[Water_news] 3. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATERSHEDS - 4/27/09

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

April 27, 2009

 

3. Watersheds –

 

Daniel Weintraub: River restoration project offers a sprinkling of hope

The Sacramento Bee

 

Opinion: More crop for the drop

The Los Angeles Times

 

Landscape changing for water conservation

The Riverside Press-Enterprise

 

Meadow Restoration may be inexpensive method for water storage

The Stockton Record

 

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Daniel Weintraub: River restoration project offers a sprinkling of hope

The Sacramento Bee – 4/26/09

By Daniel Weintraub

 

When the chinook salmon come back to the San Joaquin River, it will be a miracle. But the wonder of the river's restoration won't be in the biology involved, which is well established. Or the engineering needed to bring the river back to life. Most of what is required has been done before.

 

It's the politics that make this project so remarkable.

 

Few issues in California, or anywhere in the West, cause as much bitter division as water. Yet in the foothills east of Fresno and the flatlands stretching toward the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the warring parties have finally put down their arms and are working together on a project that should benefit the environment, the fishing industry and the local economy. Even the farmers at the heart of it all have signed on to the deal, though many of them still wish they could remain set in their ways.

 

Thanks to recent changes in federal law and a commitment of federal money to the project, the San Joaquin River restoration, debated for nearly 20 years, is about to begin in earnest. The first water for the newly re-created river will flow through Friant Dam in October, if all goes according to plan, and it will then flow into parts of the river that have been dry for decades. Within a few years, thousands of salmon should be swimming upstream through what is now a parched valley landscape.

 

"When we're done, we'll have a river that can safely convey the flows necessary to restore salmon and other native fish to the river," Monty Schmitt, a biologist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has been working on the project for nine years, told me last week. "It means the San Joaquin River is providing fresh water downstream, to the lower San Joaquin and the Delta, stretches of the Central Valley that have water quality issues. We'll actually have a living, connected river.

 

"In these years when the salmon populations have been crashing throughout California, when the commercial fishery is closed again, restoring salmon to the San Joaquin River is one of the greatest steps we can take to hopefully revive the commercial salmon industry," Schmitt said.

 

Much of what used to be a wild, scenic river has been transformed over the years into a series of channels and canals, with water moving this way and that to irrigate some of the most productive cropland in the country. Citrus, stone fruit, grapes and nuts are grown there now, along with forage crops for the cows that make Tulare County the No. 1 dairy county in the nation.

 

Those farms stand to lose as much as 20 percent of their water as the river is restored. But the restoration plan makes it a priority to help them get most of that water back in one way or another. The water district will be allowed to capture more water in flood years and save it for dry years. Canals will be improved and new levies built. New land and new techniques will be employed to store reserves as groundwater that can be pulled back to the surface with wells and pumps.

 

There is even a plan to recycle water by taking it back out of the California aqueduct south of Fresno after it flows down the river, through the Delta and becomes part of the state's water system. The same water that restores the salmon could then be pumped back uphill and used again, this time for irrigation.

 

"We hope to get double duty out of that water by taking it the long way around," said Ron Jacobsma, general manager of the Friant Water Authority. "We really need to focus on getting that water back. The project has been in operation for over half a century, and the whole fabric of the community here has been built on having those reliable water supplies."

 

There's a lesson here for combatants on other contentious issues large and small: It's usually better for everyone involved to settle their differences rather than fight to the death.

 

At first the farmers fought the lawsuit that sought the river's restoration. After all, it challenged their right to use the water they had been claiming for decades. But once the courts ruled that the river's diversion had endangered the salmon, it became clear that a decision would be issued at some point ordering the restoration. Facing that prospect, the users eventually decided it would be better for them to help shape the plan than to merely suffer its consequences.

 

"Our folks needed some certainty," Jacobsma said. "The settlement provides water-supply certainty. It provides financial certainty. They'll be paying no more than what they would have otherwise paid. That would not have been the case if a judge had decided it. And we get an opportunity to get our water back, which we did not think we would get out of a federal court ruling."

 

The environmentalists who brought the lawsuit, once having gained the legal momentum, could have refused to concede any points. But Schmitt said they wanted a settlement that the farmers could believe in.

 

"We did it because we felt that a settlement that had everyone on board would be an agreement that everybody could live with, and we could go forward working together," he said. "A court-ordered judgment forcing them to release water would have continued an atmosphere of hostility and anger. It's always better to have a situation where everybody works together."

