The CA Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) Proposition 1 Watershed Restoration Grant Program Solicitation Notice has been released. The due date for the application is June 13, 2018.
The purpose of the Watershed Restoration Grant Program is to build resiliency and address immediate issues from the aftermath of recent wildfires, as well as address long-standing environmental challenges, by supporting water quality, river, and watershed protection and restoration projects of statewide importance outside the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Funds will support planning or implementation projects that address at least one of the following priorities:

• Central Valley salmon resilience and recovery: shovel-ready implementation projects that focus on Central Valley anadromous fish habitat restoration and that benefit salmonids and other native and anadromous fishes
• Large-scale wildfire recovery response: planning and implementation projects in fire-damaged watersheds that will contribute to restoration and recovery of stream and riparian habitats, prevent erosion, protect and improve water quality, and prevent potential future negative ecosystem effects
• Restoration project implementation: shovel-ready implementation projects that contribute to the recovery and conservation of special status species and protect, restore, or enhance important ecosystems identified in the California Water Action Plan (CWAP)

Examples of eligible projects include:

• Installation of fish screens
• Removal of fish barriers and dams
• Prevention of upslope erosion
• Restoration of riparian habitat
• Improvement of water quality for aquatic and riparian species
• Restoration of coastal wetland ecosystems

A workshop for this grant will be held on May 30. For more information see: https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Watersheds/Restoration-Grants
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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. 

​Summary and Conclusions from SRT’s San Joaquin Valley Greenprint Demonstration Project
 
The State of the Valley Report identifies water as “one of the central management challenges of the San Joaquin Valley,” and emphasizes that “[b]oth surface water and water pumped from underground aquifers are critical to the region’s farming, ranching, urban users, industry, and natural ecosystems.”[1]  Implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is just beginning,[2] but the overall dialogue about water sustainability has focused more on technological solutions than on ways to improve the natural ability of watersheds to absorb, store and gradually release water in forms useful to people and the land.  Sequoia Riverlands Trust’s (SRT’s) San Joaquin Valley Greenprint Demonstration Project explores the potential contribution of land-based strategies to watershed effectiveness, usable water supply and groundwater sustainability, focusing on three themes:

• Soil Enhancement and Water Resources;
• Floodwater Threats and Opportunities; and
• Mineral and Water Resources.

 
These approaches are not new.  Many have been extensively researched, incorporated into funding programs and regulatory requirements, and applied to varying degrees.However, relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship of these land-based strategies to effective watershed function and groundwater sustainability.  Sequoia Riverlands Trust applied existing Greenprint data and other information to map areas where these approaches might yield the greatest water-related benefits, and to roughly quantify their potential contribution to groundwater sustainability in the Kaweah and Tule River Watersheds.
 
Our results suggest that practical applications of these strategies could offset at least 25% of the annual groundwater deficit in the Kaweah and Tule River Watersheds by addressing both the supply and demand sides of the water balance equation.  This assertion is based on estimates that:

• Soil organic matter-enhancing land management practices have the potential to increase the effective capture of precipitation by at least 14,500 AF, both reducing the need for supplemental irrigation and increasing the amount of water available for recharge;
• On-farm flooding and recharge could reduce annual groundwater overdrafts by up to 20% based on studies of similar groundwater basins in other parts of the Southern San Joaquin Valley; and
• Projects that restore at least some natural function to modified floodplains (e.g., at reclaimed alluvial mines, streamside areas of farms and ranches, or sites like SRT’s Kaweah Oaks Preserve) could make a measurable contribution to groundwater recharge by slowing floodwaters down and providing larger areas for infiltration.

 
Furthermore, all of these land-based strategies provide additional ecological, economic and community benefits, such as increased agricultural production, flood management, habitat enhancement, drought resilience and aesthetic values, that make them politically palatable alternatives to new dams or regulations about water use.  Water-focusedland conservation, restoration and management strategies therefore deserve serious consideration as we work together to solve our region’s pressing groundwater sustainability concerns.

[1]Thorne et al., 2014.

[2] Cal. Water Code § 10720 et seq.

Please view the project PowerPoint presentation HERE.

IN JUST A few short weeks, Californians have been reminded that drought has an evil twin: flooding.

Droughts in the Golden State often end with floods, as seems to be happening this winter. But the state’s political and economic fortunes always seem to swing between the two, leaving precious little opportunity to explore the terrain where they intersect.

One place that happens is on floodplains. When rivers swell, floodplains absorb the excess flow, protecting cities built along rivers, recharging groundwater and providing vital aquatic habitat – all at the same time. When drought swings back, we can pump out the groundwater to serve farms and neighborhoods.

There are precious few floodplains left in California. Development long ago eliminated all but about 5 percent of the state’s original floodplain wetlands, aided by levee building that forced rivers into narrow channels between fragile levees.

Now a new effort is building to reunite rivers with their floodplains, a movement that could take the sting out of both drought and flooding.

“We’re kind of reimagining the management of groundwater and surface water,” said Graham Fogg, a professor of hydrogeology at University of California, Davis. “The more we look at it, the more optimistic we are that there are ways to do this differently and better.”

A major step in the transition is anticipated later this year, when state officials are expected to approve a new Central Valley Flood Protection Plan. The plan is expected to include a new “conservation strategy” intended to encourage flood safety agencies to incorporate habitat and water supply components in their levee projects.
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What this means, in practice, is floodplain restoration. One way of doing that is to expand narrow river channels by moving levees farther apart. These so-called “setback levees” increase holding capacity for floodwaters between levees, and they also create new riparian habitat.

Continue to read in full HERE. 

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s (“NFWF”) Sacramento District California In-Lieu Fee Program (“ILF Program”) was established in October 2014 and approved by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (“USACE”), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the California State Water Resources Control Board, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, and the Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board (each an “Agency” and collectively the “Agencies”) in accordance with the 2008 Compensatory Mitigation for Losses of Aquatic Resources Final Rule (33 CFR Parts 325 and 332; and 40 CFR Part 230) (the “2008 Rule”).
The ILF Program offers permittees an in-lieu fee option to satisfy their compensatory mitigation obligations as determined by any of the Agencies, as applicable, for impacts to aquatic resources authorized under the Clean Water Act, the Rivers and Harbors Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act, and other applicable laws, in the “Program Area,” which covers the geographic area under the jurisdiction of the Sacramento District of the USACE within California. For reference, the overall Program Area is subdivided under the ILF Program into discrete geographies comprising 17 “Aquatic Resource Service Areas” and 12 “Vernal Pool Service Areas.” The ILF Program offers two types of Credits: 1) Vernal Pool Credits for authorized impacts to vernal pool wetlands; and 2) Aquatic Resource Credits for authorized impacts to wetlands (excluding vernal pools), other Waters of the United States, Waters of the State, and certain species.
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As a result of sales of Aquatic Resource Credits and Vernal Pool Credits to date, NFWF has accumulated certain funds that may be made available to fund projects that establish, enhance, restore, or, in certain circumstances, preserve wetland resources in an applicable Service Area (“ILF Projects”). NFWF is issuing this Request for Proposals (RFP) in order to solicit proposals for the implementation of eligible ILF Projects to be funded through the ILF Program.

Pre-Proposal due date: March 17, 2017
Full Proposal due date: April 21, 2017

More information and the application can be found HERE.