Water Resources

What contaminants lurk in the urban subsurface, and what happens to them once they're there? Do they make their way into storm drains and creeks to reach groundwater, or even oceans? Or do they naturally attenuate as they migrate through soils, somehow allowing them to self-cleanse as they travel? A UC Santa Barbara researcher hopes to find out, thanks to a generous new gift to fund her work. Read the full story

Few weeks ago, Jessica Hall, a Los Angeles landscape architect who also co-authors the excellent L.A. Creek Freak blog, showed me around some of the little-known wetlands of the old Dominguez Slough, hidden in the South Bay cities of Torrance, Gardena, and Carson.

"There are many successes that we should be happy about today, but there are many shortfalls," said Hilary Harp Falk, director of Choose Clean Water, a coalition of the region's environmental groups. "And we need to stay the course in order to clean the rivers and streams that flow to the Chesapeake Bay." Read the full story

The World Resources Institute (WRI), a global development and environmental think tank, will receive a grant of $35,000 USD to research how forest certification standards can help protect American lakes and rivers, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative® (SFI) announced today.

Landscape architect Jessica Hall, a longtime advocate for "daylighting" streams in LA, says the small waterways that remain can be sources of confusion for builders and urban planners."I’ve seen this situation a few times where because the creeks are not mapped," she says, "building and safety officials aren’t aware of their presence and don’t know to take the steps that they need to take to protect the streams when a neighbor comes in and wants to McMansionize their property."

"It is things like limiting idling time of equipment. It's looking at all of our equipment and seeing that it's sized right for the job," explained John Andrew, assistant deputy at DWR.

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Hydrogeographers such as Peter Vorster of the Bay Institute are on one side. KTVU met him along the last stretch of the wild San Joaquin River, arguably the most desiccated -- and desecrated -- major river in California. "This has a lot of salts in it from the agricultural runoff, Vorster remarked. "The water that would have been in here, a lot of it has been diverted to make these fields grow these amazing crops. The San Joaquin Valley is the most productive agricultural region, arguably, in the world."