In a normal year, groundwater accounts for 40 percent of California’s water supply. That number jumps to 60 percent during a drought. It’s also critically important for sustaining certain types of aquatic, terrestrial and coastal ecosystems.
Yet decades of unregulated groundwater withdrawal has compromised that ability to provide for people and nature. Wells dry up, water quality declines, and rivers, wetlands, and springs disappear.
To address this problem, California passed legislation requiring that groundwater basins be managed sustainably. We still face gaps, however, in our understanding of how to manage these basins to ensure the health of the ecosystems they support. Conservancy scientists are working with water managers and state agencies to close those gaps.
Scott A. Morrison, Douglas T. Bolger
Reproductive success of many species in arid environments can be sensitive to rainfall patterns: rainfall events can produce a boom of primary productivity that fuels an ecological response from the…
Scott A. Morrison, Douglas T. Bolger
Fragmentation-sensitive species – those that tend to disappear when their habitat is fragmented – pose particular challenges for conservation, in part because fragmentation ushers in such…
Douglas T. Bolger, Andrew V. Suarez, Kevin R. Crooks, Scott A. Morrison, Ted J. Case
Habitat fragmentation ushers in a wide array of ecological changes, and understanding the drivers and impacts of those changes is critical for conservation management. This study examines an often…