The current drought has focused and renewed discussion about how California curtails water rights when water availability is insufficient. Prior to the 2013-14 water year, the most recent curtailment effort dates back almost 40 years to 1976-77. Since then, many changes and advances have occurred in water use, policies, and technology. New complica...
Scientists have identified 181 California dams that may need to increase water flows to protect native fish downstream. The screening tool, developed by the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis, to select \textquotedbllefthigh-priority\textquotedblright dams may be particularly useful during drought years amid compet...
Published in BioScience
Environmental flow protections are crucial to the conservation of freshwater biodiversity in dam-regulated river systems. Nevertheless, the implementation of environmental flows has lagged far behind the pace of river ecosystem alteration. The vast number of dams now in operation and the substantial resources required to modify their operations sug...
Table of California water rights allocation volumes and percentages relative to supplies for about 100 river basins.
Published in San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science
Climate change is expected to progressively shift the freshwater environments of the San Francisco Bay Area (SFBA) to states that favor alien fishes over native species. Native species likely will have more limited distributions and some may be extirpated. Stream-dependent species may decline as portions of streams dry or become warmer due to lower...
Published in Environmental Research Letters
For 100 years, Californias State Water Resources Control Board and its predecessors have been responsible for allocating available water supplies to beneficial uses, but inaccurate and incomplete accounting of water rights has made the state ill-equipped to satisfy growing societal demands for water supply reliability and healthy ecosystems. Here, ...
A regional breakdown of the estimated economic impact of the 2014 drought on California agriculture. This is an expansion of Table 5 in Howitt et al. (2014).
This report updates estimates on the drought\textquoterights effects on Central Valley farm production, presents new data on the state\textquoterights coastal and southern farm areas, and forecasts the drought\textquoterights economic fallout through 2016.The study found that the drought — the third most severe on record — is responsible for the gr...
Published in PLoS ONE
Understanding factors influencing survival of Pacific salmonids (Oncorhynchus spp.) is essential to species conservation, because drivers of mortality can vary over multiple spatial and temporal scales. Although recent studies have evaluated the effects of climate, habitat quality, or resource management (e.g., hatchery operations) on salmonid recr...
Published in Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
Water systems in snowmelt-dominated hydro-regions such as California\textquoterights Sierra Nevada mountains are sensitive to regional climate change, hydropower systems in particular. In this study, a water resources management model was developed for the upper west slope Sierra Nevada to understand the potential effects of regional climate warmin...
