 Welcome everyone. Good morning. I haven't had a chance to check this. So is this too loud? Okay, if folks don't mind turning off their cell phones during the plenary session, that would be greatly appreciated. So I want to welcome everyone to the 35th annual Salmanid Restoration Conference. We're thrilled to be back here in Davis. Salmanid Restoration Federation is a statewide nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote restoration and recovery of wild salmon populations. And our annual conference has now become the largest salmon restoration conference in California. It brings together scientists, engineers, restoration practitioners, planners, regulators, and the next generation of watershed stewards. We are so excited to be back in Davis, the Central Valley Heartland, where academia and scientific research and policy decisions evolve. And the theme of this year's conference, Restoring Watersheds and Rebuilding Salmon Runs, really highlights the innovative efforts to restore legacy watersheds, salmon reintroduction to historic habitats, and our shared vision to revive and restore ecological function in Central Valley landscapes. The plenary session will focus on restoring salmon and sustainable watershed management in California from a global state and regional perspective. We have an all-star lineup of keynote speakers that will focus on drought, water management, and how we can strive towards sustainability. An emerging theme when we were developing the conference this year is visioning salmon recovery and forging meaningful partnerships in order to rebuild salmon runs against all odds. In this cataclysmic time of both global warming and political weirding, the watershed restoration field faces insurmountable challenges. Yet dams are coming down, salmon are being reintroduced to historical habitats, and flood plains are rich with food. In this field, we are dedicated to both sound science and social service. There is a generosity of spirit and a currency of shared knowledge and experience. This year in particular, it has been so humbling and awe-inspiring to witness firsthand the tremendous effort by so many that goes into the creation of this conference. The production and coordination of the conference is a very collaborative process that involves the SRF Board of Directors, our co-sponsors, and our many colleagues. We're so appreciative of all the field tour and workshop session coordinators for their outstanding job of creating a dynamic agenda, as well as all of the dedicated presenters for sharing their knowledge and expertise. Our co-sponsors, as you can see, we have many, contribute their time, their ideas, their resources, and I especially want to acknowledge the California Conservation Corps for their generous support, their presence here and all they do for California watersheds. I also want to give a special thanks to the Watershed Stewards Program. We would not be able to put on this conference without their tireless help and participation, and we're so dedicated to keeping this affordable for practitioners and producing the conference in a grassroots way really enables us to do that. So thank you so much, Watershed Stewards Program. So I think that they work very tirelessly and our Board of Directors and staff, we work very tiredly and I really want to acknowledge the SRF Board that is here, you know, from dawn till way past dusk every day of the conference doing all kinds of tasks to make this work smoothly. And the staff as well, so thank you so much. And finally I want to thank all of the conference participants who have migrated here so tirelessly to participate in this premier salmon restoration conference and for joining us in our efforts to enhance the art and science of restoration and ultimately recover wild salmon populations. And for many years now Tommy Williams has been a fabulous colleague and sounding board and helped with the plenary session and it has really been a joy to work with you, Tommy. And I'm so grateful for NOAA Fisheries Support and particularly your support Tommy. Thank you. All right, thanks Dana. First of all, on behalf of the SRF Board of Directors, the Executive Director and their staff, welcome to this year's conference. We are blessed here folks with this SRF and this conference and I think we should give them all, all SRF, a big round of applause for what they do for us here in California. This is the 35th annual conference and this is I think one of the best conferences, not just in California, not just on the West Coast, but in the United States just because it brings everyone from the folks who are boots on the ground to people in the classroom to people in the policy offices management arenas. So get a chance for us all to kind of mix it up and hear our speakers and think about the resources we love. I think we have a great plenary session today. All of us spend a lot of time thinking about wood debris, side channels, sampling schemes, pit tag arrays, market recapture, FRGP grant writing, all of these things. And the bottom line a lot of times is we need water. We need water. We need water and we need the right water and we need the water delivered, something close to how the historical patterns were before to return those processes that are important to these watersheds. And so I think the panel today we have for you reflects that need. And so I'm real excited we'll have a brief set of question time after each speaker and then after all three speakers we'll have a kind of a panel discussion question and answer time. So our first speaker today is Dr. J. Lund. He's the Director and Center for Watershed Sciences, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California Davis. He had I think probably the longest drive here today. Dr. Lund is Director of the Center of Watershed Sciences and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UC Davis. He has long enjoyed teaching research and engagement on many aspects of theory and practice of water management and policy. Usually trying to integrate economics, operations research and traditional engineering. He has become particularly engaged in working on the wide range of problems in California with many collaborators and remains enthusiastic about the potential of systems analysis and optimization to provide understanding and insights for management and policy. He is on the editorial board of several water resources publications and served as President of the University's Council on Water Resources. In California he was on the advisory committee for the 98 and 2005 California Water Plan updates, has served as convener of California Water Environmental Modeling Forum and his chair of California's Delta Independent Science Board. He's been long involved in applying economic and organizational ideas to provide insights into California's water problems including the development of the use of the Calvin model of California's water supply. He is the lead author of Comparing Futures for the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta and Managing California's Water from Conflict to Reconciliation. So please welcome Dr. Lund. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. I think the last time I was in this room one of my kids was up on stage. It's a pleasure to be here. I notice this is the 35th conference. That's really amazing longevity in conferences and a really important subject. I'm afraid it's still going to be important for a long, long time for good and bad. The Center for Watershed Sciences that I now work with a lot, this is our 20th anniversary this year so we're all getting older. So when I talk about California water with people, most people are in this position. And this applies to elected officials, even to people that have worked in water for their whole career because in water, California water, most of you are here from California, even the wonkiest of us only knows a little piece of the picture of what's between the cloud and the faucet or the cloud and the irrigation drainage ditch or the cloud and the salmon stream. I'll try to fill a little bit of it in. But first I want to look at, reflect a little bit on the hydrology of the last few years. It doesn't have a laser. You can see here, this is a normal plot from DWR. The driest year of record and you can see the second driest trace here, 2014-2015 water year. We had four or five years sort of way down in there and then the 2015-2016 drought last year and then we had that blue line up on top which is the current year. It's the wettest year of record so far and it was so wet they even had to shrink the size of the map in order to fit it on the curve. That's how wet it has been this year. Ah, now that works great. Such a huge range from some of the driest years of record to the wettest year of record at least so far all within a few years. A lot of the climate change folks saying we should expect more extremes, well we're seeing a lot of them. We're not seeing anything average except for 2016 which was sort of on the way between them. Look at that. Snowpack, it's not, snowpack this year is unusually high, not a record setting one. Again, what you would expect with a warmer climate, very wet year but not as wet in terms of hydrology, in terms of snowpack. Huge range here. Let me go back a little bit to the fundamentals of water in California. Anybody here not from California? Okay, so some of you might not know so much of this. The map on the left is the runoff in California. California is mostly a dry place but we have some wet places as well. So the dark parts on that map on the far left is 20% of the surface area of the state. It's responsible for two thirds of all the runoff. If you take the light blue and the dark blue together that's 40% of the surface area. It's responsible for 90% of all the runoff. The red area is 30% of the state of California. It's responsible for 0.1% of all the runoff in the state. We don't have many salmon there. Huge mismatch in space. So where is the agriculture in California? Where are the cities in agriculture in California? Where are the people? It's where the water ain't. When is this water available? When it's available, it's available in the winter. We want it for agriculture and for cities in the summer, in the spring. So we have this tremendous mismatch in space and time for water in California which makes it heaven for civil engineers. And so the map on the right is the infrastructure that we've built and cajoled and we manage for all of California. You'll see we have lots of reservoirs up in the mountains. We have lots of canals. The canals rival the sizes of many of the rivers. We bring water from everywhere. We take it to the places where there's a lot of agriculture or where there are a lot of people. The other thing I like about this map is it's very colorful. And the colors come from all the different odors. So we have over a thousand maybe on the order of three or four thousand different water districts that run this water system. One hydrologic cycle, four thousand water agencies. You read about this every, no wonder it's so colorful in these papers. We have a lot of natural variation here seasonally from the wet season to the dry season and between the wet years and the dry years. So this was 1983, the wettest year on record. These are unimpaired flow for the delta. We have a pronounced wet season and snow melt season. And then we have wet years, average years and then this is the driest year of record, 76, 77. Huge range, more than an order of magnitude range in flow. And this is of course the Orville spillway in better days. I was about to change but I thought it was too good for today. And just to give you a sense for how weird the hydrology is for California, this shows the coefficient of variation. Now some of you, I realize you're all biologists but I know a bunch of you took statistic class at one point. And you know that the coefficient of variation is the standard deviation divided by the mean. Because it shows you how unusual things are relative to the central tendency. And I'm from Delaware, I'm from back here. The other J is from Rhode Island, it's up around here. It's very boring back there. What's the weirdest place in the United States? California, obviously. Well some of California is even weirder, I guess that's true. And so we have fewer average years compared to the extreme wet and dry. And we certainly have seen that in the last few years but the statistics bear us out in this. The landscape here has always been changing. And it continues to change under a lot of human influence. This is what California looked like in the late Pleistocene, before the end of the last Ice Age. You can see out here the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta outside the Golden Gate Bridge down by the Farallons. You see a giant glacier on top of the Sierras. Which explains why there were no native fish in that part of the world in the recent era. And you see this lot of hydrology going on including very large lakes in Central Valley. Moving up to just a couple hundred years ago, 1873, here's a map of the Central Valley. You see Tulare Lake down here. Anybody gone swimming in Tulare Lake lately? Not for a long, long time. Well, maybe this year later they might be able to swim in some of the ditches. All that's gone to irrigate agriculture. All these dark areas here were seasonal or permanent wetlands, 95 or more percent of which are gone. All that salmon rearing habitat is essentially gone. And a lot of it is evaporating off the surface as agricultural productivity. We've built the state water project, federal water project, moved water all up and down, pumping water over mountains. All kinds of really cool stuff from an engineering perspective. The other side of the hydrograph, on the wet side we have the bypass system. This is the city of Marysville in 1955, just before Orville was built. We were worried for a little while it might look like this again this year. Back in February, this is the yellow bypass in 2011. It looks fairly similar to that today in the last few months. Essentially, the bypass was a recreation, sort of a bad recreation from an ecological perspective, of the overflow that would naturally occur every year, almost every year in the bypass in the Sacramento Valley to accommodate the hydrology we have here. It was probably historically a tremendous source of rearing habitat for salmon, and we're trying to recreate some of that with some experiments out at Nags Ranch and such today. So it's a very highly altered landscape, but we're not going to do much to change the fundamental hydrology of having a high coefficient of variation. The management we've done in this system is pretty much decimated, more than decimated. Decimated is only killing off 10%. 90% would be non-assisted or something like that. The habitat for salmon, every place you have a black mark here, so to speak, and the red area is salmon habitat that's been cut off. So certainly the Central Valley used to have a lot more of it, and the habitat we've cut off has been the upper parts, which would be better for a warmer climate. So go figure. Again, we've taken away most of the 95% or more of the wetlands. We've recreated some of that in terms of rice habitat, which has helped the birds, but not so much the fish. We're trying to work on that. And this from Peter Moyle is the freshwater fish in California. Despite quite considerable attention between 1989 and 2010, we still have more listed species and fewer species that are in good shape. So we still have a long way to go. So that's the bad news. What's the good news? So I was thinking about this during the drought. When you compare California with other places, California is weird, as we've already established, because we have this Mediterranean climate. So I made a list of all the other countries in the world that have a Mediterranean climate, and I thought, well, how do we compare in terms of water management, in terms of the population we support, the wealth of that population, the food production, and what's the condition of the native freshwater aquatic ecosystems? And you can go pretty much through this list, and California either does much better or about the same as any other place on these measures. For you all, probably the ecological measure is the most interesting, where really nobody with a Mediterranean climate is doing very well, but California does as well with South Africa, which is sort of struggling but much diminished. Most of the other places with Mediterranean climates got rid of their native aquatic ecosystems maybe a few thousand years ago, in some ways. So in some senses, we're doing really well here, but I think we'd all agree that we have a long ways we'd like to go. It's a tough neighborhood when you're dealing with a Mediterranean climate. Just to point out some of the successes we've had in the last several years, and some of our failures as well. The drought from 2018 to 2012 to 2016, oh, 10-16. Wow. How'd I do that? Okay. The cusp of a millennia. We lost essentially 30% of our normal water supply during that period for five years. And in losing that much water supply, we lost 3% of our agricultural revenues. I find that remarkable that you can lose a third of your water supply and lose only a .03 of your agricultural revenues. And yet, even during that period, because we're continuing to shift the economy and agriculture to