The California Legislature was the first in the country to
protect rare plants and animals through passage of the California
Endangered Species Act (CESA) in 1970, Congress followed suit in
1973 by passing the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA).
The federal ESA aims to, “protect and recover imperiled species
and the ecosystems upon which they depend.”
The state ESA states that, “all native species of fishes,
amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, invertebrates, and plants,
and their habitats, threatened with extinction and those
experiencing a significant decline which, if not halted, would
lead to a threatened or endangered designation, will be protected
or preserved.”
Imperiled species are defined as follows: “Endangered” if it is
in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion
of its range and “threatened” if it is likely to become an
endangered species within the foreseeable future.”
… Sulphur Creek was intended to be part of a movement.
Billions of dollars in former President Biden’s Bipartisan
Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) were
meant to be “a freaking game-changer” for conservation and
climate work in the Bay Area, according to one expert Bay
Nature interviewed when we first began tracking that money
in June 2023. … This legislation has been in the
crosshairs of the Trump administration since before its January
inauguration; early executive actions froze BIL and IRA
funding. … Still, a lot of this money has already been
awarded locally—more than $1.4 billion, in fact, according to
Bay Nature’s reporting. What kind of difference can it still
make—especially as Trump claws back funds and eviscerates
federal natural-resource agencies?
A federal judge declared in a new ruling that the Bureau of
Reclamation can issue permanent water agreements to major
contractors in California — specifically the sprawling
Westlands Water District — without undertaking new
environmental or Endangered Species Act reviews. But
conservation advocates who brought the lawsuit against the
Westland contract said that it does not clear the path forward
for that deal, pointing to a series of claims still pending in
the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.
District Judge Jennifer Thurston, a President Joe Biden
appointee, issued a decision in favor of the Interior
Department on June 30, and subsequently ordered the case,
Center for Biological Diversity, et al., v. U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation, closed last week.
It had been five years since the first of the frog eggs had
been moved, carefully plucked from Mexico’s Baja Peninsula and
transported by cooler to Southern California. Anny
Peralta-Garcia was getting nervous. The eggs belonged to
California red-legged frogs, an amphibian that had been eaten,
bulldozed and eventually pushed out of the state decades
earlier. Peralta-Garcia, an Ensenada-based conservation
biologist, had helped harvest fresh eggs from a pond in Baja.
The efforts to move them back to the frogs’ historic range in
California had been monumental — involving private landowners,
federal agencies, conservation groups, helicopters and an
international border. And now, 87 more moved egg masses later,
everyone was waiting to see if it worked. If the re-introduced
frogs were breeding.
Every spring, tens of thousands of California gulls, some from
the Bay Area, leave their home on the coast for a lengthy
flight over the Sierra Nevada to summer at Mono Lake. There,
the next generation of birds is born. Last year, however,
long-simmering problems with the gull population exploded into
view. The number of chicks that hatched at Mono Lake dropped to
its lowest level on record: just 324 birds, down from about
11,000 chicks the prior year, according to a new report by the
research group Point Blue Conservation Science. The dramatic
decline is not only raising questions about the future of the
gulls, but it’s rekindling concern about how the iconic lake
200 miles from San Francisco is being
managed. … Those working to protect the lake see
the record-low gull numbers as a sign that the water
restrictions haven’t gone far enough and need to be revisited.
Recent results from white sturgeon monitoring surveys by the
California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) suggest the
white sturgeon (Acipenser transmontanus) population has
continued to decline. CDFW fisheries biologists now estimate
there are approximately 6,500 white sturgeon between 40-60
inches long in California — down sharply from the previous
estimate of approximately 30,000 fish in that size range, based
on the 2016-2021 survey average. There may be many reasons for
the downward trend, including mortality from harmful algal
blooms, poaching, past sport fishing harvest and poor river and
Delta conditions. … Based on historical surveys
conducted by CDFW between 1954–2022, the number of white
sturgeon in California has been in decline for many years. The
species is currently a candidate for listing as threatened
under the California Endangered Species Act (CESA) and receives
full CESA protection while its status is reviewed.
Other California Department of Fish and
Wildlife news:
Swimming past the California-Oregon border, a lost fish — one
of thousands — finds its way home after an exile of over 100
years. As swarms of salmon migrate north to Oregon along
the Klamath River, youth from across the region’s indigenous
tribes kayak south through northern California to the Pacific
Ocean — a 300-mile celebratory journey that would not have been
possible just a year ago. What’s changed? Beneath the fish
and kayaks lie the watery graves of four dams, built in the
early 20th century and dismantled over the past two years at a
cost of $500 million, the largest and most ambitious dam
removal in history. The return of salmon to the upper
Klamath River represents a victory for nature, an exhibition of
the century-long transition in how Americans view the
environment, and a signal achievement of the 1973 Endangered
Species Act.
