 Well, it's always a pleasure to be here. I've been a great fan of systems from its inception, and it's a great honor to be able to speak with you all today. I am a faculty member at UC Berkeley, but I'm currently serving a four-year term position as the Delta Lead Scientist, which is a USGS funded position housed within a state agency in California, the Delta Stewardship Council. And so the space that I'm working in right now is very much a space where modeling is applied to urgent policy questions. And today I'm going to be telling the story of how integrative, collaborative modeling might optimistically bring about a just transition in California water management from one that's really mired in conflict to one that is fair and inclusive. Now the region that I work in is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which truly functions as the heart of California. Not only does it look a little bit like a heart, it's the area shown in red here, but it functions as a heart too. In this region, water emanating from distal parts of the state, here's the Sacramento River, here's the San Joaquin River mix, and that water is then pumped out. It experiences tidal pumping, so oceanic exchange, and also pumping by humans. Much of that water is sent to the area shown here in yellow and southern California, where most of the population of the state resides. So one important thing to be cognizant of with California water management is that this is a highly human-dominated system. Now the water that circulates through the delta also really functions as the lifeblood of the state. Two-thirds of Californians receive water from the delta. That water sustains 80% of the state's commercial fisheries and irrigates almost half of the fruits and vegetables produced in the U.S. This area also serves as a biodiversity hotspot, but it is a landscape that's deeply seeped in conflict, in part because of the radical change that it has experienced over the past century and a half in all of the competing demands for water. So this, oops, oh no, I stepped on a chord. Okay, don't step there. This slide gives you a sense of what the delta used to look like. Historically, it was well connected to its floodplain. It was almost fully occupied by tidal and non-tidal marshes, and it was highly productive. Today, the delta looks a lot more like this. It's much more disconnected. The gray areas here are predominantly agricultural areas, and you have levees that separate the main waterways from the surrounding landscape. Together with that change, about 89% of the food supply to the food web has been lost. And we've also seen dramatic declines of important native and commercial fish species, including Chinook salmon. Many of those species are now threatened or endangered. Now there are still some parts of the delta that look a little bit like what I imagine it looked like historically. You could see these extensive tuli marshes. This is primarily in the north delta. And I like to show this slide because it's always good to get an on-the-ground picture of what a particular landscape looks like. And I'll also note that the tuli here, which is a scurpus, is a plant that is highly valued by a range of Native American tribal communities that also viewed this delta as very much a heart of the landscape. This is an area that holds deep significance for tribal communities, not just in California, but all up and down the Pacific coast. Today, though, most of the landscape looks like this because it was formerly occupied by wetlands. The soil within the delta is peat soil. And so the past century of agriculture in this area has resulted in oxidation of that soil and deep subsidence. And so in many places you see that the portion of the landscape that is farmed is actually below the main waterways. So these levees that were built over 100 years ago are now essentially functioning as dams. And many of them are privately maintained. Many of them are not up to modern federal standards. Some of them are constructed even of peat or loosely consolidated sand. So I think this this photograph is nice because it really illustrates the vulnerability of this landscape. And this is even before you consider climate change vulnerability. Now in the past couple of years, the Delta Stewardship Council has been working on Delta ADAPS vulnerability assessment and development of an adaptation strategy. And the findings of the vulnerability assessment are fairly scary. I'll let you read many of those bullet points that basically what we're facing in the state is increased likelihood of both flood and drought conditions. We're facing much warmer temperatures. These changes are projected to impact the community surrounding the Delta inequitably. And we're also facing dramatic ecological change. Now some of some of the changes that have been predicted through the modeling that supported the vulnerability assessment are actually being seen now. I'm sure you've seen many of the headlines. But during our last drought, we experienced conditions where whole communities within the Central Valley predominantly rural communities ran dry and didn't have access to clean drinking water. There are also growing water quality problems within the Delta. We've had several recent high profile harmful algal bloom events. And many of those harmful algal blooms are situated in the vicinity of vulnerable communities where you do have people using the landscape for subsistence fishing. And so this creates public health concerns and equity concerns. It's been said that California is confronting a 21st century water crisis armed with 20th century infrastructure and 19th century laws, which is true. During