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Keeping Tabs on CalFED
"Eyes and ears" on the multi-million dollar effort to improve the Delta's water supply, fish and wildlife are the goal of one of the most sweeping environmental monitoring programs ever proposed. With a $1.8 million grant awarded this April, scientists and stakeholders recently began mapping out a 30-year Comprehensive Monitoring, Assessment and Research Program aimed at evaluating CALFED's successes and failures - with a first draft due this autumn.
"In order to manage adaptively, CALFED's approach from day one, you have to know what the results of your actions are," says the new program's manager Leo Winternitz of the Department of Water Resources. "Monitoring and research are the only way to do that, and it ain't easy or cheap. It takes equipment, takes boats, takes people, takes planning..."
"What's most appealing is the opportunity to focus from the outset on what people actually need to know, so the science doesn't just end up on the shelf," says the U.S. Geological Survey's Larry Smith.
The fledgling effort's workplan, posted on the Web, includes inventorying all current monitoring programs in the Central Valley watershed, identifying gaps and overlaps, and developing a mutually compatible data management process, common monitoring protocols, feedback loops and an umbrella institution to coordinate the whole shebang.
Can all this really be planned by October, with CALFED burn-out rampant among stakeholders, agency staffers and scientists alike? Winternitz is wearily optimistic. "We'll be happy if we identify what needs to be done and why in terms of CALFED's common programs, and to some extent when and where, but the who and how will have to come later," he says, laughing and likening the task to parting the waters of the Red Sea.
What excites Margaret Johnston most is the close resemblance of the program to the kind of coordinated, regionwide monitoring strategy proposed in the S.F. Estuary Project's 1993 Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan for the Bay and Delta. Johnston's S.F. Estuary Institute now coordinates Bay-centric monitoring. "The effort to tie Bay to Delta monitoring has been pretty bottom-up until CALFED," she says.
Scientists like Johnson, and many environmentalists, have long harped on CALFED to set detailed restoration goals against which researchers can monitor, such as those newly released for Bay wetlands (see cover). Such goals, and an explicit conceptual model of how the Estuary works and what stresses it, will provide an essential reference for the new monitoring program, according to Winternitz. Once the system is in place, Smith hopes to make the data collected accessible to all via the Internet. "A lot of controversies arise because of the absence of hard information," he says.
With new watching and listening posts on every shore and in every den, the information flood could be daunting. "Hopefully the eyes will be able to see straight and the ears will be able to hear well," says Winternitz.
Contact: Leo Winternitz (916)227-7548 or view the workplan on-line at http://iep.water.ca.gov/cmarp/
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