Stuff I wrote elsewhere – Anthropocene diaries: how much water for the minnow?

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From the morning paper, the latest in the struggle to figure out how much water the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow needs:

According to an analysis by the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, the river has only once since the 1990s, in 2005, had enough water to meet the Fish and Wildlife Service’s “conservation objective” for spring runoff high enough to help the endangered minnow’s population recover.

The gap between flow goals and the reality of dry-year flows on the river has led to high-level negotiations among the federal agencies trying to manage the Rio Grande, including the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers.

 

landmark Arizona-Nevada water deal coming to an end

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The agreement between the Southern Nevada Water Authority (Las Vegas)  and the Arizona Water Banking Authority, under which Arizona banked water for Nevada, has always seemed to me like a harbinger of the future in the Colorado River Basin – mutually beneficial sharing across state borders. Via Juliet McKenna and Michele Robertson, it now appears that it’s more a thing of the past. But with some lessons learned:

[T]he parties are now looking to terminate future water banking obligations. Lessons from the past are not forgotten, however; the new draft agreement provides the flexibility to adapt to changing conditions. In fact, the parties can agree to resume storage at any point in the future. This adaptive approach will be important to managing the Colorado River as both states grapple with the potential impacts of climate change and future population growth.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Real water, real people, Maxwell NM edition

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oops, update, forgot link

Journal photographer Robert Rosales and I recently visited Maxwell, NM, which I describe (I think safely, though how does one know for sure?) as having “arguably the most serious drought-driven municipal water supply problem in the state of New Mexico.”

From the story:

Asked about the burden she bears in trying to find the water to keep her village alive, Pinkston chafed at the word “burden.” What would she call it? “A responsibility,” she said.

Whatever the word, Pinkston is clear about what is at stake.

“People would just have to move if there’s no water,” she said. “We’d be a ghost town.”

Where the Bellagio Fountain’s water comes from

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Bellagio Fountain

I’ve been getting this wrong.

The water in the Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas does not come from recycled sewage:

The Bellagio fountains are mostly using well water that exists beneath the Bellagio landscape. That well water was used previously to maintain a golf course that previously existed there. The beauty of that is the current water use, because of the lake, represents only two-thirds of the water that was used before when the golf course existed, so in reality, the Bellagio uses less water than the golf course that use to be there before.

(I got it wrong in a talk I gave this morning, and a gentleman who knows Vegas water kindly corrected me in the hall after.)

 

The risks of risk communication

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[A]n informed and properly motivated risk communicator would proceed deliberately and cautiously. In particular, because efforts to quiet public fears about vaccines will predictably create some level of exactly that fear, such a communicator will not engage in a high-profile, sustained campaign to “reassure” the general public that vaccines are safe without reason to believe that there is a meaningful level of concern about vaccine risks in the public generally.

That’s Dan Kahan, pointing out the need to tread carefully in risk communication because of the danger of reinforcing that which you’re trying to debunk.

In the eastern Mediterranean, tree rings tell of a shift toward stand-replacing fire?

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In a Greek forest, tree rings telling a familiar story – a history of surface fire, but a trend toward much more destructive blazes:

the size of the area burned as well as the type of fire seem to have changed, with the 2007 event being the most extended crown fire encountered so far. Our study has provided additional evidence that P.nigra is indeed a fire-resistant tree species provided that it is exposed to surface fires, even if they are recurrently occurring. Shifts from this pattern may lead to local extirpation of the species, as in the case of severe and extended crown fires.

Interested in learning more on the use of tree rings in science? I’ve got a book for you.

 

Anthropocene diaries: a fish story I wrote elsewhere

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A forest burns down. Humans rescue fish, keep ’em alive in an Albuquerque warehouse. Maybe 80 years before the drainage that feeds their forest creek recovers. Maybe 200. This is life in the anthropocene:

Angela James’ fish tanks don’t look much like Whiskey Creek.

But for 68 imperiled Gila trout, the tanks in a northeast Albuquerque warehouse will have to do for now. After last year’s Whitewater-Baldy Complex Fire in the mountains of southwestern New Mexico, Whiskey Creek itself doesn’t look much like Whiskey Creek anymore.

“I refer to it as a halfway house,” said James, a fish biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as she prepared a breakfast of frozen bloodworms for her guests.

Insanely cool new evapotranspiration maps from USGS team

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Evapotranspiration is the combination of water evaporated from soil, surface water, etc., and water transpired from the leaves of plants. It’s an incredibly important measure of what’s going on in the hydrologic system. Which is why I love this new map:

US Evapotranspiration, from Sanford and Selnick

US Evapotranspiration, from Sanford and Selnick

From Estimation of Evapotranspiration Across the Conterminous United States Using a Regression With Climate and Land-Cover Data, Sanford and Selnick, Journal of the American Water Resources Association, Volume 49, Issue 1

Ed Ruscha is from Oklahoma

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Via the economist Tyler Cowen, I learned today that the artist Ed Ruscha is from Oklahoma.

When I mentioned this to Lissa, she wisely observed that many of the people we think are from California are not. That’s one of the central points of Carey McWilliams’ classic “California: The Great Exception”, which I am rereading. McWilliams’ snapshot in time is California’s enormous explosion in human energy and population in the decade of the 1940s. (The book was published in 1949.) The book is about California’s marvelous and chaotic talent for self-invention as one wave after another of population pours in and does new things.

My Mom is from California. My Dad was part of the same post-McWilliams wave as Ruscha. I’m not sure if I think of Dad as quintessentially Californian, whatever that means, except that he obviously was, one of those immigrants who made the place.

Watershed stuff

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My friends at Carpe Diem West, who’ve been doing some interesting work on the science/politics/policy interface of watershed restoration, are holding one of those ghastly named but increasingly useful “webinar” things next week:

Join the Academy’s first extended webinar taking a closer look at how to value watersheds and the services they provide to downstream users.

Investment in watersheds expands the portfolio of risk management options available to water utilities as they plan for the effects of climate change on their water systems. Implementing a watershed valuation study informs the structure of, and determine possible sources of funding for, ongoing watershed investment programs. Watershed valuation helps answer some of the questions of what services watersheds provide, and how to account for them – for example, what are the costs of providing those services through some other mechanism or what costs can be avoided by investing in watersheds?