Other dam removal and anadromous fish restoration news:
Environmentalists filed suit against the Fish and Wildlife
Service on Tuesday for alleged inaction in the face of threats
to a rare desert plant called the Tecopa bird’s beak. Citing
the presence or possibility of nearby mines, solar energy farms
and geothermal projects, the Center for Biological Diversity
called on the federal agency to make a final determination as
to whether the plant warrants listing as threatened or
endangered. According to the lawsuit, the FWS missed a decision
deadline established under the Endangered Species Act. “The
Fish and Wildlife Service has delayed long enough,” said
Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director at the CBD. “We’re suing
to make sure that these special little plants get the
protections they need before it’s too late.” Donnelly added
that the wildflower found in parts of Nevada and California are
“uniquely vulnerable to extinction” because of their reliance
on groundwater that’s also being tapped for
farming, energy production, (and) residences.
A federal judge agreed on Monday with the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation that conversion of temporary water contracts from
the California Central Valley Project doesn’t require a new
environmental review under the National Environmental Policy
Act or the Endangered Species Act. U.S. District Judge Jennifer
Thurston, a Joe Biden appointee …. said she agreed with and
adopted the bureau’s interpretation that (the 2016 Water
Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act) requires
contract conversion upon request by farmers and other water
users that obtain water from the Central Valley Project and
that it strips the bureau of discretion to modify any
contractual right other than those related to the financial
terms specifically addressed in the statute.
Before the construction of Hoover Dam on the lower Colorado River, as well as a slew of smaller sisters downstream, the stretch downriver served as a biological oasis in the middle of the unrelenting Mojave and Sonoran deserts. The marshes and backwaters along the river’s edge provided sheltered areas for fish to spawn and rear their young, and mesquite and cottonwood-willow forests provided important habitat for numerous species of birds and other animals.
Learn the history and challenges facing the West’s most dramatic
and developed river.
The Layperson’s Guide to the Colorado River Basin introduces the
1,450-mile river that sustains 40 million people and millions of
acres of farmland spanning seven states and parts of northern
Mexico.
The 28-page primer explains how the river’s water is shared and
managed as the Southwest transitions to a hotter and drier
climate.
The Klamath River Basin was once one
of the world’s most ecologically magnificent regions, a watershed
teeming with salmon, migratory birds and wildlife that thrived
alongside Native American communities. The river flowed rapidly
from its headwaters in southern Oregon’s high deserts into Upper
Klamath Lake, collected snowmelt along a narrow gorge through the
Cascades, then raced downhill to the California coast in a misty,
redwood-lined finish.
In the vast labyrinth of the West
Coast’s largest freshwater tidal estuary, one native fish species
has never been so rare. Once uncountably numerous, the Delta
smelt was placed on state and federal endangered species lists in
1993, stopped appearing in most annual sampling surveys in 2016,
and is now, for all practical purposes, extinct in the wild. At
least, it was.
Biologists have designed a variety
of unique experiments in the past decade to demonstrate the
benefits that floodplains provide for small fish. Tracking
studies have used acoustic tags to show that chinook salmon
smolts with access to inundated fields are more likely than their
river-bound cohorts to reach the Pacific Ocean. This is because
the richness of floodplains offers a vital buffet of nourishment
on which young salmon can capitalize, supercharging their growth
and leading to bigger, stronger smolts.
This tour guided participants on a virtual journey deep into California’s most crucial water and ecological resource – the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The 720,000-acre network of islands and canals support the state’s two major water systems – the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project. The Delta and the connecting San Francisco Bay form the largest freshwater tidal estuary of its kind on the West coast.
Voluntary agreements in California
have been touted as an innovative and flexible way to improve
environmental conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
and the rivers that feed it. The goal is to provide river flows
and habitat for fish while still allowing enough water to be
diverted for farms and cities in a way that satisfies state
regulators.
One of California Gov. Gavin
Newsom’s first actions after taking office was to appoint Wade
Crowfoot as Natural Resources Agency secretary. Then, within
weeks, the governor laid out an ambitious water agenda that
Crowfoot, 45, is now charged with executing.
That agenda includes the governor’s desire for a “fresh approach”
on water, scaling back the conveyance plan in the Sacramento-San
Joaquin Delta and calling for more water recycling, expanded
floodplains in the Central Valley and more groundwater recharge.
Bruce Babbitt, the former Arizona
governor and secretary of the Interior, has been a thoughtful,
provocative and sometimes forceful voice in some of the most
high-profile water conflicts over the last 40 years, including
groundwater management in Arizona and the reduction of
California’s take of the Colorado River. In 2016, former
California Gov. Jerry Brown named Babbitt as a special adviser to
work on matters relating to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and
the Delta tunnels plan.