more permanent, higher profit crops, we had absolute increases in revenues and in employment and agriculture. But it would have been another 3% or 5% higher had we not had the drought. We went through this huge drought. We had essentially almost undetectable economic losses to urban areas. Even in 2015, when the governor required the state board enforced a 25% reduction in urban water use. How do you have a 25% reduction in urban water use where 97% of the economic production is occurring and not see any detectable economic losses? Because half of human water use in California on the urban side is keeping their lawns green. So a very small part of the economy. We did see some severe rural water supply impacts. People with dried up wells. The other Jay will tell you a lot about that I suspect. We had some severe fish impacts and we had very severe forest impacts up and down the Sierras. And one of the things we learned out of this was the importance of groundwater. Because particularly for agriculture, that was 2 thirds of the reason why that number is so low. Because the farmers picked up the pumping of groundwater, the overdraft of groundwater. Okay, let's take it to the opposite extreme. What we've been seeing this year. And the year's not completely over yet, but we can make some kind of assessment. The widest year of record so far. So big they had to shrink the map. We had spillway failures on Orville Dam. Not just one, but two. We were pretty lucky. We felt we only had to evacuate 190,000 people when we didn't actually flood them. For San Jose, a much more controlled environment, much smaller reservoir was at stake here. They had to evacuate 14,000 people and they actually flooded out most of those homes with about $73 million worth of damage. We had lots of local flooding and you probably all ran across some roads where you drove through a little bit of wetness. The wetness out there, the wet fields are going to delay farming activities. They're going to impose some economic losses on agriculture this year. We've had some small levee breaches that have caused local agricultural flooding. And in some places like McCormick-Williams retract, we've had some breaches that have caused what I will call unpermitted habitat restoration. Which hopefully we can preserve. Nature can sometimes move much faster than even our most populated bureaucracies. Maybe we should take advantage of this when we can. And the fish effects I think are we won't know for a while yet. But it's a good lesson for us because for a while there we were thinking that California was never going to see floods anymore. And now we're reminded. But I think this is remarkable. We have 29 million people, $1.3 trillion of economic activity, the wettest year of record and this is the worst nature could do to us. And a lot of this was self-inflicted. I think it's remarkable how well we've done in this climate, given how variable it is. Now could we do better? Should we do better? Obviously. That's the only reason we do as well as we do is we're not very patient with ourselves. But everything is not completely screwed up for the humans. Why is that? Why have we gotten so good at this as humans in managing water in California? Let's look at the water supply side first. And my theme here is portfolios, portfolio management. A lot of gray hairs out there, a few gray hairs out there. So I know some of you are thinking about portfolios for retirement. And that you're all buying Microsoft stock. And that's it. Hopefully you're diversifying your portfolios. You've got lots of different things you're doing so that it's more stable, more robust. And you're hoping to work till you're 75. In the water supply, one of the reasons we got through the drought so well was we had a very diversified supply. If you looked at the previous drought, 1988 to 1992, the urban areas in that time were not nearly so well diversified, not nearly so well intertied, did not cooperate as well with their neighbors, and they had very severe impacts. Much more so than last drought anyway. And what you do when you look at urban water supplies these days is you look at well, let's look at the whole portfolio on the water supply side. Source protection, stormwater capture. How are we going to gather up water? How are we going to store it in ground water and surface water? How are we going to operate with our neighbors? Conjunctive use with the ground water, buy and sell water. Be able to convey water from where it's stored or from where there is water. How do we reuse it locally? What new treatment plants can we build to make use of that water? And then on the demand side, how do we reduce demands? How do we improve efficiencies? How do we make the best of what we get? And then because water supplies are essentially millions of people all with their hands on a faucet, how do you get all of these millions of people to behave in ways that make the system work well? So you have pricing and markets and subsidies and education. All these things come together to give you a portfolio of how you manage things for urban water supplies and we get through this horrible drought really with very little damage at all in comparison. On the flood side, how do we go through the wettest year of record in California and not have millions of people displaced? How come we didn't lose Sacramento in this wettest year of record? There were times in the past when we lost Sacramento in years like this, back in the 1800s, early 1900s. Well, again, we have a portfolio of actions and here we typically divide them up into preparatory actions. What do you do before a flood? Because that's when you have the most time to do something about a flood and you build all these infrastructure, sort of structural measures as we call them, but there's also a whole bunch of non-structural measures, vulnerability reduction we now call them where you try to move people out of the flood plain, you elevate their structures, things like that. And then in flood response actions, what do you do during a flood? There was a nice flood in 1993 in Idaho, Iowa rather, where they had a very large system of levees and they had these flood gates and flood walls, but this town got flooded anyway because somebody forgot to close the flood door between the river and the city, so actually responding is important. But sometimes you do things like designing the infrastructure, like the bypass system for the most part, where it just works, the water overflows a weir into the bypass. And then we have recovery actions, both on repairing the infrastructure and going back and reconstructing and trying to remove damageable property from the flood plain after the flood. So we have a whole portfolio of actions and quite a few agencies that work between local state and federal agencies to make these things come together. On water quality, it used to be that a lot of people would die from drinking water and now they don't, at least in this country. How did we do that? Well, we have a portfolio approach there as well. We have a philosophy in environmental engineering, sanitation engineering called the multiple barriers approach where you take some chemicals and you ban them outright. Although we might be seeing less of that in the current administration. We have source protection. We try to keep the rivers cleaner. And then because we don't trust those things to always be in effect, we treat the water when we take it out. We manage the distribution to keep it clean. And then for the cases where we have diseases that creep through this whole system of multiple barriers, we have a public health system to identify, oh yes, this person got sick because of the drinking water and now we need to go back up in here. So when you saw this work at Flint, we don't have flints very often. I hope we don't. More often than we'd like, but on the whole it's better than living in China, which is the second most prosperous economy in the world. To parallel this system of multiple barriers, we have multiple institutions. Again, just like we have multiple physical barriers, we have multiple institutional barriers. So we have a lot of redundancy in water quality. We don't like killing people. And we don't like it so much that we have lots of different people that are responsible for it. Almost like water supply. So we have local boards, public health agencies, local utilities, state regulators, federal regulators, professional societies in universities, all that play a role in making this system work. And this essentially happens for all of these portfolio approaches. Now let's go look at salmon, the area where we haven't done well during this drought and during these wet years and in California in general. Here we have a salmon life cycle. You guys know much more about this than I do, but we've got essentially geographic segmentation here. Salmon come out of the ocean, they go up the rivers to spawn, so they have to be able to get up there. We don't let them do that because of dams quite often now. When they get to places that they can spawn, they need some characteristics there. Once the salmon hatch from there, mature a little bit, then they move down in the rivers, tributaries, flood plains, and eventually out to sea. And they have to have good rearing habitat down there. So this cycle for salmon life history I think helps us define what a portfolio system might look like for salmon and ecosystems as well. So you'd identify what do you need in each of these stages in the life cycle, and you look at these separately and then together. Because the whole cycle doesn't work if there's a very... It works as well as the weakest link essentially. And then this would lead us to a bigger circle if you will, of what elements of a portfolio might you identify for each of these segments. And then I think ultimately the thing that we need to do is not only identify these elements, but identify people responsible for making sure these things happen and making sure that these elements are coordinated and paid for. I think that's always our hardest part, being paid for. We're very good with public health because people pay for that in their water bills every day. People that irrigate their lawns profusely, that money goes in and is used disproportionately to subsidize the public health, the water quality and the water supply delivery. Property taxes help us with the flood control. We don't really have that funding model and that institutional model for coordination on the ecosystem side. And I think that the weaknesses have shown up in this drought. So for building an integrated ecosystem portfolio, we should look at the life cycle support. How can we support each stage of the life cycle? Recognize that the population is only as strong as the weakest stage. How do we develop institutional support to coordinate across and within each of these stages and provide enough assets and organization to give us the flexibility for managing this portfolio in a highly variable hydrology that we have in California. One of the things that really shocked me in this drought was everybody had drought plans except for the ecosystem. And that's really the area that fell short. And it likes this slide so much. Microsoft PowerPoint has stopped working. You start the program. See, there's that life cycle once again. Thank you Bill Gates for pausing my talk. So there's some reasons to hope here. I think things are getting better for the salmon at least because we're going to see diminishing growth in human water demands and probably absolute diminishment in human water demands. Hopefully that makes it easier for the salmon and the ecosystems. If you look at the growth and gross urban and agricultural water use, it's essentially flattened out. We have more and more people but they're using less water per capita so urban is sort of flattened out. We've largely irrigated most of the agricultural land we're likely to see grown and the Sustainable Ground Water Management Act is going to essentially reduce some of that agricultural use over time. Our economy, our economic structure depends a lot less on water. So the economic damage we see from a water shortage is much less in California than it would have been 40 or 50 years ago. Look at the different sectors of California's economy in terms of employment. Mining which used a lot of water is almost nothing. Agriculture which uses 80% of the human water use is down to about 5% of the economy as a whole. Recreation, non-recreation services, other goods. We rarely use very little water to provide all that economic activity. So the shift in economic structures really helped us for managing droughts and making more water available at less cost hopefully for ecosystems. We have water markets that we can help use to shift things around, civilize change and we agree we have a problem. That's one nice thing about having to dry and wet years together. Some quick conclusions. California is a dry place with many water demands. Droughts and floods are very good at reminding us that we need to make changes. If you look at the history of California water droughts and floods have really helped us make improvements. The economy is robust to water now overall but the ecosystems are still the most harm the least well-prepared in terms of their management. Portfolios are really the core for water management success and I think this is the weakness of ecosystems. We haven't developed a portfolio approach across the agencies and a way to fund it. As part of all of this we need much better water accounting and I think in all of this area it's important for us to be somewhere between complacency and panic. When people panic we don't do very well, we don't make very good decisions and it tends to come back at us but if we're complacent we don't make progress so I think it's always important to try to steer between those two. There are going to be big changes in California water over time. I made a list of one point of here are all the changes that we're going to see no matter who's in the White House, no matter who's in the governor's office, no matter what happens with climate change we're going to see these kind of changes and they're going to be fairly big but they're not going to be catastrophic for most of us. Maybe for a few salmon runs but hopefully we can do something about that. But there are going to be some big changes. And because I'm a professor I'll give you some, I'll leave with some readings. So there we go, that's the end of my talk. Thank you for being patient with me. So we have some time for some questions. Oh yeah, so this is my favorite question. What is this map of? This is the audience participation question. Oh my, you guys must be young. We lost this. What was that map? That was the vote on the peripheral canal 1982. It's basically cultural geography. Northern California doesn't like Southern California. I have a question. So you talked about how far the environment has diverged from historical conditions. You also talked about this portfolio or this resiliency the infrastructure has in terms of management. So how is that, is that incongruent that you made the statement that the environment or the ecosystems don't have a portfolio? Because what their portfolio would be might be constrained by those. So I'm trying to wrestle that incongruence between this portfolio that you expressed in terms of the infrastructure and the management and society and this lack of portfolio and salmon and ecosystems. I think, you know, we've been trying to manage California's water for ecosystems for maybe 20 years in a serious way. We've been trying to manage water systems not to kill people for really in the last 150 years. And it took us a long, we killed a lot of people before we figured out how to provide people with clean drinking water. We killed a lot of people with floods before we got organized and built infrastructure and organized cities and zonings to keep people from getting flooded out. So I think it's mostly a matter of we're still struggling to figure out how to manage ecosystems. And we haven't figured out a way to dedicate resources to it and organize the different agencies to do it. Well, you're asking an engineer a biology question and that's not a really, you know, you've got to be careful with those kind of questions. You don't want me to answer that really because I'm not going to know anything so I won't. But it's somebody's going to answer that question because the resource, where do you focus on? There were some diseases, waterborne diseases that were not as high in priority as the waterborne diseases that we addressed first and were successful with. So maybe history can give us some lessons on how we make decisions on what we allocate our effort to and what we train ourselves up on, really, so we get more effective on other things. We worry about water quality issues today that we wouldn't have given any thought to at all 100 years ago. Some of the carcinogens were one in a million chances of dying from when we were losing 30,000 people a year in Philadelphia every summer to waterborne diseases. We didn't care about those other risks. I think we ought to prioritize a little bit and focus, make sure we do something really well and then after we get well organized and solving some of these problems it'll make it easier to solve some of the others. So remember your questions, we'll have all the speakers up for about 