands, and an alfalfa field on Twitchell Island. Surface temperatures at wetlands with open water were up to 5.1 degrees Celsius cooler than the crop field during the daytime. As expected, the dark open water absorbed more solar radiation, and released the energy slowly at night. But wetland vegetation played a role as well. The tall, uneven surfaces of tule and cattail stands, and their patchy distribution, hastened the movement of heat away from the land surface. “Whereas we’re often focused on the greenhouse gas reduction benefits of restoration, the significant cooling...Read More
The culprit behind poisoned seabirds, closed crab fisheries, stranded sea lions, and shellfish poisoning in humans are often diatoms producing the neurotoxin domoic acid. Now, scientists have identified the genes and biochemical processes responsible in diatoms of the genus Pseudo-nitzschia. The finding, published in the journal Science, opens the door to rapid genetic monitoring of algal blooms as a means to spot nascent harmful blooms and track their spread. “By identifying the genes that encode domoic acid production, we are now able to ask questions about what ocean conditions turn these genes on or off,” said lead author Patrick Brunson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The achievement comes not a moment too soon: with algal blooms getting larger and...Read More
Zalophus californianus have traditionally preferred nurseries in the Channel Islands, but the population of pups born off Northern California’s coast began skyrocketing in 2016. Births at both sites went from a few dozen pups to more than 500. The trend has only intensified since; more than a thousand pups born at the Farallones, and between 500 and 700 at Año Nuevo, in 2017 according to NOAA; similar numbers are expected this year, although final counts are not yet available. Such high census numbers are unprecedented since robust surveys began in 1975. The move appears to coincide with the onset of “the blob,” a marine heat wave that formed off the California coast starting in 2014. California sea lions prey on...Read More
Two banana-yellow buoys anchored along the Tiburon shore will be San Francisco Bay’s sentinels against shifts in water chemistry due to climate change. Known as the Bay Ocean Buoy (BOB) and the Marine Acidification Research Inquiry (MARI), the permanent moorings will provide long-term monitoring of acidity and carbon dioxide levels—key indicators of how the changing ocean will impact Bay chemistry. “It’s taken over three years of perseverance and partnership building to get these instruments into the water, but now we’ll be able to reveal how ocean acidification may be influencing SF Bay now and in the future,” says Karina Nielsen, a San Francisco State Professor of Biology and Director of the Estuary and Ocean Science Center, where the one of...Read More
Cold water, essential for the life cycle of Chinook salmon, is all too often in short supply along the Sacramento River. Two clever innovations have been implemented to conserve cold water into the autumn. First: A 300 foot tall, 250 foot wide “adjustable straw” possessing a series of intake gates enables power plant operators to draw water from behind the dam at three different depths. Second: A 40 foot tall rubber sheet.Read More
These include lobster, black bass, and Atlantic cod, all of which have supported iconic fisheries along the Eastern seaboard of the United States. “Ocean animals are moving ten times faster than animals fleeing climate change on land,” says Rutgers University marine biologist Malin Pinsky, whose Rutgers OceanAdapt website enables visitors to explore changes in marine species distributions over recent decades. These range shifts are causing headaches for fishing fleets, which are forced to head farther out to sea or hundreds of miles further from home ports. But fishes moving north face a catch-22: Water absorbs carbon dioxide more readily when cold, meaning rising greenhouse gas concentrations are causing the oceans to acidify much faster at the poles. KMWRead More
Phytophthora is difficult to detect in nurseries, plant materials, and planting sites until it has done its damage. To develop early-detection options, H.T. Harvey and Associates are training a female cattle dog/border collie mix named Bolt to sniff out Phytophthora. Part of the Harvey Dog ecological-scent detection program, Bolt has accurately identified four species of Phytophthora in the lab. If her training in a natural setting is successful, Bolt could get to work helping minimize the spread of Phytophthora. Potential beneficiaries would likely include those working to re-oak the parks, open spaces, and backyards of Silicon Valley to improve habitat for native plants and animals. KMWRead More
Off a bustling Delta highway, next door to a branch of the California Aqueduct, sprawls a tidy collection of shipping containers, humming pumps, and cylindrical tanks. This resolutely artificial site is devoted to preserving a disappearing piece of natural California: the Delta smelt. “Our fish are a refuge population,” says Tien-Chieh Hung...Read More
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.