the past drought, when many of these communities that you see on the map did run dry, senior water rights holders or those water rights holders that were assigned appropriations prior to 1914 received their full allocation of water. And this was a time I think it's worth pointing out when women couldn't own property, when blacks couldn't own property. So there is a legacy of inequity that is built into our legal system for water rights accounting in California. Now, many of those senior water rights holders are associated with big agriculture, particularly in the Central Valley. And so it might be somewhat surprising that when you drive the I-5 corridor through the Central Valley, you see signs like that save California's water, build more damn storage, make California great again, stop dumping 78% of our water in the ocean. So I think this really begs the question, what's the real story here when you get beyond the rhetoric? I think what I've shown you illustrates some of the sources of conflict that we're facing around water in the state. But then the question is how can modeling help? How can science help? And what's the real story behind this rhetoric? Now there's a really great analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California that I often like to show that accounts for sources and sinks of water that passes through the delta. And if you think about that previous sign, stop dumping 78% of our water to the ocean. That really comes from wet year water accounting where this blue bar represents net runoff to the delta and this bar represents delta outflow. It's about 78%. But during dry conditions, during drought conditions, when we really are in a water crisis, the amount of water that's going out to the ocean is much, much smaller. And in fact, you'll see that most of this delta outflow bar is in the purple color. And purple here is system outflow. System water is water that is needed to push back against tidal forces that would otherwise pump salt into the delta, potentially endangering the freshness of the major intakes to the aqueducts in California. And so this system water is really water that is used to protect the long-term integrity of the system of water redistribution. And so I think this is pretty eye-opening. It's information that I've had the opportunity to share in informal conversations that I've had in Southern California and talks among water wonks even with people who were initially giving me a hard time about this perceived use of water in the delta to protect fish that, according to the people I was in conversation with, no one really cares about. But their comments after data-centered conversations like this are that we need to have more of these sorts of conversations statewide and more often. This experience really provides me with some encouragement of how public education and information sharing might bring about more of a willingness to see California's water dilemmas with clear eyes and move opposing parties to a position of compromise. In the remainder of my time this morning, I'm going to regale you with a bit of a vignette that describes an approach to modeling that's growing in recognition, including at this meeting for which there's a clinic on tomorrow's agenda that is quite relevant. But this is an approach that's participatory and inclusive and hints at what might be possible statewide. And it very much deals with this system water in purple here and various ideas about how we might further reduce delta outflow during the driest of droughts preserving more water in case the next year also happens to be a drought year. Now there have been a lot of ideas circulated about how we might reduce the system water and some ideas that have been actually tried. One of the ideas that was circulated in the San Francisco Chronicle was to dam the Golden Gate. And there was actually a task force that was formed and included faculty from Berkeley, including myself, to examine the feasibility and trade-offs associated with damming the Golden Gate to save water during drought. Well as you can imagine it didn't go very far. There's pretty bad trade-offs for anadromous fish and water quality as you might anticipate. But one solution that has actually been attempted by the Department of Water Resources, so this is something that's been implemented in 2015, 2021, and 2022, is to essentially dam a portion of the delta. Put a hard rock barrier across the Falls River, which is right here. And the idea here is that this barrier redirects saltwater pumping, so dispersion of salts that come from the ocean and typically enter this flooded island known as the Franks Track. Once you get salts in this region it's really hard to get them out just because of the hydrodynamic mixing. And once you get salts in this area it's more likely that the intakes to the State Water Project and Central Valley Project down here in the South Delta will become affected by salinity intrusion. So the idea with this barrier is to redirect that tidal pumping of salt to the North. And it has been extremely effective in doing so, but it's not without consequences either. And some of the consequences have been the irreversible spread of submersed aquatic vegetation within this Franks Track area. This is a bad thing because this is an area that's really important to local economies within the Delta. It sustains a lot of commercial and recreational fishing and boating. It's also an area that's really important for migration of native fish species that don't tend to do well in areas of invasive aquatic weeds. So there are other solutions that are possible, including nature-based solutions. And in fact a team that