25 minutes of questions after all the presentations. So join me in thanking Dr. Walker. Alright, once again the hitches keep on coming with our panel today to the next speaker is Felicia Marcus. She was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown to the State Water Resources Control Board for the State of California in 2012 and designated by the Governor as Chair in April 2013. For those who are not all that familiar with the Board, the Board implements both federal and state laws regarding drinking water and water quality and its implications, implements the state's water rights laws. The Board sets statewide water quality, drinking water and water rights policy, hears appeals of local regional water quality decisions, decides water rights disputes and provides financial assistance to communities to upgrade water infrastructure. Before her appointment at the water board, Felicia was served in positions in government, the non-profit world and the private sector. In government, she served as the regional administrator of the US EPA Region 9 in the Clinton Administration where she was known for her work in bringing unlike the allies together for environmental progress and making the agency more responsive to the communities they served, particularly Indian tribes, communities of color, local government and agricultural business interest. Prior to that, Felicia headed the Los Angeles Department of Public Works. She came to Public Works after extensive experience as a public interest lawyer and community organizer in Los Angeles, including being a co-founder and general counsel for Hill the Bay. In the non-profit world, she was Western Director for the Natural Resource Defense Council. Prior to joining NRDC, Felicia was the Executive VP, COO of the Trust for Public Lands. She also was a private and non-profit sector attorney in Los Angeles, so you can see she has not been very busy. So it's a great pleasure to introduce Felicia Marcus. Now, I have to deal with the elephant in the room because otherwise you won't hear a word that I have to say. I know that is not a salmon. But I do want to tell you that finding appealing pictures of a talking salmon ate up at least two hours of my time over the course of the last few weeks. And so my plea to you before I begin my talk this morning is please send me your best pictures of salmon who look like they're talking. I found a good one this morning and then of course I read the tag on the image and it was a dead smolt that had been found after floodwaters receded. So I didn't use it because it was just too painful and I knew that the rest of you would know that it was a dead smolt. But I have to say, okay, it's a striped bass. I'll admit it, big mouth, billy bass to be sure. And if all of you don't already have one of these, it either means you're a lot younger than I am or you don't have a sense of humor because this is one of the best things that ever came out on the Christmas gift market. And as I said, my goal is to find someone techie enough to be able to get into its innards and change the words so I can have it say whatever I want when someone goes by. But if a salmon could talk, they would probably say kill this guy as often as you can. So I found another talking fish. What this particular fish as you know would say, keep that cat out of my house. Then if you haven't, you either don't have kids or you don't remember the cat in the hat. But it was a more charming talking fish. So with that, let me start my talk. I have to say that it fills my heart and I anticipated it filling my heart to see so many people who are working on restoration activities in one place. I spent a lot of my time in the word arena, which is sometimes more like the Roman arena of all more than even a sporting event. And as you heard, I've had a lot of jobs both in government and in the private sector in the nonprofit world. I've done advocacy, policymaking and management. I've been in regulatory agencies and in operations agencies and in the nonprofit world. I've been an advocacy and in project delivery organizations at Trust for Public Land at the national level. I got to see 200 plus miracles a year of people restoring a place together with people that they never thought they'd be able to agree on lunch with. So I've been through the world and had a taste of what you deal with every day. And I have to say it's been a good run and I've learned a lot, met a lot of great people and I hope done some good work along the way. But I have to say there is something really wonderful about working and being with people who are trying to get stuff done on the ground. Whether land conservation, organizing the public to pick up trash, restoring a wetland or just teaching a child about the wonder of the world around them. Public Works was my biggest and hardest job like that. TPL is neck and neck with that with Heal the Bay and other local LA groups being my formative experiences. There's something about being grounded in trying to change something real. Whether it's restoring a salmon stream, fixing a sewage system, filling a pothole. If you've never filled a pothole, it's a rush, I just have to say. Or making sure that the trash gets picked up and recycling goes long, which is what we did in LA. That's just different. Those jobs are the hardest and potentially the most rewarding. But they also draw people to them have a combination of vision and heart and connection to something bigger than they are. So thank you for the work that you're trying to do, which is challenging but essential, frustrating but noble and important to so many of us, whether we have scientific skill or not, where waiters and fleece or not. Work outdoors or always behind a desk or can even say fluvial geomorphology. So I thought I'd start with a couple of quotes, one in particular, maybe just one. It's a quote from Aldo Leopold that we used to really love and use a lot at TPL but I think of all the time. One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, economics, and history. The other studies the plant animal community uncomfortably relegates the hodgepodge of politics to the liberal arts. The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of this century. That's what interests me most in some ways about this work, not the line of specialization but drawing together the notion of the natural world and people and the fact that we are intrinsically connected and trying to find those connections and draw in more allies to the restorative work of restoring, say, salmon streams and salmon runs, for the value to the salmon, but more than that the value to ourselves individually and as a people. So the title I chose was if salmon could talk instinctively, in part because it'd be a lot easier for us if they could, and because so many people purport to talk for them on both sides of the water battles, and it feels sometimes to me, frankly, like sometimes people are so focused telling each other why they're wrong that they forget to focus on the fish. And I have this vision of a fish to say, excuse me, excuse me, as we're seeing the rhetorical battles about what they need. So I was really happy to come here to thank you because you keep your eye on the ball, which is the fish, actually. I just thought he was cute. Or is it a she? I don't know. So Jay did a great job. So I'm going to flash through way too many slides and forgive me if I glance over them, but I had a lot I wanted to say, but I really only have a few things I wanted to leave you with this morning for starters. And I know we'll have a chance to have more conversations now and for the future. And so I'm going to talk a bit about the California water context. But Jay did a great job and did a lot of it. And the other Jay will talk about the rest of it. So the Jay's, I'm a Jay sandwich. No. You're a Felicia sandwich. No, I don't know. Sorry, I'm from LA. You know, forgive me. From the Valley, like really. And I'm going to talk about, I'm every woman. That's who I am. I mean, how many of you was Jay's Borg slide the best picture in the whole thing, right? Of course. So I'll talk about Bay Delta, but I cannot talk about California water fix. And I will just say that that has been the issue that has sucked all the air out of the room about Bay Delta issues for a long time. I spend months in the room, you know, water rights hearing, so I cannot talk about it. I can't tell you context wise. I can't talk about it. I can't hear about it. I have to run out of the room when it comes up. It's sort of, I keep saying that California water fix is the new by Felicia because I got to leave the room. If it gets managed to go to a party, lean against the refrigerator, somebody walks through and says about that water fix and I got to leave. And then I'll talk a little bit about the talking salmon. So forgive me as I roll through. Well, I had a lot I was going to say about California water policy and Jay said most of it. But I always, as those of you know me know, I always start with an elephant and you would say why an elephant and not a salmon or a salmon of some kind. And it's because when we're trying to deal with California water policy, which I dealt with very intensively through the Bay Delta Accord and other years and then ran screaming out of the water world because I was so tired of being the princess of peace all of the time. And I like to say it's hard to be the princess of peace when you're pissed. But I was tired of how often I had to get the warring parties to sit down and try and focus on the fish, for example. Or to see where they had won a war but had to give up a battle because they had to give something up to folks. That's the way we move forward as a society with competing interests. And I left and went to land conservation because I wanted to work with folks who knew how to make a deal. I wanted to work with folks who worked on tangible things on the ground with people, a focus on the thing versus at the other people or out in some intellectual ozone. And it was it was a restorative experience for me. And when I came back into the water world, got dragged back into it. When I moved back in the policy world and already seen got dragged into the 09 legislation negotiations because I'm not so good or that smart. But apparently people do behave better when I'm in the room because I just listen to all of them. So we have a long way to go in our world. There are a lot of people who do it too. But I guess I was kind of happy to be drawn back in. But one thing that I noticed was it was the same people saying the same things past each other across the decades. And I also noticed because I was a little older and more mature that you had people who were really smart and knew a lot. Whether it was about fish or conveyance systems or dams or farming or you name it. And they knew it all very deeply and they knew one piece of the water pie. And they would say, just this one thing will solve it all, which of course isn't true. And not recognizing that portfolio that Jay was talking about, which is the way you actually solve things. Or the portfolio of things that we see in nature in an ecosystem as opposed to pulling out single species or the like. And it reminded me of that parable of the blind men and the elephant who are each touching a different part of this magical creature and describing something completely different. And there are a whole herd of elephants in most policy rooms about water. But I always see that as part of the problem with moving forward on solutions that a regular person, my aunt Charlotte, my friends, your friends, expect us to have conversations about in solving problems. And so unless you deal with this weird log jam, whether you call it the elephant in the room or the elephant phenomenon or the inability to see how other people see things, we're not going to make as much progress as we need to. And those of you in the room who know me for a long time and most of you don't know that I'm fond of saying that the biggest challenge before us isn't scientific, technical, engineering, economic, legal, you name it, even the complexity of ecosystem management. It is the challenge of ecosystem management. And that does not mean big egos. That means being able to actually see the people in the room that you need to get together with to actually do things on the ground. So I'll talk a little bit about that and that is more of my focus. So Jay did this. I'll just put an exclamation point on the climate change issue where with a few degrees temperature rise, we lose a lot of or all of our snowpack over the next decades to come. For anyone who's been working in this field, if you see the water and the snowpack up north being a third of our storage in an average year in a state that relies on storage above ground or below, but where it doesn't rain and snow every year, it doesn't rain and snow in the places where it's most used and that we've come to rely on it and not in the time of year, a storage becomes very important. That's why the emphasis on groundwater management because those basins are the only thing that can approximate in size the snowpack that we're going to lose. And if we don't get off our duffs and start taking a different approach to water and doing a lot of things, all of the conflicts we see today are going to seem like a picnic compared to what's to come when we're going to be losing that. So this is the picture on the bathroom mirror every day to motivate me to get things in motion. For the administration, oh darn, I thought I made that faster. I apologize. We have taken a portfolio approach and I'm not going to go through everything in the water action plan, but I give it to you for the context of what our administration's been trying to do relentlessly for the past few years. And it came out a year before the end of the last term and it was our five-year promise to everyone that these were the things we were going to focus on for the next five years to lay a foundation for a more sustainable water future. It's an all of the above strategy. It is a portfolio strategy. And also let's get off our butts and stop talking and start doing strategy. Come with me if you want to live. We are in motion trying to do all these. Do we do every single one of these things everywhere? But we've got to do them where they're appropriate and where they go. And I just wanted to highlight too. I mean, I generally highlight providing safe water for all communities because I actually think that is the top issue of our time and our top priority because it has to be with so many Californians not having clean systems. It's safe and affordable water. But right up there, achieving those co-equal goals for the Delta, you know, because it is the vortex of so many things, ecosystem, water supply, the people there, any number of things and it's a challenging system that we need to deal with. But I also want to point out protecting and restoring important ecosystems, which is getting ahead of the curve, not waiting until something's endangered and trying to take that single species approach, but trying to go long on restoration. Again, the drought has delayed a lot of what we were doing, but many of you are no doubt engaged in the work that we're doing, both on the North Coast, salmon streams and elsewhere to try and make some headway. The work that Chuck Bonham and others have tried to do, starting to have a conversation about upper watershed work, mountain meadow restoration and the like. There's a lot going on there and I invite you to work with us on that with Cal Eco Restore and all the money that was in the bond that Chuck has and others have to spend. We can make a little dent, but it's just a down payment on what we need to do. There's more to it. Where'd that go? Oh, so now it's doing both. Thanks. What are you doing? This I can't blame the machine on. This is me too late last night trying to make it go faster. That didn't work. So we've talked about the drought a little bit. I won't go into too much detail just in the interest of time. This was the slide that broke our hearts, of course. This was the worst snowpack in modern history from April of 2015 that set in motion much more dramatic actions on our part and caused incredible amount of devastation with all the caveats that Jay mentioned. It is extraordinary that we came through this as well as we did with all sensitivity to people who were hurt and there were a lot of people who were hurt. But I do have to put my happy slide up, and it is just my happy slide to make you a little happier, but I have to say we can't be totally happy yet because flooding can cause mayhem, death and destruction. And so as I've been explaining to people, they say, are you just thrilled and happy that it's rained and snowed? And all I can say is I'm getting a little more sleep. I owe Bill Croyle a really good bottle of scotch because he doesn't get to relax at all. But I'm containing my euphoria until we really are out of the woods in the flood risk season. And I have been saying we want all the rain and snow we can safely handle for the last four years because I don't want to be the one who asks for all the rain and snow in the world and caused that death and destruction. Is that like a wonky way to live? I can't have to contain my euphoria. So sometime in June I'm told we'll have a party and you'll see me dancing on stage, which could be the first time that ever happens. So