The growing leadership of women in water. The Colorado River’s persistent drought and efforts to sign off on a plan to avert worse shortfalls of water from the river. And in California’s Central Valley, promising solutions to vexing water resource challenges.
These were among the topics that Western Water news explored in 2018.
We’re already planning a full slate of stories for 2019. You can sign up here to be alerted when new stories are published. In the meantime, take a look at what we dove into in 2018:
Water means life for all the Grand Canyon’s inhabitants, including the many varieties of insects that are a foundation of the ecosystem’s food web. But hydropower operations upstream on the Colorado River at Glen Canyon Dam, in Northern Arizona near the Utah border, disrupt the natural pace of insect reproduction as the river rises and falls, sometimes dramatically. Eggs deposited at the river’s edge are often left high and dry and their loss directly affects available food for endangered fish such as the humpback chub.
An hour’s drive north of Sacramento sits a picture-perfect valley hugging the eastern foothills of Northern California’s Coast Range, with golden hills framing grasslands mostly used for cattle grazing.
Back in the late 1800s, pioneer John Sites built his ranch there and a small township, now gone, bore his name. Today, the community of a handful of families and ranchers still maintains a proud heritage.
Farmers in the Central Valley are broiling about California’s plan to increase flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems to help struggling salmon runs avoid extinction. But in one corner of the fertile breadbasket, River Garden Farms is taking part in some extraordinary efforts to provide the embattled fish with refuge from predators and enough food to eat.
And while there is no direct benefit to one farm’s voluntary actions, the belief is what’s good for the fish is good for the farmers.
Does California need to revamp the way in which water is dedicated to the environment to better protect fish and the ecosystem at large? In the hypersensitive world of California water, where differences over who gets what can result in epic legislative and legal battles, the idea sparks a combination of fear, uncertainty and promise.
Saying that the way California manages water for the environment “isn’t working for anyone,” the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) shook things up late last year by proposing a redesigned regulatory system featuring what they described as water ecosystem plans and water budgets with allocations set aside for the environment.
As vital as the Colorado River is to the United States and
Mexico, so is the ongoing process by which the two countries
develop unique agreements to better manage the river and balance
future competing needs.
The prospect is challenging. The river is over allocated as urban
areas and farmers seek to stretch every drop of their respective
supplies. Since a historic treaty between the two countries was
signed in 1944, the United States and Mexico have periodically
added a series of arrangements to the treaty called minutes that
aim to strengthen the binational ties while addressing important
water supply, water quality and environmental concerns.
Butte Creek, a tributary of the
Sacramento River, begins less than 50 miles northeast of Chico,
California and is named after nearby volcanic plateaus or
“buttes.” The cold, clear waters of the 93-mile creek sustain the
largest naturally spawning wild population of spring-run chinook salmon in the Central Valley.
Several other native fish species are found in Butte Creek,
including Pacific lamprey and Sacramento pikeminnow.
This 28-page report describes the watersheds of the Sierra Nevada
region and details their importance to California’s overall water
picture. It describes the region’s issues and challenges,
including healthy forests, catastrophic fire, recreational
impacts, climate change, development and land use.
The report also discusses the importance of protecting and
restoring watersheds in order to retain water quality and enhance
quantity. Examples and case studies are included.
20-minute version of the 2012 documentary The Klamath Basin: A
Restoration for the Ages. This DVD is ideal for showing at
community forums and speaking engagements to help the public
understand the complex issues related to complex water management
disputes in the Klamath River Basin. Narrated by actress Frances
Fisher.
For over a century, the Klamath River Basin along the Oregon and
California border has faced complex water management disputes. As
relayed in this 2012, 60-minute public television documentary
narrated by actress Frances Fisher, the water interests range
from the Tribes near the river, to energy producer PacifiCorp,
farmers, municipalities, commercial fishermen, environmentalists
– all bearing legitimate arguments for how to manage the water.
After years of fighting, a groundbreaking compromise may soon
settle the battles with two epic agreements that hold the promise
of peace and fish for the watershed. View an excerpt from the
documentary here.
This 25-minute documentary-style DVD, developed in partnership
with the California Department of Water Resources, provides an
excellent overview of climate change and how it is already
affecting California. The DVD also explains what scientists
anticipate in the future related to sea level rise and
precipitation/runoff changes and explores the efforts that are
underway to plan and adapt to climate.
This beautiful 24×36 inch poster, suitable for framing, features
a map of the San Joaquin River. The map text focuses on the San
Joaquin River Restoration Program, which aims to restore flows
and populations of Chinook salmon to the river below Friant Dam
to its confluence with the Merced River. The text discusses the
history of the program, its goals and ongoing challenges with
implementation.