was led by Brett Milligan at UC Davis but conducted in partnership with the Delta Stewardship Council, Department of Water Resources in California State Parks came together to brainstorm and use modeling to evaluate alternative futures for this region in California that really looked to promote multiple benefits. And so over a series of nine different workshops, stakeholders from Delta communities, from water agencies, from the agricultural community, and from the state came together to brainstorm alternative ways of managing this Franks Track. And they achieved consensus on a design that features the use of wetland restoration to essentially serve as a soft salinity barrier that would redirect salinity around the Franks Track and to the north. It's really interesting because when you talk to the Department of Water Resources modelers who were involved in this process, the final design that was converged upon was not one that they brought to the table. And in fact it even included some elements that they were very skeptical about initially. But it is a design that there is a lot of public support for. And let me see if I could get my video to work. Essentially what this video was going to show you, it might not work, is that this is very effective at redistributing salt around this region of the Delta. But this project is not yet funded and it's likely not to be implemented so long as the Department of Water Resources is using that hard rock salinity barrier. It's still floating around and there's still a lot of public pressure there to implement it. And so as I was reflecting on this story, I was thinking one theme of this meeting is patterns and processes across scale. The Franks Track Futures project is a process designed to create a just and equitable transition and management of one flooded island in the Delta. So how do we take this approach and begin to scale it up? And how do we move to the implementation phase? One thing I will say is that the Delta Stewardship Council is in the process of developing an adaptation strategy for the region. And it is also a process in which they've engaged in extensive public engagement through four different focus groups focused on different types of topics as well as a cross sector stakeholder work group. And that Franks Track Futures design is incorporated into the larger draft adaptation strategy that they'll be putting forward this summer. But these sorts of processes are things that we really need to do at the statewide level. And so one of the things I think a lot about in my position is how can we use modeling to catalyze this sort of transition? And what I've really been pushing for and I think I've got a captive audience here and you all can help do these sorts of things. But what I've really been pushing for are the formation of more academic agency community partnerships. And I really think those three different entities are needed to transition us to a more sustainable form of governance. Academics have the freedom to evaluate the sorts of management alternatives that are unpalatable for agencies because they're politically maybe they're politically infeasible right now. And I'm just going to show you a proposal for a collaboratory for equity in water quality allocations that we're calling co-equal. But what we're working towards is a modeling collaboratory that essentially creates a safe space for evaluating how many different operations scenarios including perhaps relaxation of our system of prior appropriations for water rights. But how these different types of operations scenarios permute with different climate scenarios and essentially how they play out over the long term for water allocations within the state. So academics are needed to evaluate some of these politically touchy operational scenarios. It's really important to get the information out there to stimulate public dialogue. But community engagement is also essential here in order to push back against century or over a century of exclusion and the resulting distrust of agency and even academic processes that has developed through that period of time. One of the things that we've been hearing from our preliminary engagement is that there is an executive order within the state that state agencies consider tribal beneficial uses when putting together environmental impact reports or environmental impact statements because of some complex grandfathering that hasn't been done for many projects within the Delta. And so we're looking to liaise with tribal communities in order to figure out how to incorporate this accounting into our models to evaluate different tradeoffs. So what we're working towards doing is creating this space that includes community engagement, includes modeling, and essentially produces a library of over a thousand different water allocation projections that is publicly available and accessible and easy to understand. And this would be a huge departure from the sort of data that's out there and produced by state and federal agencies right now. But then we are going to be forming working groups that evaluate tradeoffs that are associated with drinking water access, salinity management within the Delta, and Chinook salmon recovery. And we see this is really just a start. It's an idea that we would like to grow and eventually sponsor additional working groups. And I have just a few more slides that show what we envision and how we envision using modeling to really rethink our water governance within the state. So our modeling system would, as I said before, permute hydroclimate inputs with different allocation rules. And then what you would end up with is water supplies, so water