Jay talked about a lot of the impacts and obviously the Fish and Wildlife ones were huge. The communities out of water were huge. The fallowed fields and people out of work could have been a lot worse, but was really pretty darn terrible. We did a lot of things. I won't go through all of them now. Some of them were really good and I will talk. My doubts do say on water rights we went beyond where anyone has gone before. That was for Jay. But I will say that we made some decisions and this is one of the things I did want to say here and I've said elsewhere. Where because we were seeing such an unprecedented confluence of challenges and we were looking at what was left in the project's storage and trying to figure out how to balance and maintain salinity control in the delta so that we didn't lose it and therefore make the water unusable for who knew how long for people or farming in the delta or south of the delta. We didn't know how we were going to deal with both spring flows as Sam and trying to get out but trying to hold enough water for temperature and largely temperature control through the fall. We cut it a little too close. My hats off to the fish agencies who did the heavy lifting of working with the projects to try and come up with what they thought might work. Both sides have a lot of arrows in their back from their respective constituency groups. We at the water border kind of in the middle of his were supposed to balance that we do obviously have a thumb on the scale for fish and wildlife and environmental issues and I think folks did a good job of trying really hard, far better than any time I had seen before, certainly better than the 90s, but we missed it on temperature control a couple of years and we lost. An awful lot of salmon eggs and I will take that one to my grave as something that I really wish we had been more conservative that second year but I do want to say on behalf of the folks who worked so hard to try and make it work. It wasn't for lack of caring about the fish. It was for making some really hard choices that are really easy for people who don't have to make those choices to think they could have made better. Because you do have to own all those competing interests and what's happening. I can say that to a lot of people but that was one of the things I wanted to say. We also got that water bond pass which isn't the end of the story but certainly a good beginning and the money in there for ecological restoration is really, really important and as I understand it and I'm sure you've heard from Chuck and others. Whether you call it Project EcoRestaur or just the other projects that they've been able to get more done in the past couple of years than the past 20 because we've sort of unleashed folks into trying to actually focus on let's get projects done on the ground and hopefully there'll be many, many, many more and hopefully many of you are getting more funding on projects that you care about. So that's pretty important. There's more there but I'll keep going. Now, people think I'm fixated on this slide and some of you have seen this. I am not doing a whole talk about beer this morning because we're talking about fish but I love this quote because so many people can be patronizing about people but really about the value of real facts and about how people, if given the right facts, the real facts can rise to the occasion and they certainly did during the drought. And then I love this thing about the great point is to bring them the real facts and beer and as many of you know, I won't go through it all, I did a lot of Googling late night on that one and looked for quotes about beer. I mean you have the Ben Franklin ones but many of them reportedly by him but I looked up Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy, Mar-Ronal Reagan and beer and I got nothing. I just want to say nothing. That was really good. I did get from Martin Luther the original that popped up. Whoever drinks beer, he is quick to sleep long. Does not sin. Whoever does not sin, enters heaven. Thus, let us drink beer. Which I thought was really pretty good. So this morning I actually tried Googling Abe Lincoln. You may think I just have too much free time. This is just my, I could be playing video games, you know. I tried Abe Lincoln and salmon. I thought, hey, he might have gotten something good there. I got zipped but I didn't spend that much time on it but I did get this. I have simply tried to do what seemed best each day as each day came. I decided those were words to live by even if I can't put a fish in the picture. So what's the reality we're dealing with? And Jay talked about a lot of this. That loss of snowpack is the biggest one. Sea level is going to rise. What does that mean? People right now are using that as a weapon depending on who they are. It's something we have to deal with. And restoration particularly in the Delta is one of the key things that can help deal with it. Many of you know that. The Delta needs our help. The ecosystem, the people in it and the people dependent on it. So we've got to get off our butts and figure out how to not break the Gordian knot but make some real improvement there. Here's the reality that makes it hard to sleep at night which is all the people in this state who rely on wells that are contaminated. These aren't all the ones who rely on wells. If you're in a large urban area, as Jay's slides talked about, you can afford to treat it, blend it, etc. If you're in a small rural urban community relying on shallow groundwater wells, you cannot. And even under the systems that we regulate, which is small systems over 25, we know there are hundreds of communities that just can't meet modern treatment standards. And we're making headway. We've got money on it. We've gotten authority to consolidate. We've gotten all kinds of tools from the legislature. But we still, the big thing to watch for this year is can we get an operation and maintenance funding source because they will never be able to afford even to keep a system running even if we build it. And this is the issue of our time for Californians. I think Californians, if you give them this information, will absolutely contribute a few bucks a year or a month so that people can have clean, safe and affordable drinking water. So let's hope they get that chance. Population's going to rise. Our infrastructure, it's actually, the issue is more a lot of little problems rather than the big one, but it's such a good picture. This is one that California agriculture, it painted as a demon by many who are advocates for salmon, and I think that's short-sighted, is also a precious resource for all of us. Only five Mediterranean climates in the world that can grow the level of healthy fruits and vegetables. We can. I need better slides on this, please. I just did an invitation for my slide deck. I was just trying to pull things out. It just looks bad if I go really fast. You can see it looks really bad. But it's still not the best set of slides, but that is critically important and massively. J is going to talk about this really well, but it's a great picture. And really more importantly, the reality is there's a lot we can do through integrated water management, the portfolio approach that Jay talked about, which is part of why we're pushing so hard to figure out how to move forward versus being stuck on it. It's this one thing. No, it's not. Yes, it is. It is so is not. You're a jerk. No, I'm not. That's the level of discourse we have a lot of the time. That is not going to get us where we need to go. And the reality is there's a lot of, I know there are a lot of words on this slide, but as every time I look at it, there's more going on. I mean, as you see, we're cycling. We got a billion dollars out the door in low cost grants and loans to get stuff off the drawing board and onto into the ground. I got three billion backed up in requests far more than we can ever spend. It's exciting what people want to do. Conservation, what the urban public did when finally given the information was hitting it out of the park. They've learned that they don't need to hemorrhage water on their lawns. When people put out, when agencies put out rebates, they got snapped up in weeks. People are transitioning to drought tolerant if they can't afford it. I think people are good and people want to try and do the right thing. But again, remember, I rolled out a recycling program. That one made a lot less sense dealing with water. It made sense, but it was driven by a public sensibility that they didn't want to waste and they wanted to be part of a solution. So my bias, as I do believe in the public and they'll rise to the occasion, you also had farmers in the delta agreeing to senior water rights holders in the delta agreeing to take 25% less water. Why? Well, then they knew they could bring in 75% crop and a curtailment. But if you read all of the stories and you read the reason why, they also didn't want to be seen as part of the problem. They did not want to be seen as we're senior, you can't touch us when fish and wildlife and people were hurt. And that has never happened before at that scale and was pretty exciting. And of course, you had a lot of the fish farmer win-wins. You all are a part of them where folks have tried rice has an awful lot of them, but they're not the only place and drought angels helping each other, et cetera. And the groundwater management movement, which Jay will talk about a bit, which is underway, again, slower than some would like, but a really heavy lift. There are a lot of great things happening. Let me just say that because those were a bunch of Debbie Downer slides. I'm not going to go through this just to give you a sense that we're busy and overall the goal is to implement that water action plan. You know, come with me. We're going, so come with us. Give me a better way, but don't stand on ceremony and just say it's one thing. It's not one thing. It's a lot of things. So there's a lot here. And I put cannabis curve at the bottom, as many of you know, because it is the tsunami of pain coming our way. It already is a lot of pain and we've been able to get resources to deal with it. But we'll see if the approach that the legislation, which gave us a lot more authority quicker to set in stream flows and do a number of things if it'll get us where we need to go. And I know a lot of you are on the front lines of that. That's a huge thing that we're dealing with. The Bay Delta plan you hear a lot about. I use this one because it actually shows those rivers. As you know what we need to do, and this is the most fraught, biggest deal, highest takes politics we deal with where we have to update the Bay Delta plan. Last was done 21 years ago. 21 years ago. It didn't work out as planned. I mean it did some good, but it didn't work out as planned as people diverted at different times of year and different things happened. More than 10 years ago the board identified the need for the update and we've been working hard on it. A lot of it was delayed for a full three years as all the same people were working on the drought and then we got some more staff to get it going. And I won't get into all the detail because some of you know but it's tough. One of the key things we're doing is focusing up the trips. The old plan ended up being implemented by a settlement where the projects took on all the responsibility down sort of at the confluence of all of the trips. And we certainly, this isn't why we did it this way. We certainly found during the drought that the projects alone don't have the capacity to deal with all the issues that are there. But we moved up the tributaries because the fish live and live their lives and the critical parts of their life cycle up the tributaries. But that has brought in a whole host of more serious opposition as they see the need that there'll be a need to contribute where they are. The idea is an idea of unimpaired flow. People have taken those words and twisted them and said they mean all kinds of different things so they can punch it as a punching bag. The whole notion of that is a different way to approximate flow. Right now we do it by calendar date based on how wet it was sort of the week before where you have these stair steps. Those are the things we had to relax or felt we had to relax during the drought which was an unprecedented use of the temporary urgency change orders. But this whole idea is to use unimpaired flow as an approximation of nature as a way to just at least share the river with fish and wildlife. In many of these areas 80 or 90% of the water is diverted out at many times. While fish and wildlife can't survive that, regular people understand that. People had no idea that we're diverting that much out of the river. Even if you know the dry part of the middle of the San Joaquin, there's a lot more that runs dry or nearly dry. Again, I'm preaching to the choir here. But we knew that that alone wasn't the perfect thing. It will simulate the cues in nature that fish have evolved for. But our whole idea and a key part of it was this olive branch isn't really the right word. But this awareness that humans coming together with fisheries agencies, farmers, irrigation districts. Some reasonable group of stakeholders coming together and deciding how to shape those flows in an adaptive management framework. Trying something one year and something else the next. Coming up with biological objectives, keeping their eye on the fish are going to have a different dynamic and a different human energy brought to this that might actually get us a lot further than just a piece of paper that says a percentage with enforcement. It's been taken that we want that sort of standard unimpaired flow that that's the answer. No, that's kind of the backstop. But it's really a way to approximate how you could help the fish best with an offer to come together and maybe get some discount on the amount of water if you do all those other non-flow things that we also know that fish need. And it's important because obviously, you know, flow is essential to fish. You don't need to have a fish talk to know that, but other things are to. And so figuring out how we can create a circumstance where we leverage that great human energy around trying to solve a problem is really important to us. And I will just say without telling a lot of stories, I mean, I'm getting older now and I am a veteran of the sewage turnaround in LA. But really the constructing the conditions under which people came together changes the dynamic of how they talk and did probably the biggest environmental turnaround in the country in that decade. And it was all because of the individual people in the room who stopped fighting and talking past each other and actually got to business trying to solve some problems. So we're as much about that process as not. And then we do have some salinity things I'm happy to talk about if you're interested that are actually very important to people in the Delta. I don't know how well that will turn out. Phase two is similar. This was on the lower San Joaquin tributaries. Phase two is in a slightly different place. It's at the scientific basis report stage. We did an awful lot of engagement. Some of you were very engaged. Extra comments on the draft. We're sending it out to peer review blind peer review to shortly. We got ISP review independent science board review on it as well. And we'll have a proposal next summer. The framework of it is similar to that that whole construct I talked about. But it also has a lot more in it to get inflows outflows. You've got interior Delta flow issues, you know, similar to what the biological opinions have dealt with cold water habitat. There's more in it. So watch that space. This is all, you know, you can buy popcorn to watch this. This is a pretty fraught series. And people feel very strongly on all sides. And some people do the pissing at each other. Sorry, I've said piss twice. That's probably bad. I get three times. Thanks. Three times I'm out. But there are also a lot of people trying really hard to figure out how to bridge divides and really get something to happen here. So common components, I already talked about some of it. I probably talked about all of it. There you go. Let me keep moving. I'll move faster again. Again, I talked about why to focus on flow. Flow is essential. It's clearly not adequate now. And it helps with all the other stressors, whether we're talking about predation or temperature. You know, you name it. You all know the details. So I won't explain it in detail. But fish definitely need more than flow. And I know they would say that. I know that. I'm not the Lorax or whatever the fish Lorax is. Someone has to write the fish Lorax book now. And there's just our time panel. All right. Don't forget this is my point here. But again, dialogue is the biggest problem. Okay. That's not that helpful. It's one way of putting it. I see that all the time. I understand the emotion of it. I get it. I think it unfortunately produces an equal and opposite reaction versus attentive empathy, which is what we really want. This one that many of you saw recently. Here's another one, which I have to say has been bemoaned by many, many thoughtful farmers who are trying beneath the radar outside the microphones to actually make something happen on the ground and who speak about the need to preserve nature as