On-Farm Recharge of Annual Crops Brochure

​GROUNDWATER RECHARGE TO BENEFIT PEOPLE AND WILDLIFE
With the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) requiring basins to balance water budgets and manage groundwater sustainably, there is an opportunity to demonstrate groundwater recharge with benefits to birds and people.

A multiple-benefit approach brings together water managers, farmers, agencies and conservation groups to stabilize groundwater in a manner that provides greater water reliability for farms and communities while protecting ecosystems, including migratory bird habitat.

WHAT ARE WE DOING?
The Migratory Bird Conservation Partnership is developing resources to help landowners incorporate multiple benefits into groundwater recharge projects. This includes working with farmers, water management agencies, and other partners to identify how recharge on annual crop fields can also provide bird habitat. Our goal is to develop the resources that will help landowners implement multiple-benefit recharge projects where it matters most.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?
Talk to your community, other farmers and local agency staff about a multiple-benefit approach to replenishing groundwater. Collaborate with us to evaluate the benefits and tradeoffs of managing annual cropland for birds and groundwater recharge. If you are interested in collaborating, please reach out by calling or emailing Samantha Arthur, sarthur@audubon.org, (916) 737- 5707. 

The Nature Conservancy has recently created a map overlaying GDEs and GSA boundaries. The map allows users to view where GDEs are located in their sub-basin, as well as the dominant species in each GDE. This map is a complement to the iGDE mapping mentioned below, which includes a document explaining the source of the data in the database.
 
If stakeholders, GSAs or consultants are interested in learning more about how to comply with requirements to consider GDEs, we are offering an interactive workshop at the Groundwater Resources Association Western Groundwater Conference. The workshop is on Sept. 26 from 2:30-5pm and registration is required.

If there are any questions related to any of this information, please feel free to contact me or Susan Tatayon, statayon@tnc.org.

From the workshop registration page:
"SGMA empowers local agencies to sustainably manage groundwater to benefit California’s communities, economy, and diverse natural resources.  To do this, SGMA requires local agencies to develop groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs) that consider the impacts of groundwater use on a variety of beneficial uses and users including people, business, and the environment.  SGMA also includes specific requirements to identify and consider impacts to groundwater dependent ecosystems (GDEs) in groundwater management.  Recognizing data and resource limitations, The Nature Conservancy has developed a GDE indicators mapping database in partnership with the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) and Department of Fish and Wildlife,  as well as a guidance document designed to help agencies identify where GDEs exist, determine whether potential effects on GDEs are occurring or may occur due to groundwater conditions, and consider GDEs when setting sustainable management criteria.  These tools provide a systematic and defensible approach that takes advantage of local, statewide, and best available scientific information to inform local decision making. This hands-on workshop will walk attendees through the GDE indicators mapping database (hosted by DWR as the “Natural Communities Commonly Associated with Groundwater dataset”) and GDE guidance document.  This is your opportunity to do a preliminary assessment of the GDEs in your basin with support from TNC and other practitioners.  Whether you are a board member on a GSA, a consultant developing a GSP, or an interested stakeholder trying to understand how GDEs fit into GSPs – this is the workshop for you!
MUST BE A REGISTERED CONGRESS ATTENDEE TO ATTEND
There is no additional charge for this workshop but space is limited so please RSVP  in order to save yourself a seat."

​Groundwater pumping chronically exceeds natural recharge in many agricultural regions in California. A common method of recharging groundwater — when surface water is available — is to deliberately flood an open area, allowing water to percolate into an aquifer. However, open land suitable for this type of recharge is scarce. Flooding agricultural land during fallow or dormant periods has the potential to increase groundwater recharge substantially, but this approach has not been well studied. Using data on soils, topography and crop type, we developed a spatially explicit index of the suitability for groundwater recharge of land in all agricultural regions in California. We identified 3.6 million acres of agricultural land statewide as having Excellent or Good potential for groundwater recharge. The index provides preliminary guidance about the locations where groundwater recharge on agricultural land is likely to be feasible. A variety of institutional, infrastructure and other issues must also be addressed before this practice can be implemented widely.

​Please continue to read the research article in full HERE. 

As general manager of a water district that serves about 27,000 agricultural acres in the southern San Joaquin Valley, Eric Averett knows the solutions to the region’s water shortages are fairly straight-forward.
He speaks of two knobs that valley water users can turn. One controls supply, and the other  demand.
In past years, Averett says he figuratively had his hand slapped by his Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District board whenever he tried to adjust the knob that affected the supply of water to growers. But as droughts, surface water cutbacks and groundwater overdrafts confront districts throughout the Central Valley, all solutions are now on the table.
“Throughout the valley, we’re going to end up turning both knobs in the future,” Averett said during a recent panel discussion on the valley’s water future.
In short, experts believe the only way to bring the valley’s overburdened water supplies into balance will be to increase supply, mainly by making the most of available water, and reduce demand. And part of reducing demand may well be the voluntary fallowing of agricultural land.
“For some of our hardest-hit areas, the idling of agricultural land is going to be a reality,” says Abbey Hart, the agriculture project director for The Nature Conservancy. She adds that growers may see an economic benefit for converting land into wildlife habitat, but the process will have to be well planned. A checkerboard approach to creating habitat won’t work, she says.
“A lot of these species won’t be able to use tiny patches of land,” Hart told about 200 growers and others at the water forum in early May, sponsored by the Almond Board of California.