 

Although the agreement was formally placed into federal law when President Barack Obama signed the Omnibus Public Lands Bill in March, the parties had been working on the restoration plan for more than two years, laying the groundwork for the physical changes to come. The next step is for scientists to study those first water releases planned for October to see how the water flows, how wildlife reacts and what engineering changes will be necessary to accommodate the amount of water needed to create the salmon fishery.

 

The river will not necessarily be restored to its full, natural path along its entire length. Too much has changed in the decades since it was dammed. Along some stretches, canals might still be used to carry the water short distances and to ferry the salmon upstream.

 

"We've never done anything on this scale," said Peter Moyle, a UC Davis professor and consultant on the project. "You've got 150 miles of river where roughly half of it was drying up every year. The lower-most section has essentially been treated as an agricultural drain."

 

One example: A section of the riverbed near Fresno after the river flows under Highway 99 has a sandy, rocky bottom and has the reputation of being a big sink for water. Nobody knows at this point what is going to happen once the water starts flowing into that sink. Much of it will simply disappear into the ground. And no one knows how long it will take to recharge the groundwater basin so that the earth no longer absorbs all the water put into the river.

 

"Some of the initial flows will answer that question," Moyle said.

 

Once that problem and many others are overcome, California's second longest river will be alive again.

 

"That's going to be an enormous asset for the people who live in the San Joaquin Valley," Moyle said. "It's more than just for fish. It's going to be good for recreation, for all kinds of other endangered species. We're doing more than just bringing back a few fish into the system. We're recreating a river, and that's going to be an amazing thing." #

 

http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/story/1808444.html

 

Opinion: More crop for the drop

The Los Angeles Times – 4/27/09

By Henry I. Miller

 

Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

 

America's politicians and government officials have been slow to grasp the importance of societal resilience -- the ability to recover from or adapt to adversity. Sufficient resilience can minimize the risks of major, debilitating disruptions -- whether they be economic ones, such as the current recession, or unavoidable natural disasters.

Take the ability to cope with droughts, for example. Science, technology and intelligent planning cannot eliminate them, but they can mitigate their effects. Or at least they could, if only federal policymakers and local regulations permitted it.

 

Gene-splicing, sometimes called genetic modification, offers plant breeders the tools to make old crop plants do spectacular new things. In the United States and two dozen other countries, farmers are using gene-spliced crop varieties to produce higher yields, with lower inputs and reduced environmental impact.

In spite of research being hampered by resistance from activists and discouraged by governmental over-regulation, gene-spliced crop varieties are slowly but surely trickling out of the development pipeline in many parts of the world. Most of these new varieties are designed to be resistant to pests and diseases, or to be resistant to herbicides, so that farmers can more effectively control weeds while adopting more environment-friendly no-till farming practices and more benign herbicides. Other varieties possess improved nutritional quality. But the greatest boon of all, to food security and to the environment in the long term, may be the ability of new crop varieties to tolerate periods of drought and other water-related stresses.

Where water is scarce, the development of crop varieties that grow under conditions of low moisture or temporary drought could boost yields and lengthen the time that farmland is productive. Even where irrigation is feasible, plants that use water more efficiently are needed. Agriculture accounts for about 70% of the world's freshwater consumption -- and more in areas of intensive farming and arid or semi-arid conditions, such as in California. So the introduction of plants that grow with less water would free up much of that essential resource for other uses.

 

Plant biologists have identified genes that regulate water use and transferred them into important crop plants. These new varieties grow with smaller amounts of water or with lower-quality water, such as recycled water or water high in natural mineral salts. In 2004, for example, Egyptian researchers showed that by transferring a single gene from barley to wheat, the plants can tolerate reduced watering for a longer period of time. This new, drought-resistant variety requires only one-eighth as much irrigation as conventional wheat, and in some deserts can be cultivated with rainfall alone.

Aside from new varieties that have lower water requirements, pest- and disease-resistant gene-spliced crop varieties also make water use more efficient indirectly. Because much of the loss to insects and diseases occurs after the plants are fully grown, the use of gene-spliced varieties that have higher post-harvest yields means that the farming (and irrigation) of fewer plants can produce the same total amount of food. We get more crop for the drop.

