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Accord Aftermath
Flex-Time for Flows
Dive under the surface chop of river outflow percentages, isohaline positions and channel closure periods in the new Bay-Delta accord and there's an strong undercurrent of change in how we manage flows to protect imperiled fish. Rather than imposing a fixed standard and continuous limit on export pumping year in, year out, the agreement gives pump managers an annual water budget and allows them to meet biological goals (such as a doubling in the salmon population) with that budget however they like.
"It's a new paradigm of how to operate," says the Department of Water Resources' Bob Potter. "Basically, when the fish aren't present, we may exceed diversion limits and bank water for future supply." Conversely when the fish are present, pumping may drop below limits.
The idea of tuning pumping to the actual physical and biological conditions that exist at any given time is something The Natural Heritage Institute's Dave Fullerton calls "adaptive management." Water managers in the Columbia River Basin are already trying it out. For application to the Bay-Delta, it will mean stepped-up monitoring to assess when and where the fish are in the system, corresponding daily and monthly adjustments in pump operations, and careful oversight by a whole new multi-agency, multi-interest "Operations Group" charged with deciding, among other things, what the split between export and outflow will be on a day-to-day basis.
"Adaptive management can be a frightening concept because it means that we must trust institutions to make good decisions on the fly about the environment," writes Fullerton in a recent analysis of the agreement. "We will no longer be able to simply fall back on black and white standards. But I would argue that such standards are so inefficient that they reduce to unacceptable levels the amount of environmental protection that we can justify politically and economically."
If done right, adaptive management may bring a lot more bang for the buck in terms of the water costs of environmental protection. It's also much more flexible. "It's built into the structure that you learn from your mistakes," says fish biologist Peter Moyle. "If you make a mistake you have the flexibility to correct it immediately, instead of having to go through a whole Bay-Delta hearing and negotiation process all over again."
Adaptive management uses experimentation as a strategy for managing large ecosystems. According to EPA's Patrick Wright, the theory is to create a decisionmaking process that allows you to incorporate the results of ongoing studies into management decisions. "We don't do enough learning in our regulatory programs," says Wright.
Adaptive management underlies the accord in several places, not only within the new water export accounting system, but also in the set of measures to protect migrating Chinook salmon. Under the triennial review of standards established by the agreement, if some measures work better or worse than predicted, they can be adjusted. "In this way, surprises become opportunities to improve previous management decisions rather than to reject them," says Wright.
"If we become serious in our monitoring, data analysis and response management, we could see big improvements," says Russ Brown, a Jones & Stokes hydrologist who has long been a vocal proponent of adaptive management.
Contact: Dave Fullerton (415)288-0550; Bob Potter (916)653-6055; Patrick Wright (415)744-1993
Reality Checks
Bay Delta managers must expand the web of underwater instruments, communication links and research programs now taking the Estuary's environmental pulse in order to comply with the new Bay-Delta agreement and monitor the success of its water management approach. At the heart of this new approach to pulse-taking is something called "real-time monitoring" in which Bay-Delta managers base their decisions not just on models and projections of flows and fish movements but also on actual in-the-water conditions.
As a first step into real-time, government scientists have been brainstorming with water users and environmentalists to come up with a monitoring plan for inclusion in the forthcoming state Water Quality Plan for the Delta. In draft form already, this includes a list of goals and objectives, plus 27 pages of research questions, according to Cal Fish & Game's Pat Coulston. Coulston says the proposed research will not only back up the accord, but will also include more coordination with work going on upstream and more communication between fish and toxics research. "We need to try and tease out the relative importance of pollutant and other effects versus water management effects on fish populations," he says.
Hydrologist Russ Brown of Jones & Stokes says the monitoring push will also likely require new technologies (such as unmanned instruments capable of picking up passing schools of fish); upgrades of current programs measuring physical and chemical factors such as salinity and temperature; and more rapid reporting of monitoring results to operations managers.
One newly on-line real-time example is in Suisun Bay, where this January teams from a NOAA/San Francisco State partnership deployed three pairs of conductivity-temperature sensors to measure salinity changes in the shallows of Suisun Bay. S.F. State's Mike Vasey says the new stations will fill a data gap related to the new salinity standard and complement existing monitoring in the deeper channels.
"We need more information about how the upper, shallower parts of the bay are tied to the salinity issue," says Vasey, adding that these shallows host important nursery grounds for Delta smelt. The new stations will be radio linked to a dedicated phone line and a computer at the California Maritime Academy, enabling users to dial and hear a synthesized voice tell them, for example, just how salty and warm the water is out in Suisun's Honker Bay.
Contact: Pat Coulston (209)948-7800; Mike Vasey (415)338-1957
No-Flow Dream Dough
Water users often complain that there's too much emphasis on the environmental toll of water exports and not enough on other threats. This December, they decided to put their money behind their concerns by making a downpayment on a $180 million fund for non-flow related Estuary improvements.
High on the funding priority list are steps to minimize fish losses to unscreened diversions. Other potential improvements on a now 500-item long list include habitat restoration, monitoring and water purchases for environmental purposes. Fund staffer Walt Wadlow says his task force also drew on the S.F. Estuary Project's Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) for fodder, and is now exploring ways to more closely link the two efforts and the CVPIA restoration fund. A draft implementation plan is scheduled for release this March.
Contact: Walt Wadlow (408)265-2607 ext. 2772
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