CalTrout News
A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Tara Duggan, profiled CalTrout’s Nigiri Project and how smarter management of floodplains can benefit fish and farms.
You could say that fisheries biologist Jacob Katz is swimming upstream in his opinion that rice farms and wildlife can, and should, coexist. In fact, to hear Katz tell it, rice farming could be California’s salvation, its last opportunity to restore the Central Valley watershed as close as possible to its origins.”
[gview file=”https://caltrout.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/FloodedRiceFields-sfchronicle.pdf”]
CalTrout’s research with the Nigiri project demonstrates that restoring ecological function is possible, even in intensively managed landscapes like the Central Valley, by mimicking natural flood patterns on working agricultural floodplains-like rice fields.
Recovering native fish populations like salmon and smelt, even during times of drought, is possible when this science is turned into action and California’s outdated water infrastructure is updated to allow more frequent and longer duration floodplain inundation. Reconnecting floodplains will improve flood protection, increase aquifer recharge and generally increase resiliency of both the aquatic ecosystem and California’s water supply to increasingly extreme droughts and floods.
CalTrout’s work in the Central Valley is laying the scientific and political groundwork for precedent-setting water solutions. To learn more, read about our work in The Current or visit our Central Valley Fish and Floodplains page here.
1 Comment
Hi Jacob,
I enjoyed your presentation on Floodplain Fatties last weekend at the Big Room and am excited about the possibility of having someone from your team take part in the Willow Bend SLEWS activities that the Land Trust is coordinating as part of the NOAA Grant that River Partners was awarded.
We held our first field day with the Colusa High School seniors on Nov 8. We have three more field trips planned for the academic year: Jan 17, Mar 14, and Apr 11, 2018. Do any of these dates coincide with any of your planned site activities? Ideally, I’d like small groups of students to take part in an activity led by someone from your team. See attached Day 1 Agenda as an example.
Thanks,
Paul Kirk
Northern California Regional Land Trust