- Posted By: Trina Wood
- Written by: Carson Jeffres, fish ecologist, UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences
A very wet spring brought a good deal of water to the floodplains this year—good news for juvenile salmon that thrive in this habitat. Floodplains — such as the Yolo and Sutter Bypass areas and the Cosumnes River floodplains — provide a link for juvenile salmon between the gravel bedded rivers where they hatched and the ocean where they will spend the next one to five years.
Although salmon may only use the floodplain for a month or two, this could mean the difference between success and failure in their long journey to the ocean and back again. When juvenile salmon spend time on the floodplain, they grow faster than those that use only the river channel during their migration to the ocean (Sommer et al. 2001, Jeffres et al....
- Posted By: Trina Wood
- Written by: Peter Moyle, Professor of Fish Biology, UC Davis
The San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta and Suisun Marsh were once part of a continuous, enormously productive aquatic ecosystem that supported dense populations of fish from Sacramento perch to salmon, huge flocks of wintering waterfowl, and concentrations of mammals from beaver to tule elk. This amazing ecosystem is gone and cannot be brought back.
The once vast marshes have been turned into farmland and cities, protected by a complex system of levees. The patchy remnants of the original ecosystem are disappearing fast, as more and more native plants and animals become extinct or endangered. In their place, hundreds of alien species thrive in the altered conditions—crabs, clams, worms and fish from all over the...
- Posted By: Trina Wood
- Written by: Jay Lund, Ellen Hanak, Richard Howitt, Ariel Dinar, Brian Gray, Jeffrey Mount, Peter Moyle, Barton “Buzz” Thompson
With this latest set of storms replenishing California’s snowpack and water levels in reservoirs, rivers and streams, it may be hard to think about water conservation issues. But this is a still a semi-arid state, so it is always prudent to prepare for droughts.
So where can we save the most water? Farming in California depends on irrigation, so agriculture seems the largest potential source for cost-effective water savings in the state. Although agriculture’s share has been declining, it still accounts for roughly 75 percent of all human water use, compared to 25 percent for urban uses.
The recent book, Managing California’s Water: From Conflict to...
- Author: Trina Wood
Jeffrey Mount, a UC Davis geology professor and the Roy J. Shlemon Chair in Applied Geosciences, was included in “The Sacramento 100” — Sacramento News and Review’s 2010 round-up of the most influential, important and interesting people in Sacramento.
He was joined by an eclectic group of “interesting” characters, so whether being named on the list makes him notorious or famous is up to interpretation.
Jeff Mount
In any case, Mount was aptly described as “the man who knows everything about rivers in a region that owes its existence and continued survival to its...