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.

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
​

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.

The Department of Water Resources in partnership with The Nature Conservancy have recently launched the Groundwater Resource Hub, the go-to place for information on groundwater dependent ecosystems. There are a number of tools on the site, including the database of indicators of groundwater dependent ecosystems (GDEs) and a guidance document to guide groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) to address GDEs in their plans.

Access to the iGDE database can be found HERE. 

by Ellen Hanak, Jelena Jezdimirovic, Sarge Green, Alvar Escriva-Bou

SummaryThe San Joaquin Valley—which has the biggest imbalance between groundwater pumping and replenishment in the state—is ground zero for implementing the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). Expanding groundwater recharge could help local water users bring their basins into balance and make a dent in the long-term deficit of nearly 2 million acre-feet per year. The experience with recharge in 2017―the first wet year since the enactment of SGMA―offers valuable insights in how to expand recharge. A survey of valley water districts’ current recharge efforts revealed strong interest in the practice, and a number of constraints. The following actions are needed to better capitalize on future opportunities:

• Clarify rules on water available for recharge. The State Water Board needs to develop an expeditious process for enabling water users to capture surface water when it is available. Beyond the legal aspects of establishing rights for diversion and storage, an essential part of this process is technical: developing a simple, rapid way to determine when river flows exceed water required for environmental purposes and downstream users.
• Evaluate infrastructure capacity. One of the key challenges for expanding recharge is that most available flows are in the northern part of the valley, while most of the overdraft―and best recharge lands―are in the south. In addition, these flows are mainly available for just a few months. A top priority is to evaluate opportunities for improving the use of existing infrastructure (conveyance facilities, surface reservoirs, and recharge basins) and determine where additional investments are warranted. A big bottleneck is likely to be regional conveyance, which is inadequate for capturing and moving high flows to suitable recharge locations.
• Improve recharge on farmland. Active recharge on farmland may be one of the most promising ways to capture water cost-effectively in wetter years, but it is low relative to its potential. Significantly ramping up this practice will require addressing a suite of technical issues and establishing incentives.
• Address regulatory barriers. State and federal agencies need to improve processes for approving construction of new recharge projects, moving recharge water through their conveyance facilities, and enabling more flexibility in where water is stored. Water managers and growers also need guidelines from the state for implementing on-farm recharge in ways that are consistent with water quality rules.
• Strengthen groundwater accounting. Better accounting of water going into and out of groundwater basins is key to sustainable management. It is also needed for developing incentives for growers to recharge, encouraging recharge partnerships, and informing decisions on new investments.

Making the most of recharge opportunities will require high levels of cooperation among a wide variety of stakeholders. Local and regional partnerships―for capturing and moving water efficiently, making new investments, and devising projects that bring multiple benefits―are key to helping the region manage this critical resource over the long-term.

​You can read the report in full HERE. 

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.

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. 

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.
​
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.