montana hills

A judge in Montana recently ruled in favor of landowners and ranchers fighting against a housing development project near Helena that could have put further stress on steadily declining groundwater reserves.  Public defiance: Initially, the state and county governments had signed off on a developer’s plans to build 39 homes that would pull their water from […]

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Irrigation hardware

North Coast Stream Flow Coalition The Coalition is strongly in favor of regulation for California Groundwater Resources. Groundwater and surface waters constitute a single resource (see: Thomas C. Winter, Judson W. Harvey, O. Lehn Franke, and William M. Alley, Groundwater and Surface Water: A Single Resource, U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1139, 2006). This means that […]

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California hills under cloudy skies

Abstract Across the world, declining groundwater levels cause wells to run dry, increase water and food insecurity, and often acutely impact groundwater-dependent communities. Despite the ubiquity and severity of these impacts, groundwater research has primarily focused on economic policy instruments for sustainable management or the quantification of groundwater depletion, rather than assessing the impacts of […]

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In March 2023, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) determined that the groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs) for six critically overdrafted, high-priority groundwater basins in the Central Valley are inadequate. The six basins with inadequate GSPs, from north to south, are the Chowchilla, Delta-Mendota, Kaweah, Tulare Lake, Tule, and Kern County subbasins (please see map below). […]

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Water faucet

By Ian JamesSept. 9, 2023 A spokesperson for BlueTriton Brands said in an email that the company and its predecessors “have collected water from Arrowhead Springs in Strawberry Canyon in an environmentally responsible and sustainable way for more than 125 years.” BlueTriton, based in Stamford, Conn., took over the operation when Nestlé Waters North America was […]

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Napa County has work to do to get Napa Valley wine country groundwater supplies in balance for the long haul.   Groundwater pumping in 2021-22 was 18,790 acre-feet, according to a new report. It was the third consecutive year that pumping exceeded the Napa Valley sub-basin’s sustainable yield of 15,000 acre-feet, coinciding with a three-year drought. […]

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How California Could Save Up Its Rain Water to Ease Future Droughts

By Andrew Fisher, Resilience. January 15, 2023 Instead of watching epic atmospheric river rainfall drain into the Pacific. California has seen so much rain over the past few weeks that farm fields are inundated and normally dry creeks and drainage ditches have become torrents of water racing toward the ocean. Yet, most of the state remains in severe drought. […]

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water pump

By Janny Choy and Geoff McGhee Groundwater is back in the spotlight. Largely invisible, lightly regulated and used by 85% of California’s population and much of the state’s $45 billion agriculture industry, groundwater is a crucial reserve that helps stave off catastrophe during drought periods like we’ve experienced over the past three years. Unheralded, Underregulated and Overused, […]

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Almond trees in bloom

Chloe Sorvino Forbes Staff Sep 22, 2022, 06:30am EDT Broiling heat in the middle of the worst drought in 1,200 years has strained the state’s underground water supply, pitting the Central Valley’s $20 billion agriculture industry against many of its own workers. Nature has a way of telling people when their wells are running dry. […]

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water image

SmartWaterMagazine.com reports that as climate change increases extreme weather events, such as megadroughts, groundwater management is key for sustaining water supply. But current monitoring tools are either costly or insufficient for deeper aquifers, limiting our ability to monitor and practice sustainable management. Now, a new paper bridges seismology and hydrology with an application that uses seismometers […]

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Vacaville, California city limit sign.

A lawsuit accusing Vacaville of endangering its residents with tap water polluted with hexavalent chromium — the cancer-causing chemical made infamous in the film “Erin Brockovich” — was dismissed Friday by a federal appeals court, which said the city merely carried the water in its pipes and isn’t responsible for contamination caused by others. The city was […]

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Drought cracked mud around receding lake

After three years of drought, the massive state and federal water projects that serve California’s cities and farms have less water to distribute, forcing water managers to increasingly ration supplies. This year, squeezed extra tight by the prolonged drought conditions, both the state and federal […]

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Palo Alto Duck Pond Sink

By JET PROPULSION LABORATORY APRIL 9, 2022 Researchers have untangled puzzling patterns of sinking and rising land to pin down the underground locations where water is being pumped for irrigation. Scientists have produced a new method that holds the promise of improving groundwater management – critical to both life and agriculture in dry regions. The method sorts […]

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Water racing down stream. Free to use under the Unsplash License.