something they do as farmers, but also as something they want to do for fish. And I suspect we'll talk a little bit more about the rest of this in Q&A. We are in different times. This is also not the greatest way to talk about the need to save the fish. Folks may see it in a graph. It's not particularly poetic or inspiring. It might be motivating for people who know, but it's not obvious to people who don't know. We have to learn to talk about the magic and the importance, not just the magic. Magic might be dismissed, but the possibility and the strength of being able, not just to protect fish through restoration, but to do other things. The floodplain multiple benefit idea in a more poetic way. This was my life during the drought where folks jumped on one thing. It's an interesting thing and vilified it as if it were the whole problem. These things have issues. They're definite issues depending on where they are, but it wasn't the drought issue. Of course, my favorite example is bottled water, which has all kinds of problems. I've spent years in different jobs dealing with the scourge of too many bottles, but there are times when that water is important to a community that can't get water any other way to a kid to make sure they hydrate out on a hot day where you don't have a tap or a clean stream. And most importantly, it takes more water to make a beer. Should we ban beer? That always got the point across. Again. And then finally, there's a saying some of you know in Chinese, I can actually say it, but I'm not going to, where they say it's a phrase like a chicken talking to a duck, which means where you're talking past each other, but you don't understand each other. And some of you were at the science conference, heard me talking about my China story, but so let me tell you some others. I see this everywhere. This is the thing I see. Sometime back in the 80s, I was at a community meeting on Bayona Lagoon restoration. It's down in Los Angeles, right near where I live. I went because I lived in the community and people asked me to go because they knew I was a public interest lawyer. One set of participants talk about this beautiful wetland, this glorious ecosystem. They were practically crying, getting misty eyed or crying about the importance of saving this wetland. The other folks got up and said, it's a stinking mud hole. Why are you going to take our money, disrupt our lives, do whatever for this stinking mud hole? And in response, the other people would just get more misty eyed and more aggrieved. And I told people I couldn't take this case for a variety of reasons, but I was happy to sit in the back and give them advice. And at the end, folks came up to me and said, okay, what do you think? I said, I think you kind of have to see it their way. And what you need to say before you talk about the wonders of nature and how great it is, you have to say, I know it looks like a stinking mud hole, but here's why there's beauty in this that perhaps we can't all see and actually explain it versus expecting them to explain. A small thing, but a way to connect, either at the microphone or off the microphone is to acknowledge a perception that frankly, if someone doesn't come from your circle, they might not understand. Robert Greenfield in Servant Leadership has a concept of sort of verbal reinforcement that people form self-congratulatory circles and they talk to each other and they have their own language and they agree with each other. So they gird themselves then against the world because then the other people who don't agree with them must be stupid, venal, or pick your shot. And that ends up being the nature of the dialogue. So my point of this is that you have to figure out how to puncture that natural tendency as opposed to saying we're right, they're wrong. It's about empathy, it's about asking questions, it's about trying to figure out how to say it in a way people can understand. And I'm going to run out of time. I probably already have. So I have myriad examples of this. It's a smog check where I went, when I got to EPA, the state was at war with EPA on that. And I went and instead of bringing an entourage or just speaking in hearings, I visited every legislator on both sides of the aisle who had anything to do on either of the transportation committees. And I had one particular, oh, I took it off, I was going to wear my ID card. I took it off and I said to him, you know, Senator Russell, I know that you're being told that we're requiring this strict separation of testimony. I won't get into the, whatever. And he said, but I said, but we're not really, we prefer it, I can tell you why, because of fraud and other things. But I can accept a deal from the state as long as it meets certain criteria. And he looked at me and he said, no, EPA is requiring, you know, an uncertain in his mind, big fat, stupid thing, because that's what he would have expected EPA to do. And I said, no, really, I get that you're being told that, but that's not what we're proposing. You know, we like it better. I can tell you why, but we can do something else. And he says, no, EPA is requiring, blah, blah, blah. So I remember some of these stories and I pull my ID card in my bag and I held it up to him with my picture on it and the big EPA logo. And I said, honestly, Senator, I swear to God, I work at EPA now and we're not. And he looked at me and went, oh, well done. And that was the breakthrough in the negotiations. And so I can tell you a minute, just a couple of weeks ago I was sitting with two farmers who I have known for a very long time. They are my friends. We were having coffee and dessert and we were talking about all the fractious discussions. And they both kept repeating to me what the state board was requiring in the plan. And we were requiring unimpaired flow. It was so stupid. We were harsh, blah, blah, all of this. And I went, no, really, we've proposed this thing with the settlement, encouragement, adaptive management, everything. And you all are doing a lot of these projects, you know, we need. And they just kept repeating what we were doing. And so what did I do? I got really pissed off. That's my third one. Yeah, oh, good. I got really mad at them because they were my friends. And they then made the worst mistake you can ever make. And the women, maybe anybody in this room will appreciate it. One of them told me to calm down. Never tell an angry woman to calm down. I just want to say that is a universal truth. If you did not know that before, you're welcome. But afterwards I thought, oh, my God, I can't believe I reacted that way. That was not the right way to react. And so now I have to go meet with them again and ask them why. And so the point is, don't be chickens talking past ducks. Or thinking you speak duck when you don't. Okay, or Sam and Lover talking. I had a loving fish person and a friendly farmer. I just couldn't find better pictures. I hear water users and editorial writers talk about environmental advocates as haters of agriculture, as people who don't value food. We in government are trying to dupe them, or we're just plain stupid. I think the headline in the Modesto B editorial, which invoked my name liberally, was conspiracy or incompetence, which is better. He would love that I talked about it though. I'm sure he would love it. Don't tell him. They also talk about water diverted from them that doesn't appear to have helped fish. And they want to understand why they should give more. For some, it's rhetoric. And for others, it actually feels like the truth that they truly feel. I also hear a lot from those in agriculture who want to work on the basket of restoration and other actions that can truly help fish, but can't find willing partners or ears they feel from the environmental world. I hear fish advocates feel that no one cares or is listening, or who have watched salmon stocks, let alone smelt, plummet, and other species plummet. They and many of you and many of us are in a panic about it. What was that between panic and complacency? I'm closer to panic, I believe, at the moment. But all too often, I also hear them talk about numbers on a piece of paper or litigation and flow as a panacea dismissing the other things that salmon need too, like habitat, food, and evening the odds against predators. So each side thinks the other has all of the power. That is a truth. Whichever the co-equal goals of ecological restoration or reliable water supply they care about is the one that's out of balance. The Delta folks sometimes feel left out of the whole equation altogether, even though they're also an integral part of it. Each side thinks the other knows everything their circle does and is choosing to dismiss it, and there are too few olive branches or efforts to bridge the divide or even translate language. There's beauty, magic, and something of intrinsic profound importance in restoring ecosystems as a society that we have degraded, and there's something truly wondrous and heavenly about the amazing life cycle of salmonids. There's something important to us as humans, as I've said, and reconciling with the natural world through acts of restoration. But we don't communicate that very well as we talk numbers and papers and litigation threats. Similarly, people in agriculture feel it's so obvious that they're doing something equally wondrous and important to our humanity beyond the nourishment they create, but they can also lead with rhetoric and dismissal of the creatures we share this earth with. If we can see that we have competing goods, we don't have an instant solution, but we have the beginning of a conversation that can actually lead to a better and more productive way to make a difference that helps the ecosystem and people. And I also, as I've said, see people who are struggling to make these connections and to make it work. So if a salmon could talk in closing, if a salmon could talk in closing, what would they say? Well, they might settle the discussion and let us know how much flow and non-flow measures they want most and where. That'd be nice. I think they'd tell us to get off our high horses and talk to each other and get past the war of words and into action. I do definitely think they'd ask for more water, maybe even 60% of what he's having, but they'd also ask for evening the odds against predators that ask for food, cooler water, places to rest and grow and ready themselves for the next leg of their remarkable journey. A little help, please. Or there might be royally, I can't say it now, royally mad and not dain, not before and not dain to speak to us. So we have to do our best, whether as scientists and advocate or someone taking action on the ground to communicate for them in a way that can be heard to bridge divides. But most important, we need to take action to do the things that we can do, which is what so many of you do every day, with inadequate resources, inadequate certainty of what others can do to help, and without certainty that everything you do will yield returns. And we do need to draw as many allies as possible into the work, not to fight the other guy, but to add their voices and energy and effort to help make a difference. And encourage the overtures, even as we continue to press for more resources or regulation or water. So I'm not without hope. And seeing all of you fills me with more. Oh, sorry. I was there yesterday. Patrick O'Pell and Erica were there, but with farmers, irrigation districts and environmentalists trying to do some great things on the Tuolumne River. This, I just share with you some wonderlberry as I leave you. He really got the importance of both the land and ecosystem and farming. But I really like most. You cannot save the land apart from the people or the people apart from the land. And if you haven't read him, I recommend it. So most of all, I think the fish would say thank you to all of you for the remarkable work that you do through a combination of ingenuity, intelligence, heart, and plain old hard work. They'd say thank you for caring and let's hope for more of you and more resources for more of you. And I wanted to say thank you too for all of that and for the inspiration to find new ways to make real progress on the ground with people to break through the rhetoric and get to the heart of things. Your work does more than help the fish. It bridges divides and it solves problems. And you know that sometimes that takes the 1,000 cups of tea we used to talk about at TPL. It helps us all be better. So thank you. And let's get more of that hopeful story out there. I look forward to working with you in the months ahead. We have time for one or two questions. Yeah, I took too long, sorry. That's okay. And yet you persisted. And yet I have the hat. I have the hat. All right. Think of your questions during break and we'll be back with us at the end. Folks, we have about 15 minutes to stretch your legs, get a drink of water and be back in your seats. All right, folks, let's get started. I'm going to go real slow here with the introduction so people can settle in. Once again, I think you'll see that like the first two presenters, we've just got a solid panel here with our last speaker. Professor Jay Famoletti is a hydrologist and a professor of earth system science and of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California Irvine. He is on leave from teaching through 2016, probably longer, to serve as senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. In 2013, he was appointed by Governor Jerry Brown of the State Water Boards. His research using NASA satellites to track down dwindling global fresh water availability has garnered international attention. And as you'll surely see, he's a skilled communicator and lecturer who's writing, government advising, speaking events and media appearances are transforming how we look at water both at home and abroad. All you got to do is google this individual and you'll see that he has appeared as a featured expert in the critically acclaimed water documentary Last Call at the Oasis and has been covered by and among other outlets, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Economist, as well as by 60 Minutes, Bill Maher and Rachel Maddow. He's a regular contributor to National Geographic writing currents in the Huffington Post. He is currently working on a book on groundwater depletion and immersion threats to the global water security. Please help me and welcome Jay Femmelotti. Thank you so much. It's great to be here and great to share the stage with Jay and Felicia and hopefully we'll give you some different perspectives on some of the critical problems that we've been facing. So I don't have many salmon jokes that I don't have any talking salmon. I think that if we're going to use the sandwich analogy of Jay's on top, he's like the surface water top of the of the bun, right? And then Felicia is like the peanut butter and jelly that gives us like the substance, right? Today I'm really going to talk about the bottom. I'm on the bottom. I'm talking about groundwater. Now it's ironic because I'll be talking mostly about work that we do using satellites. As some of you know, we've been using a gravity-based satellite which I'll talk about today to get a big picture of you of what's going on with our groundwater resources and it's not just in California, it's really around the world. So you can get a flavor although I think in this particular slide the color's not great, but you can get a flavor of where I'm going to go with the color scheme there going from the blue meaning a lot of water 2006 or so and then get it progressively drier throughout the drought period. So I will start off by talking about defining water security. We have a lot of different ways to define that and I go with a pretty straightforward definition but we'll loop around at the end of the talk and see how it applies to California. Then we'll talk about what some of the satellites that I'm going to discuss about water availability will focus on California but then I'll show a few slides that zoom out and look at the rest of the United States and the rest of the globe and what's happening in many of our aquifers and then what the implications are and try to tie back into some of the policy issues, some issues that we really haven't talked about that much and I think you'll see a lot of overlap with both Jay and Felicia have been talking about. Okay, so I'll start off by this definition of water security and I use one, I mean there are many State Department has one and U.S. Geological Survey has one and a lot of people are defining water security. I wrote a proposal a couple of years ago and I just wrote down my own definition which goes something like this water security I define it as if a region or a government can provide a reliable supply of potable water both now and into the future for that region to meet all of its demands for the various uses and those various uses can be agriculture can be it should be environment that's my one salmon joke so I put that one in for you I just had the bear in there before so this morning I found a bear in a stream eating a salmon and so if salmon could talk that salmon would be saying holy crap so we have our very needs we have to grow food, we have to provide water for the environment and we have to be stewards and we have to have water for people these are some of our neighbors who have been sort of fallen through the cracks