Climate change adds twist to San Joaquin River restoration project
Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on April 27, 2008 at 6:29 amWater is such big news in California, as regular readers know. I can easily post ten to twelve stories per day. Aquafornia focuses on Southern California water issues, but I cast a wide net because Southern California is hydrologically connected to many areas. This is one story which, up until now, I have not been following. However, with the collapse of the salmon run, Aquafornia will now follow San Joaquin River restoration stories.
The San Joaquin River is one of the rivers in Central California which feed into the Delta. The San Joaquin River is part of the federal Central Valley Project. The river in some areas is dry most months of the year, and during the summer, some stretches consists solely of irrigation drainage flows. The players in this story are the farmers, who have been mandated to give up irrigation water to the river, and the environmentalists who want the once-prodigious salmon runs restored.
From the Fresno Bee:
The best hope for cold-water chinook salmon to survive global warming may be near sweltering Fresno — in the San Joaquin River, where salmon have been extinct for 60 years. That’s the latest twist in the long-running debate over restoring the San Joaquin, a project that will begin in less than 18 months.
Farmers, forced by legal settlement to give up irrigation water for the project, are skeptical about the claim. They see global warming as a reason to reconsider the half-billion-dollar restoration. Warmer conditions will kill the restored fish runs, they say.
But fishery experts say San Joaquin salmon would tolerate climate warming better than salmon in cooler places, such as Northern California. The reason: The highest of the High Sierra would continue to provide the cold water that salmon must have to survive in the San Joaquin. Northern California has the lower end of the Sierra and, scientists predict, eventually won’t have much of a snowpack, eliminating a lot of cold water. “The restored San Joaquin may be an important place for the survival of salmon in the next century,” said fishery biologist Peter Moyle of the University of California at Davis.
The back-and-forth over restoring the river has been unfolding for decades, with debate focused mostly on a troubled, 149-mile section of the San Joaquin between Fresno and its confluence with the Merced River. Global warming came into the picture last year when a report from a worldwide panel of experts said about 40% of the salmon habitat in the Pacific Northwest could be lost during climate change.
If the San Joaquin is revived, as is planned over the next decade, it would have the southernmost salmon fishery in North America. And the San Joaquin Valley is expected to warm up faster than the Pacific Northwest or Northern California. This prompts some farmers to question the wisdom of trying to return salmon to the San Joaquin.
“Does it really make sense to spend this money and restore salmon down here?” asked Chowchilla-area farmer Kole Upton.
But Moyle, an authority on California’s native fish, said it is a very good idea for spring-run salmon. The fish will move up the river from the ocean in spring and spend summer in deep, cool ponds near Friant Dam before spawning during fall. The release of cold snowmelt from Millerton Lake in summer should keep the ponds cool enough for salmon even as the climate warms up, Moyle said.
The undercurrent of this discussion is political, as it has been all along.
Read more on this story from the Fresno Bee by clicking here. For more information on San Joaquin River Restoration, click here.
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