Dec. 16, 2021 Harder and other lawyers in the group said they expect to face resistance but hope the unrelenting drought may help build support for changing California’s water laws. The group said in a 43-page report detailing their recommendations that they’re suggesting a “focused approach to updating existing laws, regulations, and funding.” They recently presented their recommendations during a webinar organized by the Planning […]

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sewage from the sewer pollutes a lake

With farms, ranches and rural communities facing unprecedented threats, a worrying trend leads to a critical question: Who owns the water? Eli Francovich, Columbia InsightDec. 15, 2021 Ghost cattle — 200,000 made-up heifers. A massive fraud rocking eastern Washington’s arid ranching communities, leading to criminal charges and bankruptcy. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and […]

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Judge's Gavel from Depositphotos.com

Summary The panel vacated the district court’s summary judgment in favor of the City of Vacaville and remanded for further proceedings in a citizen suit brought by California River Watch under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. River Watch claimed that the City’s water wells were contaminated by a carcinogen called hexavalent chromium, which in […]

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Delta Water Aerial View

08/04/21 By Brad Hooker The State Water Resources Control Board on Tuesday approved a regulation granting it new authority to curtail senior water rights and ramp up enforcement for illegal diverters. The action is in response to one of the driest periods on record for California and the entire western U.S. The order targets more than 5,000 water right […]

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Center pivot irrigation system. Lancaster, CA.

California’s farmers are pumping vast amounts of water from underground aquifers this year to make up for water they can’t get from rivers. It’s unsustainable, and the state is moving to stop it.July 23, 2021
The next time you pick up some California-grown carrots or melons in the grocery store, consider the curious, contested odyssey of the water that fed them. Chances are, farmers pumped that water from underground aquifers […]

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June 28, 2021 Written by Communications Intern Sage Bachman As California enters another severe drought, residents are once again being asked to use water more judiciously so as to make it last longer. While it is indeed crucial for all of us to reduce our water usage, is also critical to investigate how California’s limited sources […]

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A riparian woodland along the Santa Clara River in Southern California experienced almost 100 percent mortality during the state's historic drought that lasted from 2012 to 2016. Credit: John Stella

The highly engineered rivers that sustain California cities and farms upset streamside woodlands’ relationship with groundwater, a new study finds, jeopardizing their future in a changing climate.

California’s perennially drought-parched Central Valley bears little resemblance to the vibrant landscape of the pre-Gold Rush days, when wild rivers sustained lush woodlands and floodplains teeming with life.

Trees at the center of these biodiversity hotspots evolved in an arid landscape sculpted by finely tuned exchanges […]

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MavenBreaking NewsJuly 1, 2021 From the California Coastkeeper Alliance: Today, California Coastkeeper Alliance filed a lawsuit in Superior Court to compel the County of Sonoma to consider and mitigate impacts to public trust resources caused by groundwater extraction in the Russian River watershed. As the Russian River watershed faces a drought emergency, California Coastkeeper Alliance is […]

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Well on dry land

GLEN MARTINFOR THE PRESS DEMOCRATJune 24, 2021 The drought is intensifying efforts to conserve all of Sonoma County’s water resources, including a supply that has eluded oversight until recently: groundwater. But even as plans for groundwater monitoring and sustainable use proceed, tensions are building over its management. The authority to evaluate and regulate groundwater comes […]

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The very ground upon which Corcoran was built is steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily by agriculture. Lois HenryMay 25, 2021 In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp. Corcoran […]

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Dry stream in San Bernadino National Forest

Emily DennyApr. 28, 2021 California water officials have accused Nestlé of draining more water out of southern California’s Strawberry Creek in the San Bernardino National Forest than permitted. The drafted cease-and-desist order, which was sent to the company on Friday, asked Nestlé to stop draining millions of gallons of water out of the forest every […]

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Wild Scenic Merced River photo

The Biden-Harris transition team identified COVID-19, economic recovery, racial equity and climate change as its top priorities. Rivers are the through-line linking all of them. The fact is, healthy rivers can no longer be separated into the “nice-to-have” column of environmental progress. Rivers and streams provide more than 60 percent of our drinking water—and a clear path toward public health, a strong economy, a more just society and greater […]

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