as well as for economic growth and energy production and so this is not as Felicia said this is not a sort of us versus them in fact I will admit that while she was speaking I was eating almonds okay I'll share that with you so anyway now the other definitions are important too because they deal with some of the things that Jay was talking about and Felicia was talking about so how are we going to be dealing with these extremes how are we going to be managing water and Jay's point about going from very dry conditions to very wet conditions shows up very well in our data and I'll show that to you so these are challenges that are part you know water management is part of water security and there's the terrorism threat now too that we have to talk about so in the State Department definition there's discussion of protecting water supplies against terrorist threats so it's a different world that we that we live in now more than ever had to get that out there and so that's all part of our thinking when it comes to water security so what are the satellites telling us about water availability so those of you who have heard me speak before know that this particular satellite mission which is called GRACE Recovering Climate Experiment has really transformed the way that we look at freshwater availability at large scales it was launched in 2002 excuse me just a second while I reorient myself so it was launched in 2002 it's composed of these two satellites that are not very big they're each about the size of maybe a couple of those one and a half of those tables and maybe double the width and one and a half the length so they're not particularly big they fly up at 400 kilometers and they're separated by about 200 kilometers and I like to say that they act like a scale in the sky that helps us understand changes in total water storage meaning all of the snow and the surface water and the soil moisture and groundwater together so it gives us a very holistic look at what's going on it helps us understand things that are happening at monthly and longer time scales and over large regions 150,000 square kilometers and greater so why do we say that it acts like a scale in the sky this is really the key so most satellites when we think about satellites we think about we think about that street cleaner or whatever it is we think about satellites that are up in the sky looking at the surface taking pictures or sensing electromagnetic radiation or bouncing radar beams off the surface but grace is different in that it's sensing mass changes in the following way those two satellites which again are not very big they follow each other around the poles and as they fly over a region that has gained water weight like the Sierras this winter a lot of snow a lot of extra mass the region has gained water weight that region exerts a greater gravitational tug on the satellites as they orbit over and the satellites get pulled down just a little bit towards the surface as they orbit over the Sierras so the first one comes in and gets pulled down likewise when they fly over a region so that's the same thing that really if you think about it I won't go into it here because I haven't quite worked out the analogy but it's basically the same way a scale works but when those satellites then fly over a place that's lost water weight like the Central Valley during the last four or five years and actually last century places that lose water weight exert less of a gravitational tug on the satellites and so they float a little bit higher in their orbit as they pass over that region so the primary measurement that's being made is a measurement of the position of the satellites by mapping out those positions of the satellites as the orbit around takes about a month to make a complete picture globally so by keeping track of the position of the satellites we can map out the regions of the earth that are gaining or losing water mass on a monthly basis at this resolution of about 150,000 square kilometers which is about the size of the Sacramento, Simaquin and Tulare Basin so I'll show you some of those images it's allowed us to see some things that I think are eye-openers and the accuracy is one and a half centimeters which means that the water large change would have to be equivalent of one and a half centimeters spread over this area of 150,000 square kilometers which is pretty incredible when you think about the fact that these satellites are 400 kilometers up in space and they're monitoring changes of a centimeter okay oh yes so the satellite was launched in 2002 and it was meant to be a five year mission and well it's 2017 so it's been going for 15 years and so that's been incredible now the batteries are running down we're only collecting about nine months of data per year for the last couple of years but help is on the way in terms of what we call a grace follow on which will launch at the end of the year grace follow on or grace fo it's the same mission as you we call it in NASA speak it's called a climate continuation mission and the justification was these measurements of things like the ice sheets and the groundwater storage changes and ocean mass changes that lead to sea level rise are just too important to stop so that will be launched at the end of 2017 or early 2018 so we just had our 15th anniversary or 15th year birthday party and had some celebrations so it actually was launched in 2002 on St. Patrick's Day so we had a hell of a party over at JPL and so these are some of the or this was one graphic that was released so 15 years of grace two satellites 137 miles apart two whatever billion 2.3 2.4 billion miles traveled ice loss measured 3400 gigatons so one of the prime achievements of the grace mission has been monitoring the ice mass losses right the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet which are contributing about 3 millimeters a year to sea level rise so 3400 gigatons a gigaton is a cubic kilometer from Greenland and 1500 from Antarctica and I converted that to a sea level rise equivalent of 13.75 millimeters of sea level rise just from these two ice sheets just in the last 15 years for those of you who don't know the ice sheet melting is actually accelerating because they're getting to a phase where there's more brittle fracture and rapid fracture and some of the outlet glaciers so that's not good news and so I was I was actually I was pissed when the ice sheet picture came out and they didn't have a groundwater one so I made one myself and this is it so same stuff at the top the groundwater completion measured 300 trillion gallons of water from the mid latitude aquifers which I named here and I'll show you in some of the graphics a little bit later and so if that's not bad enough they also contribute to sea level rise and so they've contributed to about three more millimeters of sea level rise of course then we've got the alpine glaciers that are contributing to sea level rise so we're able to quantify this stuff now in ways that are better than we have previously. Okay I want to show you what some of the data look like and I'm going to I don't like this particular animation that I have so I'm just going to be very bold and because I'm a bold person and I'm going to move this because I also can't see it from down there but I'm going to go out of PowerPoint when I put my preferred animation into PowerPoint it didn't really run well and I think it's here to I think it's because the resolution is pretty high so here it is and so it's not that we sit around and watch animations all day some of us look for pictures of talking fish but this is an animation that's going to show the ups and downs of water storage in California basically over seasonal timescale starting from 2002 right up until the present so we're going to look at really is an animation of this yellow line and so this is 2002 and then things get a little wetter 2004-2005 the first phase of our drought 2006-2010 little recovery around 2010 then like you know the last four or five years have been really bad and then some of this recovery so let's take a look at what that looks like I hope it looks good okay so we're getting wetter now 2006 first phase of the drought starting to get a little red a little bit scary 2010-2011 a little mini El Nino here's the epic drought right and so bang that's okay so that was that's what I wanted to convey to you this is a different animation I'll skip that but it was that you know that that period there in 2015 I'll show you another still image of that that I think really expresses the situation the rough situation that we were in okay so here's the time series so this is the time series of the Sacramento San Joaquin, Tulare Lake Basin shown just outlined over there you can see it in the upper right and Central Valley is shown in blue so what are we really looking at we're looking at the ups and downs of total water storage from grace on a monthly basis going back to 2002 right up until January of this year so wet season, dry season, right winter here's the growing season then we get into the fall this is by November so really we're looking at sort of peaks in March and troughs in November so right we've got that uphill climb there up to 2006 first phase of the drought little mini El Nino and then the real plummet that happened over the last few years and then the recovery so we're getting information that we've never had before these are some outtakes from that animation so looking at the dry seasons getting drier through the years here's the this is the sort of crescendo that I tried to show you in that other animation so this was around the summer of 2015 going into the fall so that's probably I think when things were at their worst and Felicia was talking about panic and that's what was happening so we can see some other things too we can start to quantify you know with numbers millions of acre feet or cubic kilometers or whatever your favorite units are how much water California has been losing or gaining in these different in these different periods so that period from 2011 to 2015 we were losing about 15 to 20 cubic kilometers of water per year about two thirds of which were from groundwater you know we could really look over that period of 2006 going back to 2006 and say that the drought was really a 10 year 9 or 10 year drought in 2010 2011 was just a sort of little blip really you know from 2002 to through about the end of 2015 we've been losing water and then we've got this little uphill here recovery which is important for a couple of reasons and so Jay talked about it Felicia talked about it it sort of gets to you know in this timeframe from here to here we've gone from basically the driest ever right the lowest ever water storage to probably the greatest ever water storage okay so that points to you know we can quantify some of these things we can check them again some of the other numbers to make sure they make sense we can also understand you know is this going to help us with or not and the answer is probably no you know is the drought over well yeah the drought is probably over but what we have to come to terms with is the fact that we actually use more water than is available to us on an annual renewable basis so we use it to grow food again okay this is not us versus them I eat salmon too by the way you know sitting over there eating my almonds so you know we just have to come to terms with how we're using our water in California and how we want to allocate it and scientists like myself and Jay you know I think the burden is on us to provide better tools to give to decision makers to give them science to give them science based options so you know there's a message here in this time series because what I expect is basically just another just like we see a drop here and a drop here you know this is going to flop over my guess is you know we're going to see another continued downward trend here in the data and so luckily we have this other satellite the grace follow on mission coming along to help us understand that and the reason I say that is because of the groundwater okay and so when Jay said you know we only dropped whatever 30% of our water supply or something like that 30% less I'm not sure you were including groundwater in there and so from my and we can talk about it in the panel and so from my perspective the reason we didn't have well I know I mean and we all know the reason that we didn't have much of an economic impact on agricultural productivity is because of we use groundwater right we're statewide using two thirds of the state water supply was coming from groundwater during the drop period so basically we're stealing money from the bank right and and using it to fuel agriculture so you know that food production that we do in California exceeds right our water availability so what we really face is chronic water scarcity from a security perspective we don't really have enough water to do all the things that we want to do what we do for now but we're showing the signs of the sort of house of cards meaning the subsidence and the falling water table which I'll show you and the depleting streams so groundwater as many of you know but some people don't so don't be offended as I read this slide to you groundwater is the water that's stored underground in aquifers in these blue layers here that are soil or rock units it is the primary water source for about a third of the global population it provides almost half of the water for irrigation and in many cases not renewable especially in these deeper layers those ones that are close to the surface can be recharged although we typically use more than the replenishment rate and the ones that are deeper are just you know just take a lot longer to recharge like thousands and tens of thousands of years so we've been burning through this groundwater as you can see from this chart that combines USGS data shown in red in our base estimate of groundwater depletion shown in green it goes back to 1962 the colors in the background represent whether we have a wet period and I need to update the chart and put in a nice dark blue line here so wet period the tans the darker tan are dry periods or droughts and the colors in between are moderately wet to moderately dry so the message of this slide is at least two fold one of course is the continued trend continued downward trend so average water table depth in the central valley is somewhere around 2,500 feet this is the problem because the wells thousands of wells are going dry and it costs $250,000 to drill a well that's 2,500 feet deep and not everybody most people can't afford that and there's a wait now that's over a year long so we're headed towards the bottom of course we know that there's subsidence which I'll show you in some of the next slides but the other one sort of has to do with this very wet period and the overall replenishment I mean what we see here is very clear by the way the full story here is double this figure so there's the other half of this chart which really goes back to 1932 and it's the same thing to the 1930s so we use a lot during dry periods and we only get modest recovery during wet periods even the wettest periods big drop during dry periods little recovery big drop so that's our history will the sustainable groundwater management act change that we'll talk about that a little bit later so we've got a problem here and it's been exposed we knew it the satellite data helped us understand it a little bit more the data that I'm going to show you now they're not grace data, they're radar data and we're going to talk about subsidence for a little bit so here's this famous Joe Pollan USGS scientist picture that Felicia showed he's standing next to a telephone pole of the San Joaquin Valley with the telephone pole that has the 1923 sign at the top and the 1977 sign at the bottom and that's where the ground was in 1923 versus 1977 when the picture was taken so there's subsidence there that's happening at about a foot per year so I'd like to compare subsidence to the deflation of a tire you let the air of the tire, bicycle tire, car tire the tire flattens out you let the water out of some aquifers in particular those that have clay minerals clay minerals are flat when you take out that water that's pushing them apart they flatten out, they stack up in the ground subsides so of course there's damage to infrastructure that may be lying on top of that and you know a lot of that storage is really unrecoverable so we talk about recharging and replenishing an artificial managed recharge we're losing a lot of storage and it is happening at some of the fastest rates ever. I'm going to show you this little region here shown in the box and so these are radar images the top one is showing the cumulative subsidence how much the ground dropped from 2007 to 2011 so really sort of the first phase of the recent droughts and the blue colors there correspond to a couple of inches per year up to about 6 to 8 inches per year but then we get to 2014 now we're sort of in the throes peak drought this is the growing season of 2014 and we see that those subsidence rates jump up to a foot or more per year half per year in some places the updates this is from my colleague Tom Farr by the way so the updates to this report which came out in January 2016 and January 2017 showed in these regions subsidence in some of the most rapid spots there's some of those spots shown in