This beautiful 24×36-inch poster, suitable for framing, displays
the rivers, lakes and reservoirs, irrigated farmland, urban areas
and Indian reservations within the Klamath River Watershed. The
map text explains the many issues facing this vast,
15,000-square-mile watershed, including fish restoration;
agricultural water use; and wetlands. Also included are
descriptions of the separate, but linked, Klamath Basin
Restoration Agreement and the Klamath Hydroelectric Agreement,
and the next steps associated with those agreements. Development
of the map was funded by a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service.
This beautiful 24×36-inch poster, suitable for framing, displays
the rivers, lakes and reservoirs, irrigated farmland, urban areas
and Indian reservations within the Truckee River Basin, including
the Newlands Project, Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe. Map text
explains the issues surrounding the use of the Truckee-Carson
rivers, Lake Tahoe water quality improvement efforts, fishery
restoration and the effort to reach compromise solutions to many
of these issues.
This 24×36 inch poster, suitable for framing, explains how
non-native invasive animals can alter the natural ecosystem,
leading to the demise of native animals. “Unwelcome Visitors”
features photos and information on four such species – including
the zerbra mussel – and explains the environmental and economic
threats posed by these species.
The 28-page Layperson’s Guide to Water Rights Law, recognized as
the most thorough explanation of California water rights law
available to non-lawyers, traces the authority for water flowing
in a stream or reservoir, from a faucet or into an irrigation
ditch through the complex web of California water rights.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the State Water Project provides
an overview of the California-funded and constructed State Water
Project.
The State Water Project is best known for the 444-mile-long
aqueduct that provides water from the Delta to San Joaquin Valley
agriculture and southern California cities. The guide contains
information about the project’s history and facilities.
The Water Education Foundation’s second edition of
the Layperson’s Guide to The Klamath River Basin is
hot off the press and available for purchase.
Updated and redesigned, the easy-to-read overview covers the
history of the region’s tribal, agricultural and environmental
relationships with one of the West’s largest rivers — and a
vast watershed that hosts one of the nation’s oldest and
largest reclamation projects.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the Delta explores the competing
uses and demands on California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Included in the guide are sections on the history of the Delta,
its role in the state’s water system, and its many complex issues
with sections on water quality, levees, salinity and agricultural
drainage, fish and wildlife, and water distribution.
The federal government passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973,
following earlier legislation. The first, the Endangered
Species Preservation Act of 1966, authorized land acquisition to
conserve select species. The Endangered Species Conservation Act
of 1969 then expanded on the 1966 act, and authorized “the
compilation of a list of animals “threatened with worldwide
extinction” and prohibits their importation without a permit.”
This issue of Western Water looks at the BDCP and the
Coalition to Support Delta Projects, issues that are aimed at
improving the health and safety of the Delta while solidifying
California’s long-term water supply reliability.
This printed issue of Western Water features a
roundtable discussion with Anthony Saracino, a water resources
consultant; Martha Davis, executive manager of policy development
with the Inland Empire Utilities Agency and senior policy advisor
to the Delta Stewardship Council; Stuart Leavenworth, editorial
page editor of The Sacramento Bee and Ellen Hanak, co-director of
research and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of
California.
This printed issue of Western Water examines the issues
associated with the State Water Board’s proposed revision of the
water quality Bay-Delta Plan, most notably the question of
whether additional flows are needed for the system, and how they
might be provided.
This printed issue of Western Water examines science –
the answers it can provide to help guide management decisions in
the Delta and the inherent uncertainty it holds that can make
moving forward such a tenuous task.
This printed issue of Western Water provides an overview of the
idea of a dual conveyance facility, including questions
surrounding its cost, operation and governance
This printed copy of Western Water examines the native salmon and
trout dilemma – the extent of the crisis, its potential impact on
water deliveries and the lengths to which combined efforts can
help restore threatened and endangered species.
This printed copy of Western Water examines the Delta through the
many ongoing activities focusing on it, most notably the Delta
Vision process. Many hours of testimony, research, legal
proceedings, public hearings and discussion have occurred and
will continue as the state seeks the ultimate solution to the
problems tied to the Delta.
In California and the West, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is a
critical issue. Development and agricultural interests say the
law should not be used to unjustly block new projects, while
conservationists view the law as a major bulwark against the
destruction of vital habitat. In the water world, municipal and
agricultural interests say there is room to streamline the ESA’s
application to prevent undue interruption of water delivery.
Two events that transformed the West, population growth and the
dominance of agriculture, are inextricable parts of the battles
fought over its most vital resource, water. Throughout the 19th
century, as settlers sought to tame the rugged landscape,
momentum built behind the notion of a comprehensive, federally
financed waterworks plan that would provide the agrarian society
envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. The Reclamation Act of 1902,
which could arguably be described as a progression of the credo,
Manifest Destiny, transformed the West into an economic
powerhouse while putting an exclamation mark to the tide of
American migration.