However, unscientific and overly burdensome regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in this country -- and by national regulators and the United Nations elsewhere -- has raised the cost of producing new plant varieties and kept potentially important crops off the market. This deeply entrenched, discriminatory and excessive regulation -- which flies in the face of scientific consensus that gene-splicing is basically an extension of earlier crop improvement methods -- adds tens of millions of dollars to the development costs of new gene-spliced crop varieties. Higher costs and the endless controversy translate to fewer products in the pipeline and fewer companies competing to make them. Less competition means higher prices.

California offers a stark lesson in how wrongheaded public policy can impair resilience. Although severe drought afflicts much of California, over the last few years four of the state's counties have banned the cultivation or sale of gene-spliced plants, including those that are drought-resistant.

If individually and collectively we are to meet economic, environmental and public health challenges, we need plenty of options and opportunities for innovation -- and the wealth to pursue them. In society, as in evolutionary biology, survival demands resilience. But in large and small ways, unimaginative, shortsighted politicians and venal activists have conspired to limit our options, constrain economic growth and make real solutions elusive. #

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-miller27-2009apr27,0,3682826.story

 

 

Landscape changing for water conservation

The Riverside Press-Enterprise – 4/27/09

By Janet Zimmerman

 

Three years of drought have done more than drive up water rates and spur cries for mandatory conservation.

Sales of artificial turf and native plants have increased, calls for advice to low-water demonstration gardens are up and demand for consumer rebates on water-wise irrigation controllers has soared.

 

"Calls for support and assistance are way up," said Tim Barr, water use efficiency manager at Western Municipal Water District, based in Riverside. "We expected things to fall off a little bit because of the economy, but (applications for incentives for) weather-based irrigation controllers, toilet retrofits and clothes washers are through the roof."

 

Western and some other districts offer $85 rebates for front-loading washing machines, $100 for toilets that use 1.28 gallons or less per flush and $4 for nozzles that attach to pop-up sprinklers to reduce runoff. The largest jump at Western has been for $80 rebates on irrigation controllers that automatically adjust to weather conditions; requests increased from 45 in 2007 to 638 last year, according to district officials.

 

At Landscapes Southern California Style, Western Municipal Water District's demonstration garden at its Alessandro Boulevard headquarters, 2,030 people visited for last week's Earth Day event at the garden, an 8.5 percent increase from the previous year's attendance of 1,871. The garden's California-friendly landscape classes, offered several times a year, have been at capacity, said Michele McKinney Underwood, a spokeswoman.

 

The 1-acre garden includes 200 drought-friendly plants and irrigation systems that can cut water use by 50 percent. It also includes a strip of realistic-looking artificial turf. Many districts offer rebates for replacing the real stuff with fake grass.

 

Residential and commercial installations of artificial grass have grown 20 percent a year for the past five years, according to a 2008 study cited by the Association of Synthetic Grass Installers, a trade association in Grass Valley.

 

California's water shortage has done what years of passion and advertising couldn't do for native plants, said Valerie Phillips, manager of Las Pilitas, a native plant nursery in Escondido that draws customers from throughout Southern California.

 

Las Pilitas started in the San Luis Obispo area in 1974 and has been selling in Southern California since 2000. Only recently has Phillips noticed a surge in business outside its niche market.

 

"For years, most of the people that planted native plants ... wanted to create a habitat in their yard and bring in wildlife.

 

Now people are realizing that conservation in California is an issue and the water supply is limited," she said.

 

Phillips has seen a jump in first-time customers who want to replace their lawns. She's gotten so many questions about it she's printing up a brochure on the topic.

 

She suggests manzanita, wild lilacs, sages and penstemon as alternatives to turf. After about three years, they only have to be irrigated with a sprinkler for 15 minutes every two weeks, Phillips said.

 

At the 86-acre Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont, experts got so many inquiries about water conservation and native plants that they opened an on-site nursery in February, said Ann Joslin, director of visitor services. The native plant garden also is putting on more water-saving programs, including a series that started with a seminar on how to kill your lawn.

 

"More people are getting it. That comes about when people start seeing an increase in their bills. When it hits their pocket, people start taking notice," Joslin said.

 

Among them are Jay and Erin Westover, who scrapped more than 2,000 square feet of lawn in front of their Riverside home in December.

 

The couple and their three children don't use the front yard because it faces a busy street, so they hired someone to put in low-water, low-maintenance plants such as succulents and blue agave, plus a drip system and decomposed gravel. The Westovers like knowing that they're ready if rationing is imposed.

 

"We wanted to put in something that if they do have to turn the water off for days at a time, it will still look good," said Erin Westover, an elementary school teacher.