red was up to a meter per year okay about a quarter of the central valley has clay minerals is susceptible to this okay so here's Joe and we're going to photoshop him and take him from 1977 to 2015 or so okay so he's gone from there to here alright so this is what we're dealing with by having not really managed our groundwater you know Felicia also talked about panic and I don't know if any of you have seen this but in J I thought your comment was a great one you know how do you control the behavior of 39 million people with their hands on the faucet right or the spigot or whatever and so it's a real social science problem but you know this is what typically happens it rains and things are cool alright and whatever it hasn't rained in a while it's a drought and we kind of become aware of it then we get concerned and then we just kind of freak out and that's where we were in 2015 at the end of 2015 and then it started raining and you could see that in that grace figure that I showed you the drought you know the lowest point was at the end of 2015 and then 2016 went up and 2017 went up and so we've forgotten a lot of this stuff and we can it's the complacency versus the other thing panic was it panic and complacency? Panic and complacency right because we can't do drought planning in a crisis right we know this is coming we're here telling everybody this is we're messaging up and down the state so this is an issue and you know I do a lot of, Tommy mentioned you know I do a fair amount of writing and so this is one that I just wrote basically the same message the things that I'm talking about today we face chronic waters everything that I'm talking about today you can read in this op-ed we use more water than is available to us on an annual renewable basis we make up the difference in groundwater the groundwater is disappearing it won't be there forever we're showing the signs it's the same op-ed that I write every year by the way that's the secret okay the only thing that changes is the date and some of the numbers okay so let's move away from from California we'll come back to it I just want to show you that you know we're not alone here it's not like we're anomalous in any sense so Colorado River Basin basically the same deal we did a study a couple of years ago we looked at our grace time series from about 2005 to 2013 or so again wet season dry season wet season dry season for the whole basin but there's a trend where's that trend coming from is it coming from the water that we're taking out of our reservoirs what's the role of groundwater here is it a problem in the Colorado River Basin too and so that's what we see here in this lower figure so we did some research to split apart what was happening in this time period with surface water in Lake Powell Lake Mead that's shown in red and groundwater which is shown in blue and as you know we manage our surface water heavily and all the interbasin agreements in the Colorado River Basin are about surface water there's nothing about groundwater and so the groundwater is disappearing at a rate of about 6 or 7 to 1 so while we're very focused on the surface water the groundwater is quietly disappearing still hasn't appeared in any interbasin discussions this is a big issue let's look now at the United States the blue these are trends these are trends in water storage over the whole grace period blue is getting wetter, red is getting drier so we see a couple of things upper half of the country is getting wetter lower half is getting drier we've got these hotspots, that's the Central Valley this is the Southern Ogallala these are two big food producing regions these are the Alaskan glaciers melting so this is a problem because this is where we grow the bulk of our food it is not a problem that is just happening in the United States now this is our global map so we took that US map same US map but now we're looking globally again red is losing and blue is gaining over the lifetime of grace which started in 2002 up to the present biggest loser is Greenland and Antarctica after that the glaciers Alaska, Patagonia and just about all these other red spots are the world's major aquifers which are also coincided with our major food producing regions over half of the world's major aquifers are past sustainability tipping points it's not just the Central Valley and we know that we've done a lot of work on this we've mapped it to the maps of aquifers and done stress tests and stress studies and all that and so this is a paper that came out in 2015 that showed that over half of the world's major aquifers are past sustainability tipping points and those red and yellow colors are the ones that are being depleted there is a global change component to this and it goes like this and that diagram I showed you of the US fits right into this picture so climate models suggest that the wet areas will get wetter wet areas of the tropics and the high latitudes in the Arctic so climate models suggest that this is going to happen and that the dry areas will get drier here's the IPCC models we see this every time a new IPCC report comes out changes in precipitation by the end of the century blue is more precipitation red is less precipitation and I used to ask and then we finally wrote the paper where we could say oh we're seeing it now so this is a plot of all the red areas getting drier and that's after we pull up the groundwater depletion so this is just the background and here's the wet areas getting wetter okay so what are the implications so that's you know I don't have to say anything I got a freebie here okay chronic water scarcity right it's not a drought so the point there we have to get into our thinking droughts come and go wet seasons come and go but we just use more water than is available so it's a persistent state that the drought brings attention to we use most of our water to grow food for all of us to grasp but there's really no end in sight for this sigma notwithstanding which we can talk about what are you saying our cities may be sustainable I think that that's true I think that with and the portfolio stuff just think back to Jay's and Felicia's slides about the portfolios in particular things like sewage recycling and desalination and pricing and you know on and on I think are great and we showed fine even in very tough times but agriculture not so much because we're pulling that water out of groundwater so there are many solutions for metropolitan regions but fewer for agriculture so right here's the portfolio right conservation efficiency pricing innovation either we move water to California or we move agriculture out of the state and that's already happening right and so farms are moving to Idaho and to South Dakota and to Florida and you know acres are being felled we do have the new groundwater legislation which I'll talk about in a second but again it's not just California food production but you know study in California has made me personally understand what's going on around the rest of the world so it's been a very important case study that food production due to water scarcity is going to be really really major global problem another one that we don't talk about very much given that California grows food for the nation you know it might be time for some help from the rest of the nation right we do it just by using our groundwater right we're paying the price for that agriculture productivity but mostly California water but yet this food right I mean we we ship this food all over the world so it's just food for thought come on that was pretty good okay Sigma is a landmark piece of legislation but I think sustainability is a misnomer in the sense that classic resource sustainability means you don't mind you don't use more than is replenished okay but we do that and the proof is in the drop in groundwater so really what we may be talking about with Sigma and other states are doing this so it's not like a crazy comment really what we're maybe talking about is managed depletion right if we want to keep agriculture at today's scale conversely we may be talking about shrinking agriculture to meet our sustainability goals but again it's not sustainability in the classic sense unless we want to ditch agriculture so this is and this is something that Jace talked about the shift away from an agricultural economy it's just the accounting don't shoot me by the way oh no you won't shoot me because you're the salmon people and so Sigma is also an opportunity to embrace conjunctive joint management of surface and groundwater together and this is a chart that I've never published yet but I've just showed it in talks and it shows our grace estimate of groundwater storage change is shown in black and the colors the red and the blue are the surface water allocations right on an annual basis starting about 2002-2003 right so allocations in the central valley project and the California aqueduct and so this is a lot of surface water availability 80% allocation 90% 100% and this is the first phase of the drought and this is the more recent 2010-2011 up to 2013 or so it's pretty darn clear that when surface water becomes available we use less groundwater groundwater recovers that's what that block line is showing us that's the groundwater versus the surface water when surface water availability decreases those bars are shrinking going down to 0% then we just hit the groundwater super hard so this is not rocket science but we shouldn't fool ourselves that we're actually doing a great job managing water because all we're doing is shifting from the managed part to the unmanaged part okay does that make sense I hope so okay so the swing from the driest ever to the wettest ever points to really really incredible challenges with water management and just like Felicia what Felicia was talking about I just want to have the perfect amount of water for the goldilocks we want it to be just delivery of water so we have this it's very very complicated to protect against flooding while saving as much water as we possibly can to help us with resiliency during drought so do we need more storage maybe I don't know more conservation and efficiency absolutely everything is on the table it is just not our friend and I'm working now in an agency where it's not going to be long before they tell me I can't say climate change so we're just going to say that and pissed about 50 times right now I'm pissed pissed pissed pissed pissed I can't talk about climate change it is not our friend we're going to have so less precipitation overall more of that precipitation falling as rain which means that we don't get to store it the mountains act like an extra statewide reservoir system that holds millions of acre feet for us so when we don't have that we don't have the capacity to store even if it rained the same amount we don't have the capacity to store that water and so by definition our water supply because of climate change will shrink so we need to get on it to me and to other researchers that might be in the room besides Jay the research community really needs to contribute I mean we do a lot of this stuff but we need to engage a broader swath of our community to get engaged in this problem this could be one of my last slides can NASA help well help I hope so I could be out of a job so we have an immense so this is the plug part of the talk we have immense capabilities people don't realize that the investment of NASA in water is probably greater than all the other agencies billions of dollars on these satellites and so it's probably greater than most other agencies and we would finally realize wouldn't it be nice if water managers could actually use the data so we have these immense capabilities for monitoring and modeling all aspects of the water cycle but you know we do a pretty terrible job of distributing the data they're inaccessible and you know there's no reward for us as scientists to do it so you know people like myself have headquarters which is in Washington we recognize now the importance of societal relevance and you know we're sort of turn to corner where we know climate changes happening and we can see all these changes with the water cycle and okay let's now make an effort now that we've shown that we've got these satellites that work let's make an effort to get broader uptake by the community so we launched an office called the Western Water Applications Office that's our logo over there on the right to try to match the capabilities to stick all their needs okay however our bandwidth at present is limited so I don't want to say to you we can help you because there's only half a dozen of us and I only spend 25% of my time on this but what you can do is express your interest let me know if you think that if you want to learn more about this work if you think that what I've talked about today can be of value to you because the more interest we can demonstrate at NASA headquarters the more we can grow the program so we need to hear from you and I just talked to some people this morning while I was finishing this slide and was late for my pickup emailing my colleagues saying hey we need to have like an expression of interest form on our website so we can document the interest because we really do want to be able to be of assistance at the smaller scales at which water management decisions are actually made and these are just some of the things that I showed you today when I didn't show you some of the aircraft measurements that my colleague Tom Painter makes when he flies around and it's called the airborne snow observatory so I'll finish there and I think that's my last slide yep thank you we'll get everybody up on stage so questions right here in front so it depends on so the short answer is we're working on that and the longer answer is it depends on what kind of data that you're interested in so we're not really that good at it now but we are really accelerating the development of a website so within a year yes right now no but in part depends on which specific satellite data none of it's integrated that's another thing we're doing with this office to put it all in one place there are some satellite images like soil moisture stuff that you can get at small scale so we can talk later but the integrated sort of holistic picture is 6 to 12 months away but we are in the trenches on that yeah so that's not a great Greenland image when you flatten it when you flatten out the map like that it doesn't look great so the people that actually work so I don't work on Greenland and Antarctica myself so if you got slides from the real Greenland people they would look different but that being said there is accumulation in the middle and most of the melting is occurring on the edges so it wasn't a research quality picture but that is what's happening probably maybe not as pronounced as what's in my in my slide yes and from the small scales of local water districts to statewide and federal it's received pretty well I mean I don't think I'm telling anybody anything that they don't know just sort of pulling it together and putting some numbers on it and putting this sort of putting it in a comprehensive context so you know it's generally frightening oh it's happening yeah now it's too far it's too far down the yeah it's not there are one satellite that is really on the blocks because of so you know just a few seconds on politics we expected to get a modest cut in our budget not the cutting of NASA Earth Sciences like we heard in the news we expected to go from 19.3 to 19.1 billion total NASA you know including all the space stuff but we actually got an increase but one satellite that may not make it is a CO2 satellite it's called a CO3 and I think everybody in that community saw that coming they actually have they have one that's orbiting right now so they're not like dying or anything but their future their grace follow on may just be a few years ahead let's thank Jay for his presentation I think we'll go ahead and get this question rolling we had one right here in front who's it for so what we're doing right now so the data that we're going to make accessible I should be clear it's a western water applications office so it's for the western US up to the continental divide roughly 1.7 kilometer the scale of these small watersheds is about three square kilometers so that's the scale at which the data will be available we'll publish it on a monthly basis but there will be higher temporal resolution available and yes so we're going to integrate it into our model which is called the western states water mission which also has a very cool logo and so we will then separately have the snow and the surface water and the soil moisture and the groundwater I want to also add that there are some at a more localized level people are doing flyovers from planes that you get at a you can do that it's just not the grand scope of this which is really important to it doesn't exist how can we change this to reframe this issue so that those issues are addressed I think most of us here are concerned about surface water flows and survival of fish so that groundwater completion issue becomes very real when it comes to surface water especially late season flow yes can you all hear that question all right so I'm not going to say it as well as you just did but the issue it has to do with the current groundwater law and regulations the surface water groundwater interactions and how to deal