The Delta is a critical area for sustainable water management, facing significant challenges due to climate change. One of these challenges is in understanding and mitigating maladaptation – climate-aligned actions that may increase vulnerabilities or reduce adaptive capacity. Given the uncertainties surrounding climate change, management actions that seek to achieve high-level goals of climate change adaptation while accounting for maladaptation must be robust, ensuring adequate, multicriteria performance across all climate futures. This work responds to two gaps: (1) the absence of tools for assessing the performance of management actions in the Delta under hydroclimatic uncertainty and (2) a lack of research that explores how stakeholders can account for maladaptation in water governance. Among Delta stakeholders and researchers alike, the discourse and science surrounding ecological flow guidelines, the social complexities of water governance, and the use of integrated climate models to inform robust and adaptive decisions is active and rapidly advancing. This positions the Delta not only as an ideal case study for the academic study of maladaptation, but also as one that is of immediate relevance to stakeholders, responding to several Delta Management Needs (Science Actions 3B, 6E, and 1A) as they concern open science and the exploration of the Delta as a socioecological system and the facilitation of decision-making under climate change and its associated uncertainties.
Water primrose (Ludwigia spp.) is a highly invasive, non-native floating macrophyte in the Delta. In recent years, water primrose has extended its niche into marsh habitat, causing extensive mortality of marsh macrophytes including tules and cattails. The goal of this project is to determine whether the growth strategy of water primrose, its allelopathic properties, or factors related to plant community structure are the cause of marsh loss following water primrose invasion in the Delta. Part of this study will identify and map the marshes most vulnerable to loss and quantify the spatial trajectory of marsh loss during the past 15 years. The ultimate benefit will be an improved understanding of the water primrose invasion processes in the Delta, which can be used to prioritize herbicide treatment of this highly invasive plant in marshes most vulnerable to invasion and with the highest habitat value.
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