 

The Westovers' yard was designed by Nan Simonsen, of Nanscapes in Riverside. She's installing an average of one garden a week and has noticed that people are more willing to give up their lawns now.

 

Simonsen encourages use of Mediterranean plants that only have to be watered once a week in summer once they're established and mulched. Among her favorites: rosemary, rock roses, manzanita, lavender and lantana.

 

"Now that people are becoming fearful of resources and the availability of money to pay for those resources, it has made it easier for them to decide this is the time. People are taking it much more seriously," she said. #

 

http://www.pe.com/localnews/inland/stories/PE_News_Local_S_waterwise27.3ab5c02.html

 

 

Meadow Restoration may be inexpensive method for water storage

The Stockton Record – 4/26/09

The Dana M. Nichols

 

SAN ANDREAS - Millions of dollars in federal money will begin flowing into high Sierra meadows this year in hopes that those meadows can be restored so they will store more water until late summer, when thirsty farms and cities downstream need it most.

 

The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation - a quasi-private foundation created by Congress that channels both federal and private dollars to habitat work - recently decided to make restoration of eroded meadows in California's Sierra Nevada mountains one of its priorities.

 

Although various species of birds, fish and animals would benefit, that isn't the biggest news. The big news is that such work may be a less expensive way to expand water storage in some cases than building new dams and reservoirs.

 

According to a Sierra Nevada Meadow Restoration draft business plan completed by the foundation in March, repairing all of the degraded Sierra meadows in California could increase late-summer water storage by the equivalent of 50,000 to 500,000 acre-feet per year.

 

At the high end, that's the equivalent of building a medium-large reservoir larger than Camanche Reservoir on the Mokelumne River. And the foundation said that based on recent restoration projects, the additional water would cost $100 to $250 per acre-foot over the first 10 years, significantly less than the $330 to $685 per acre-foot cost of water from a reservoir proposed in Colusa County.

 

An acre-foot is enough water to cover one acre one foot deep, and is generally considered about enough water to supply two typical California homes for a year.

 

The Foundation plans to spend $10 million to $15 million in the next decade on such projects, and has set a goal of improving water storage in Sierra Nevada meadows by at least 20,000 acre-feet by 2014.

 

"I am going to do all that I can to get even more federal dollars directed toward this," said Timothy Male, director of wildlife and habitat conservation for the foundation.

 

Ultimately, the foundation hopes to leverage $200 million for meadow restoration. That's because a variety of other interests, including ranchers whose cattle graze in the meadows and water agencies downstream, also would benefit from healthier meadows. Meadow restoration is called for by California's State Water Plan, for example.

 

And that, in turn, could mean jobs as heavy equipment operators and work crews move soil and repair vegetation and stream beds.

 

"Certainly up in the Stanislaus National forest and surrounding areas there are a large number of meadows that would be eligible for that kind of funding," said Barry Hill, regional hydrologist for the Forest Service's regional office in Vallejo.

 

"The idea would be to store more water in the meadows so it doesn't run off right away in the winter and the springtime," Hill said. Hill added that his office has a grant right now to pay for a detailed study to calculate more precisely how much additional water could be stored statewide through such work.

 

One likely project here is known as Leland Gully, which runs through a meadow area near Leland Creek and Herring Creek northeast of Strawberry in the Stanislaus National Forest. Leland Gully is on a short list of 27 sites that the foundation's draft plan deems "ready-to-proceed meadow restoration projects."

 

"We are going to be completing the design this summer," said Tracy Weddle, hydrologist for the Summit Ranger District of the Stanislaus National Forest.

 

Weddle said Leland Gully is 1,700 feet long and averages 10 feet in depth and 35 feet in width. She said restoration techniques could include transporting massive amounts of soil and wood to fill the gully, or creating a series of "plugs" in the gully that would form ponds behind them.

 

Either way, the water table in the meadow would rise to its old level, invasive weeds would be discouraged, and the area would stay wet until late in the summer. Weddle said she is applying for a variety of grants to fund the roughly $150,000 project and hopes to do the restoration work in 2010.

 

Wildlife also benefits from meadow restoration. In the past, groups such as the California Deer Association and the Mule Deer Foundation have provided both money and volunteers for meadow restoration work in the Stanislaus National Forest, Weddle said.

 

And research done recently on Stanislaus confirms other benefits, Weddle said. "That research showed that functioning meadows stored more water and stored more organic carbon than nonfunctioning meadows."#

 

http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090426/A_NEWS14/904260318

 

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