This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Water has always been one of California's most contested resources. For more than a century, battles have raged over how much of the state's water should be diverted to farmland, pumped into cities or used to conserve aquatic ecosystems—and at times, these clashes have even led to violence.
The state's water system consists of a dizzying array of reservoirs, rivers, dams and aqueducts, making it challenging even for experts to understand the trade-offs of different management decisions. To top it off, climate change is intensifying California's already dramatic dry and wet cycles. After surviving more than a decade of severe drought, the state is now bracing for the impact of this year's super El Niño, which is likely to bring above-average rainfall this winter.
A UC Berkeley-led project aims to make it easier for all Californians to understand the state's complex water system and have a say in how this critical resource is used. The Collaboratory for Equity in Water Allocation (COEQWAL) team has spent the past three years working with stakeholders from around the state. They are creating tools that help illustrate where California's water is going, the impacts of different water priorities and how climate change will shift the water landscape.
At an event in Sacramento on Sept. 3, the collaboration unveiled the new COEQWAL website, which includes educational modules and reference guides explaining California's water system. It also visualizes the outcomes of more than 100 water management scenarios modeled using the California Department of Water Resources' CalSim 3 planning tool. These scenarios give the public the ability to explore how specific water policy decisions—such as limiting groundwater pumping in the Central Valley or increasing river flows to protect salmon—might affect water users and ecosystems around the state.
"CalSim is a very complex model in part because it's a very complex system, but the way it was designed makes it almost impossible for anyone other than a highly specialized engineer to interact with the data," said project lead Ted Grantham, an associate professor of cooperative extension in Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. "A big part of what we wanted to do with this project is explore a much broader range of scenarios [than have been published by the Department of Water Resources] to help people understand not only how water is managed today, but what's possible in the future." In designing the scenarios, the team partnered with nearly 100 organizations around the state, running workshops to understand their water priorities and interests. The scenarios explore a variety of water management approaches, including increasing river flows to benefit fish and aquatic ecosystems; improving access to drinking water; examining the impacts of state regulations on sustainable groundwater use; and protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
"It's really, really unique to be asked, 'What if we managed water for entirely different priorities than we do today?'" said Jonathan Rosenfield, science director at San Francisco Baykeeper, who participated in a number of the workshops. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly. "Usually, when you get access to the CalSim model, you're creating alternative management scenarios that really differ around the margins.
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