with that and the risk of obviously groundwater depletions further depleting streams and rivers with impact on fish right a couple of things that interesting why I wanted more on the question as well is I mean one of the great things about the legislation was holding firm on the connection between groundwater and surface water that was a big deal I gave up a lot to get that in the legislation because we have managed them completely separately and it is incredibly significant in many places so the groundwater sustainability plans that folks are going to have to turn in are going to have to address that and we have authorities to go in as the backstop if they don't adequately that's put off part of the legislation it's put off even two more years they have more time to deal with it before the dreaded state board can step in as the backstop but it's a complex set of laws and I one place I do want to differ with Jay is it doesn't mean nothing happens for 25 years which Jay you guys just guess which Jay I disagree with what I do that I wish we had agent Jay too that would be really great if we had him but so it folks have to have these plans depending on how depleted they are in your five or your seven we're now coming up in July on the first milestone which is a two and a half year milestone which is just to form a groundwater sustainability agency which is hard to do I mean you have to think of human dynamics and what we're asking folks to do we didn't do a top down regulatory thing which I didn't think was appropriate for this I think every groundwater basin is different they have a different geology they have different cultures these guys have to become the founding mothers and fathers of a whole new governance agency and I have to tell you folks are just in their butts on this all over I mean part of this framework was to give this backstop scary backstop nobody wanted so that you would give some you know wind in the sails stiffening in the spine I don't know whatever you want a metaphor you want to use for folks at the local level who actually wanted to do this but it was politically impossible for them to do it without there being a scary villain out to I sort of I'm playing the 800 pound gorilla role no how nice I actually am because I'm the princess of peace but in this the whole idea is to get folks that's going to take a while but then when they get their plans they got to start doing stuff now the goal is getting to sustainability which is not back to anything you know in the past but it's like staunching the bleeding of 2013 by doing it in a stair step etc so that you're not throwing chaos into the community you're bringing them time to put in conservation efficiency crop changes things farmers are actually pretty good at doing if they have to very innovative but you know Jay's right a lot of ag is going to go out of production in some way what it is where it is how they're going to do it how they find ways to compensate them but that everybody knows that in ag which is one of the arguments that folks are even more terrified about our flow standards going to take more of the surface water away from them that goes in the surface water groundwater interaction is a really big deal and in I haven't actually looked lately at the regulations that were put out by DWR but they should have something about the surface water groundwater interaction because we do have the ability to step in if folks don't do a plan of course we step in with a whole bunch of tools you know ordering pumping and double secret probation all kinds of things until we get to the point where we actually do a plan and if we have to do a plan I'll definitely have stuff about surface water but they have to be able to identify those characteristics of the basin but I'll go back and look if the regulations as they stand aren't obvious enough and that's not baked enough that is an issue we have to deal with because that was a very big deal I just want to add a couple of things so the writing of these groundwater sustainability plans is just an incredible opportunity for the state and you're right I mean you know 50 years from now 100 years from now hopefully we're going to look back and say wow that was amazing so it's the opportunity to do this conjunctive management the other thing is if you don't want to scare people Felicia don't dress in black do you have a feel for is that directly related to conditions that are just more vulnerable to that kind of consolidation so it's both so you have to have the clay minerals and the aquifer but I mean the higher resolution UAV SAR, airborne stuff that we do we were actually getting down to the individual well level because right now we're out let's look at this when I was a new professor thinking oh this would be really fun because you can do that as a professor and I I went around and talked to a bunch of people in the agencies and looked at their bethymetric surveys and for most of the large reservoirs it's actually surprising how little the accumulation is there are some reservoirs along the coast that are completely filled with sediment but as a fraction of the total storage for the state in surface water it's really pretty small there's a wonderful line in one of the water resources engineering textbooks that says the ultimate fate of every reservoir is to be filled with sediment but in the case of California fortunately it's going to be a very very long time but not at every place there will be some places where it's important but on the whole it's amazingly small not to say that it's completely unimportant but it is less important than you think it's interesting some of that it is more localized folks have looked at that it's interesting to me when she was in the Senate had wanted a whole study of it people are looking it again it depends on where you are I guarantee you that if you have a groundwater basin it's going to be cheaper to get water into that than to dredge and cart away all of the sediment because what do you do with it all the trucks so it may well be since we do need to restore wetlands in San Francisco Bay to create a buffer against they're going to have a problem finding enough material but that's still a lot of truck I mean someone who knows numbers needs to figure out the cost benefit the other challenge we have in a lot of places in California is legacy mercury contamination because all of those Foothill, Sierra Foothill once they're filled with mercury sediments and we're struggling with how do you deal with that mercury legacy I don't know if any of you know this but both in our stream beds and in these reservoirs is going to be with us for hundreds of years and some folks are trying to figure things out like the combi dam they have a that's you there you go a great pilot project that is an incredibly good tour guide for and to see can you recover enough of the mercury and legacy gold and stuff and people are watching that very expectantly but I think it's going to be very site specific just to go a little bit off of that we talk a lot about water balances and storage balances and things like that but one of the other things and salmon folks I think understand this is sediment balances we don't do nearly enough looking at sediment balances as a whole certainly down in the bay and the deltas area we've got problems with not enough turbidity we've got sea level rise that's going to need some of that sediment to sort of help that keep up with it so we've got another whole set of calculations once we start getting our water balances down which we're still a long ways from we've got to start working on sediment balances and don't even get me started on nutrients I just had a can you hear me right? I just had a graduate student complete a dissertation on that very topic okay thank you maybe it's just my ears I just had a graduate student complete five years of study on that topic and the answer is resounding possibly and you know there are general relationships between increasing water quality right increasing total dissolved solids with depth but there's so much other stuff that happens on the surface that is not natural that we can't account for so it was kind of a mess so I don't think the prospects for grace doing that that's pushing the envelope too far one really nice thing about having a drought followed by a really wet year and flood in some places is going to force us for the six months in this hydrologic cycle to think about them both together and we're in the waning days of the Brown administration when we're in the next year or so there's an opportunity to try to pull all this stuff together and I think this is a great opportunity I'm really pleased with the governor's water action plan I think it's marvelous in trying to look at both sides of the spectrum because in California we're always having to look at both sides of the spectrum that's just our climate that's what our ecosystems need to be managed for and what we have to manage for for floods and droughts as well just to give you a flavor of some of the conversations I mean the governor's already asked to accelerate a lot of dollars to deal with flood risk in general but there's interesting discussions going on for accelerating getting water into the ground for groundwater again those are our biggest reservoirs and there are experiments happening all over the place I mean really good collaborative efforts between the environmental farming communities sustainable conservation is doing a lot of that work but others are too where can you find the sandy you know who has the sandy soil where you can get that water in quickly we're going to be having you know farmer Joe or Jane are going to be farming water molecules for the community you're going to see a lot more of that we've been doing emergency water right permitting at very low cost to let people get it in and be able to keep it that's been a real priority over the course of the past year but there are also some different kinds of conversations about storage happening and you'll see you know there are different proponents of different kinds of program a lot of people focus on the 2.7 billion in the bond that the water commission will be giving out and and those rules there'll be a mix of groundwater and above ground but one of the interesting stories that has come through is that a lot of these largest facilities are built for both flood and flood control and storage and so for flood control because you're looking at what you have and you're looking at the snow up behind you that's going to melt out you know they're releasing a lot of water they are definitely in flood release phase all over the place because when that stuff melts if you end up with a hot spike or a warm rain they can come at you pretty quickly I mean Folsom you know is brought down by half because it covers it's not that big and it covers a giant watershed so there's more and more conversation about not just having multi-purpose storage but building off-stream storage that is not flood control storage so that you can move stuff from the flood control facilities and keep it for flood control with mayhem and destruction and get that water off there's always a conversation about how much you can pull off because generally we pull so much out that you know we actually do have species in pretty much perpetual drought from water diversions in a lot of places but in these really big gusher years you want to be able to squirrel it away everywhere you can and that is a very active discussion so the dynamic is actually changing in terms of figuring out how do we do dedicated water storage and not have this conundrum where as you may recall from the headlines many people were just bashing the Corps of Engineers let alone the state folks for having let a bunch of water go at the end of was it 2012 or 2013 because we had a really wet October, November, December and so they looked at the algorithms that I'll go and then the tap shut off and so that's where we started panicking in 2013 because then we got nothing through the rest of the rainy season and then I went to meeting after meeting were communities and we were pilloring the poor guy in the green suit you know for how could you be so stupid well they're not stupid there's a reason because floods caused death mayhem and destruction so huge amounts of conversation about how we find ways to let them shave the shoulders and they did that through the last year I kid you not one week after the Oroville stuff and all the rain some of those same people are pilloring them for not letting more out and it was like come on guys so we do have to figure out a better way to do it versus having those poor operations managers always being in a situation where they're going to make the wrong decision no matter what they do alright so here's your housekeeping announcements and then you can compare a 30 second minute party monitor to the crowd wash over them before they walk on lunch and it's the next year that we have a conference and thank you we do have to also bring this a little bit to the mundane because we want to make sure that all 500 of you get lunch and that's kind of a challenging task in an hour so people that are starving might want to file out soon if you had enrolled in the mentor mentee lunch that's happening in the game room and you had to pre-register for that so there will be a buffet line there will be a buffet line outside and somehow about 275 or 300 people are probably going to be eating in that multi-purpose room and then we have to flip that room for the concurrent sessions and we do try to operate like a Swiss train for the sessions because we want to make sure each presenter has the 25 minutes that they were promised but we're not synchronized swimming so you will have to do the math if you want to session hop but we're really hoping there will be good timekeeping going on so I want to ask that anyone who is eating in the multi-purpose room be mindful of you will have a lot of networking time while you're waiting in line for lunch and at the poster session but as soon as you're done eating please bring bus your plate I want to say that our poster session is this evening from 7 to 10 set up will start at about 5.30 and we also really rely on our conference evaluation forums we've started doing that sending out a survey monkey link because we've jumped from like a 20% return to a 70 or 80% return it's a pleasant survey to do I've done it 5 or 6 times while I've tested that it's working well it only takes about 10 minutes but we would appreciate your input and also SRF will be following up with some announcements about programs that are under fire with federal budget cuts and one of those programs is WSP and we value AmeriCorps so much so we will be following up so people can learn about some of the different programs that are at risk thank you so much this has been a fabulous session thank you everyone for coming my closing statement is just this we need your help to raise awareness of critical water issues to the level of everyday understanding you folks get it and we need your help in educating and reaching out to your family and friends and people in general I think I agree with Felicia that really the sociology of most of our problems is the most important hardest thing to crack in the history of water problems California water problems as well it's only after we got ourselves organized figured out we have effective organizations or networks of organizations with effective ways of funding them that we were able to bring the science to bear keep sustaining the science and improve it to solve some of these problems and I think the environment and the ecosystems in that area where we haven't gotten ourselves well organized or well funded enough to really bring the science to bear to do the right things thanks I just want to encourage you to show up with your whole selves and engage in all of these processes some of the best advocates that I've seen in front of us are in this room John, Jacob, Patrick, others because you can come in and talk about and doing with people with passion as opposed to just and real examples as opposed to just the brain and the words and I just want to thank them and others in the room for doing that it really it helps those of us who are trying to make these tough decisions find that balance spot in a way that brings our hearts along with everything else other than that I just say keep the faith you know and keep doing what you're doing it's incredibly important these are trying times and I know a lot of you know I talked to a lot of my former colleagues at EPA and I am hurting for them and worried about them and have a lot of alcohol and coffee in my future with them I don't work two blocks from them anymore so it's a little bit harder than it was when I was just down the street doing my job but I just suggest you keep doing what you're doing there are a lot of folks who can spend a lot of their precious life force worrying and they can mistake Twitter, Facebook and other social media and listening to their circles mistake that for actually doing something and it can deaden your soul as well so figure out what you need to do to protect that part of you that helps you do things what can do that for you so thanks and keep inviting a lot of us along on field trips that restore our souls as well so that we can go back into the arena of words and not feel quite so cold