Lab News

There are thousands of aging dams in the U.S. that are no longer serving their intended function and/or pose a safety risk to downstream communities. In many cases, the removal of old dams is more cost-effective than retrofitting or rebuilding new infrastructure. Dam removal also tends to bring substantial environmental benefits. However, dam removal is also a resource-intensive process and, given the large number of dams that exist on the landscape, deciding which dams to remove requires careful consideration of the costs and benefits. In a new paper led by Suman Jumani, we present a screening framework for guiding dam removal planning to address this need.

Fig. 1. Overview of the dam removal decision-support framework. Steps outlined in solid lines (Tier 1 and Tier 2) can be computed through desktop analyses. Steps outlined in dashed lines are those that require additional computational work and assessment of local, socio-cultural factors that may influence the feasibility of dam removal (Tier 3).

In a new paper in Journal of Environmental Management, Molly Oshun explores how we can make better use of existing biodiversity data in California to inform conservation planning and management. Read more here.

The Spring 2023 issue of Breakthroughs focuses on “The Future of Water” and spotlights research in the Carlson, Ruhi, and Grantham labs to advance understanding of California’s threatened freshwater ecosystems. Read the story here.

A new paper led by Hana Moidu in Freshwater Biology explores the environmental factors that affect the distribution and composition of stream vertebrates in an intermittent stream. Using a long-term monitoring data from Coyote Creek in northern California, Hana and co-authors show that distinct habitat types found intermittent streams (transient small pools, transient large pools, and persistent large pools) support distinct assemblages of aquatic invertebrates. These findings help us to understand how stream drying from human water use climate change can affect freshwater biodiversity.

In this opinion piece, published in Land Use Policy, we explore the barriers that cannabis cultivators face in complying with California’s cannabis regulations post-legalization.

A new paper from our research group, led by graduate student Brian Kastl, was recently published in Ecosphere, Migration in drought: Receding streams contract the seaward migration window of endangered salmon. The study explores how the migration of juvenile coho salmon from tributaries in the Russian River in springtime is affected by streamflow and temperature. We found that low seasonal streamflow and warm temperatures associated with drought resulted in an earlier and contracted migration of coho salmon smolts from the system. The research suggests that protecting environmental flows by limiting surface water diversions and reducing groundwater withdrawals could help expand the outmigration window for coho salmon smolts and mitigate the effects of drought in this system and in other salmon-bearing streams projected to experience more severe droughts under climate change.

The study was also covered in a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, “California drought poses more obstacles to young Russian River coho salmon.