- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
Tree crop growers have a new tool to help them assess the potential impact their growing practices may have on water quality. Know Your H2O, an iPad app developed by the UC Cooperative Extension Agricultural Water Quality Research and Education Program in San Diego, asks growers a series of questions about their growing practices, then suggests Best Management Practices based on UC research that can reduce runoff or leaching of contaminants from orchards into water.
Although there are many sources of water pollution, runoff from farms may contain contaminant levels that exceed water quality standards. Runoff from agricultural operations can pick up and carry natural and man-made pollutants, including fertilizers, salts,...
- Author: Katherine E. Kerlin
Cattle grazing and clean water can coexist on national forest lands, according to research by the University of California, Davis.
The study, published June 27 in the journal PLOS ONE, is the most comprehensive examination of water quality on National Forest public grazing lands to date.
“There’s been a lot of concern about public lands and water quality, especially with cattle grazing,” said lead author Leslie Roche, a postdoctoral scholar in the UC Davis Department of...
- Author: Pamela Kan-Rice
The rotten-egg stink that invaded Southern California in September was blamed by scientists on an unfortunate combination of a large fish die-off in the Salton Sea, a storm churning the fetid lower levels of the sea and unusual gusts from the southeast blowing the odors toward Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Times.
That was just latest episode in a series of environmental woes for the lake that formed 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles in 1905 when the Colorado River flooded the Sonoran Desert. Now the Salton Sea is mainly fed by fresh water drainage from nearby farms and waste water...
- Author: Brenda Dawson
Drinking water is a commodity often taken for granted in the United States. When we turn on the tap, we assume the water streaming out is at least safe, if not always up to our individual taste. We expect that problems with our drinking water are isolated, temporary and newsworthy. Which may be one reason why a report released yesterday by UC Davis made headlines.
According to the report, one in 10 people living in California’s most productive agricultural areas is at risk of exposure to harmful levels of nitrate contamination in their drinking water.
You can read “Addressing Nitrate in California’s...
- Author: Kim Ingram
A new wireless data collection system deployed at Duncan Peak, located near the town of Foresthill on the Middle Fork of the American River basin, is part of a new water information system for California. This extensively distributed sensor network will allow for better characterization on the amount of water stored in the snow and the soil throughout the watershed.
This wireless system is part of the research being conducted by University of California researchers as part of the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project (SNAMP) to investigate the impacts of fuels treatment projects on water quality and quantity and how water is routed through catchments. Information collected from...