allocation. This is a look under the hood of our main operations model in California. It's a very complex system. But what that gives you is water allocation for different demand units within the state. So each one of these rectangles represents a demand unit. And under these different scenarios, there would be a projected supply, but there also might be unmet demand. And so we would be looking at both scenarios that state agencies are already proposing, as well as a range of community-informed scenarios to try to identify the most equitable water allocation strategies under a range of different climate futures. And we anticipate that users will be able to interact with this data through an interface in which they could select particular hydroclimate futures, they could select operations that favor different outcomes, or they could select scenarios in accordance with vulnerability. And then they would get a detailed view of surface water deliveries as well as groundwater vulnerabilities. They could further look under the hood and get into trade-offs associated with agriculture. So this is where model linking becomes important. There's a number of existing models that look at agricultural or that look at changes in different crops. Models that look at habitat for delta smelt, which is closely associated with a brackish low salinity zone within the delta, as well as lifecycle models for different fish species. So just to leave you with some concluding thoughts, I've talked today about how co-produced model-based scenario exercises can lead to novel solutions that promote trust in consensus building. This has been shown at the small scale, but the next step is really to scale up. Addressing diversity gaps, I would say, is at least as important as addressing science gaps in developing sustainable solutions, particularly when dealing with social ecological systems that have a long history of conflict. Agency, academic, community partnerships can fulfill an important niche in sustainability science. So I encourage you all to think about building those partnerships, and it was really encouraging to hear how systems is thinking about building these types of partnerships in its next phase. And I'll say cyber infrastructure can really help here, but one of the things that we're facing challenges with is sustained funding. Right now there's a lot of money for short-term projects available that was allocated by the state legislature, but we need to find a way to make these sorts of efforts more sustainable. And so I'll just leave you with a few parting questions, and one is I want to encourage you to think about what role systems can play in this agency, academic, community sphere that would really make a difference. And then to what extent might systems want to broaden its scope to represent humans and human dominated systems? So one of the core driving models that we're looking at in our modeling system and co-equal is a model of water operations, which takes climate and watershed runoff as inputs, but then integrates complex logic that basically is written to meet the regulatory standards in California, as well as some information about how operators actually make decisions. But to what extent might systems think about incorporating these human processes in its models as well? So with that, I don't know if I have time for questions, but you want to learn more information about what we do at the Stewardship Council, feel free to scan that QR code. Thank you, Laurel. Are there any questions? I see a question there in the back of Mark. So we have a few people that are online, so please use the mic for your question. Hi, that was really interesting. You mentioned that you're looking into liaising with tribal communities there and that it's in fact a really important area for them. So I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that and especially have you looked into incorporating traditional knowledge into your models and how that might work? Yeah, this is something we're very much interested in. Governor Newsom in California has made improving tribal relations a priority statewide, and so there is a groundsfall of effort among different state agencies right now to, first of all, listen to tribal communities, listen to their concerns, listen to their needs, and then figure out how to move forward. So I am a leader of the Delta Science Program right now, which is envisioned as a hub for all of the science that's relevant to decision-making in the Delta. And one of our ongoing efforts is to do a review of how traditional knowledge has been incorporated into government science and decision-making processes in the past. There's not much there to review, but the next step for us is to continue building these relationships and we're hoping to sometime in the next few years post a summit that focuses on how traditional knowledge might be integrated with Western science. I will say that in the Delta's watershed, there have been efforts to integrate tribal knowledge into wildland management, particularly for fire, and so that's something that I think we'll see more of in coming years. But it's a really important area of growth and there's just such a tragic history of exclusion within the Delta. So some of the things that are really important to tribal communities that have stake in the Delta is access to the land for ceremony, accounting for various tribal beneficial uses, including area of tuli habitat. And there is an ongoing collaboration between one state agency and tribal communities to produce a white paper right now that is focused on tuli and how we might promote more beneficial uses associated with that very critical plant.