Science activity

Agencies of the CALFED Bay-Delta Authority (CBDA) face tough decisions as they search for strategies to meet their programmatic goals of stabilizing water supplies in California, providing safe drinking water to a growing population, and sustaining diverse populations of native species and their supporting ecosystem functions. The challenge of finding balanced solutions to these goals is daunting because of the enormous complexity of the San Francisco Bay-Delta system and its tributary rivers and their watersheds. The challenge grows as we consider the additional layer of complexity imposed by the certainty that all the key forces that drive dynamics of this ecosystem (climate, hydrology, water management, land use, sea level) will change significantly in future decades. This proposal describes a model-based approach for developing a long view of the Bay-Delta-River-Watershed system. The long view will be developed through simulations with linked models to project changes under a range of plausible scenarios of global warming, hydrologic responses, land-use change, reconfigurations of within-Delta habitats, and sea level rise. Our goals are to develop and apply a model-based approach of ecological forecasting to project future states of the Delta ecosystem under prescribed scenarios of change, and to communicate the outcomes of those scenarios to resource managers facing the daunting challenge of meeting CBDP goals in a continually changing world.