Please continue to read in full HERE.

hen John Wick and his wife, Peggy Rathmann, bought their ranch in Marin County, Calif., in 1998, it was mostly because they needed more space. Rathmann is an acclaimed children’s book author — “Officer Buckle and Gloria” won a Caldecott Medal in 1996 — and their apartment in San Francisco had become cluttered with her illustrations. They picked out the 540-acre ranch in Nicasio mostly for its large barn, which they planned to remake into a spacious studio. Wick, a former construction foreman — they met when he oversaw a renovation of her bathroom — was eager to tackle the project. He knew the area well, having grown up one town away, in Woodacre, where he had what he describes as a “free-range” childhood: little supervision and lots of biking, rope-swinging and playing in the area’s fields and glens.
The couple quickly settled into their bucolic new surroundings. Wick began fixing leaks in the barn. Rathmann loved watching the many animals, including ravens, deer and the occasional gopher, from the large porch. She even trained the resident towhees, small brown birds, to eat seed from her hand. So smitten were they with the wildlife, in fact, that they decided to return their ranch to a wilder state. For nearly a century, this had been dairy country, and the rounded, coastal hills were terraced from decades of grazing. Wick and Rathmann would often come home and find, to their annoyance, cows standing on their porch. The first step they took toward what they imagined would be a more pristine state was to revoke the access enjoyed by the rancher whose cows wandered their property.
Within months of the herd’s departure, the landscape began to change. Brush encroached on meadow. Dried-out, uneaten grass hindered new growth. A mysterious disease struck their oak trees. The land seemed to be losing its vitality. “Our vision of wilderness was failing,” Wick told me recently. “Our naïve idea was not working out so well.”
Wick was especially bothered by the advance of a prickly, yellow-flowered invasive weed called the woolly distaff thistle. He pulled it, mowed it, doused it with herbicides. But the distaff kept moving into what had been pasture. He thought about renting goats to eat the weeds and brush, but they were too expensive. He even considered introducing wild elk, but the bureaucratic hurdles seemed too onerous.
Then Wick and Rathmann met a rangeland ecologist named Jeff Creque. Instead of fighting against what you dislike, Creque suggested, focus on cultivating what you want. Squeeze out weeds by fostering conditions that favor grasses. Creque, who spent 25 years as an organic-pear-and-apple farmer in Northern California before earning a Ph.D. in rangeland ecology, also recommended that they bring back the cows. Grasslands and grazing animals, he pointed out, had evolved together. Unlike trees, grasses don’t shed their leaves at the end of the growing season; they depend on animals for defoliation and the recycling of nutrients. The manure and urine from grazing animals fuels healthy growth. If done right, Creque said, grazing could be restorative.

Please continue to read in full at The New York Times.

via The Nature Conservancy:

California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) established a framework for sustainable, local groundwater management. SGMA requires groundwater-dependent regions to halt overdraft and bring basins into balanced levels of pumping and recharge. As a result, agricultural land retirement is on the rise in the San Joaquin Valley, California’s largest agricultural region and home to the state's highest concentration of threatened and endangered species. In this assessment, The Nature Conservancy introduces the concept of strategic land retirement and restoration, an approach which seeks to help recover San Joaquin Valley threatened and endangered species by restoring agricultural land that is suitable as habitat and under threat of retirement. The authors identify 2.5 million acres of current agricultural lands that have high potential for restoration, 14% of which was fallowed at least once during the most recent drought. 

From the SJV Greenprint Phase II Summary Report:

"The San Joaquin Valley (SJV) is one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions; is a vital link in California’s complex water delivery and transportation systems; provides important habitat to protect biodiversity; and is a center for oil and solar energy production. The region has a unique set of assets and challenges related to its agricultural land, growing population centers, biodiversity, energy production, and water availability.

The San Joaquin Valley Greenprint project grew out of the San Joaquin Valley Blueprint... The Blueprint focused on urban challenges, particularly the relationship of land use to transportation, and developed a set of smart growth principles that should minimize development impacts on the non-urban lands of the Valley. The Blueprint revealed the need for better regional mapping of the Valley’s non-urban areas to assist land use and resource management decisions...

The SJV Greenprint is primarily a collection of maps, assembled as a comprehensive, interactive database that catalogs current conditions and trends related to the region’s resources. The maps and data collected for the SJV Greenprint are publicly available through the San Joaquin Valley Data Basin Gateway (http://sjvp.databasin.org)... The collection demonstrates how these resources are interrelated across political boundaries and how they are changing under the influence of population growth, changing land use practices, resource limitations, and changing climate. 

Phase I of the Greenprint focused on identifying and mapping Valley resources for the eight counties that comprise the San Joaquin Valley, including Kern, Tulare, Kings, Fresno, Madera, Merced, Stanislaus, and San Joaquin Counties... The compiled information includes over 100 datasets related to agriculture, biodiversity, energy, and water resources, as well as supplemental datasets including land use planning, transportation, soils, and land cover...

Phase II of the SJV Greenprint was intended to build on and extend the work in Phase I by demonstrating the real world utility of this information. The Demonstration Projects, described in Section IV, serve as case studies for the use of Greenprint data. A second objective of Phase II was to find an appropriate platform for these curated resources, specifically a host that could provide a user-friendly interface as well as the capacity to update and maintain the data. The San Joaquin Valley Gateway, hosted by Data Basin, was identified as the best platform... A third objective of Phase II was to shed light on key questions and insights into various resource management challenges in the Valley through outreach to experts, regional councils of government, and county planning directors...

Please continue to read the SJV Phase II Summary Report in full HERE. 

Sustainable California
Premiere Date: 5/5/2017 | from University of California Television

How researchers at UC Merced are developing a better understanding of the three sources of water upon which California depends in order to adapt to the effects of environmental changes and make better use of this most precious of our natural resources.