Episode 29: Functional Environmental Flows
“Functional flows are a simple representation of the work that the river does to create conditions for habitat. Water is the architect of the habitat in landscapes and rivers.”
A conversation with Dr. Marisa Escobar (Stockholm Environmental Institute) and Dr. Belize Lane (Utah State University) about different California river ‘personalities’, how flowing water creates and sustains habitat, and flow diversions for cannabis cultivation. Released February 18, 2022.
guests on the show
Dr. Marisa Escobar
Dr. Marisa Escobar is the Water Program Director at the Stockholm Environmental Institute, based in the Davis office. Her work focuses on creating linkages between physical processes and socio-ecological systems. She uses her expertise on water, including water quality, the physics of water, and the movement of water through watersheds, to produce information on the implications of decisions about water on the overall ecosystem. Her geographic focus is California (where she resides) and Latin America (where she is from). Exploring the linkages between water and the socio-ecological system in Latin America has resulted on the investigation of the energy-water-food nexus and of the role of hydropower in sustainable development. In 2013, Dr Escobar received the Best Research-Oriented Paper Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers for her publication on : Water Management Adaptations to Prevent Loss of Spring-Run Chinook Salmon in California under Climate Change. Follow Dr. Escobar @MEscobar_Agua
Dr. Belize Lane
Dr. Belize Lane is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Utah State University and a researcher at the Utah Water Research Laboratory. She is a watershed hydrologist with the aim of understanding rivers, their biota, and humans as an integrated system. Dr. Lane is interested in ways to more efficiently allocate scarce freshwater resources for humans and ecosystems under increasing stressors. Her research spans the interface of data science and physical process thinking to build a scalable framework of hydrologic knowledge. Her lab group performs applied, interdisciplinary investigations using a combination of field measurement and modeling to understand the relationship between landscape and channel context and hydrologic behavior across multiple scales and disturbances (e.g. diversions, wildfire, climate change). She also leads several efforts to integrate emerging research and develop dynamic web-based tools to guide coordinated, stakeholder-engaged instream water management in the western U.S. In 2022, Dr. Lane received the Early Career Award for Applied Water Research from the University Council on Water Resources.
TRANSCRIPT
Sam Sandoval
Bienvenidos a Water Talk. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about water for the environment, a concept that for some of you might be unfamiliar. It is providing water to support what lives in the river and along the river, so all those freshwater and riparian ecosystems. Faith, Malika, are you familiar with the concept of environmental flows? What are your opinions about it?
Mallika Nocco
You know, it was a new concept for me. I associate it a lot with you, Sam, because I know that your research group, studies it quite a bit. But it is a tricky concept to me, just because as a soil scientist, for some reason, when I think about environmental flows, I can wrap my head around all these concepts easier if instead of picturing a river, I picture soil and water moving through soil. Then it makes a lot of sense to me if I think of looking at soil moisture and how there's going to be that interannual variability that happens, but then there's also going to be this climate change signal that we're seeing in many cases. So that's very helpful. And I'm excited to learn more.
Sam Sandoval
Think of then how you want to keep the river flowing so it will provide water to the soil and provide water to the plants and riparian vegetation.
Mallika Nocco
Okay, now I have a question: so there's soil in environmental flows?
Sam Sandoval
There’s a lot of soil, all the riparian vegetation, all the flow.
Mallika Nocco
Okay. Okay. So then when you say environmental, is it soil? Plants? I'm assuming fish, micro organisms?
Sam Sandoval
Yes, insects, macroinvertebrates, birds that live in the trees. So think of it as environmental flows providing water to support what lives in the river, and along the river, as all the plants, all the trees, all the animals that live there.
Mallika Nocco
Faith, I'm curious to hear what you think about it.
Faith Kearns
Like you, Mallika, I know a lot of people who study environmental flows, who work on these topics. And even as somebody who was sort of trained in this field, I still find the concept a little bit challenging and sort of non intuitive. So I'm really excited to learn from our guests a little bit more about this topic that I have a pretty hard time wrapping my mind around sometimes. So looking forward to it!
Mallika Nocco
Is environmental flows a scientific concept, or is it a political concept? Or is it both? What is it?
Sam Sandoval
I think, you know, it is a scientific concept. And environmental flows include both water for the environment and water for human needs. When that concept then wants to be applied into the real context, that's when it gets charged politically. Because if it means providing water for the ecosystems and the human needs, how much is divided, what is the portion that can be split between them. The one other thing that I have to get my head around is that water for the environment is not the same every year. If it is in a dry year, it will change, if it is in a wet year, it will change. And that really makes it difficult, mostly for engineers, who want to always have these kinds of cyclical things that as water for the environment changes, the natural cycles also change, and droughts are good for the environment, the same as wet periods.
The environment uses water, but for me, the environment is not a user, it is a provider, right? And all the water that we use as humans, as a society, all of that comes from the environment. The main issue in this is to recognize that the environment needs water. And that's why some of that water has to be allocated for the environment. To have it in the same pool as another user. But I don't think it goes with the political bargain of how much do we want to give it to the environment compared to agriculture or to others?
We're going to be today talking with Dr. Belize Lane, and Dr. Marisa Escobar, two experts who have done a lot of research on this topic. We're going to be discussing some of the technicalities as well as some of the difficulties of implementing environmental flows in the state. This is an important topic as we are trying to improve rivers throughout the state. Now can you talk to us about your life experiences with rivers? How do you got interested in them?
Belize Lane
Absolutely. So I would say that my work and my play are one in the same. I'm very fortunate that way. I grew up in California in the San Francisco Bay area. My parents were both from California. And from a very early age, we spent a lot of time in the Sierras, wandering around rivers and streams and mountains. And I immediately was fascinated by river systems. And by the time I was in college, I became a river guide, and just tried to see as many rivers in the state as I could. I worked on the American, the Kern, the Kings, the Tuolumne, the Klamath, and others, and then went internationally and explored the Amazon River.
Sam Sandoval
What about you, Marisa? I know that you will also have very interesting experiences with rivers. How did you fall in love with rivers?
Marisa Escobar
My path is a lot longer than Belize’s. I am from the coffee region in Colombia, in the Andean mountains. In Colombia, we have a very close relationship with water because it is everywhere. It is one of the greenest countries in the world and in most places, water up to now has been sufficient. My hometown is a midsize city of about 300,000 people call Manizales. And my mom's hometown is a small town of about 5,000 people about one and a half hours away from Manizales, it's called Salento. We would visit family on holidays, and we would go to my grandma's farm in the Green Mountains of the Colombian Andes. My uncle would always say that my grandma's farm was the headwaters of the main river in the coffee region called Rio Quindío; the Quindío River flows to the Cocora Valley, which is a very beautiful glacier valley. But it’s not running, it is very green because of all the water and all the processes that happen for the soil to create there. That valley is called the Cocora Valley, which means water star in the Indigenous language. My grandma's farm later became part of the natural reserve to preserve the headwaters. So that's why my family and myself, my siblings, my cousins, we all grew up very conscious of the importance of headwaters to maintain river flows.
Sam Sandoval
Belize, as a river rafter you have experienced firsthand the beauty, but also at the same time you have experienced firsthand how things can go bad when we manipulate rivers. Could you tell our audience, what a river that is healthy looks like and about your experience with that feeling?
Belize Lane
Sure, so unlike Marisa, I became a river guide in California at the start of a long drought period, I started in 2012. And I watched over several years, exploring these different systems, as things became drier, the landscapes became more parched, and people began to care a lot more about water. We've come from a wetter period and then suddenly you could see people's fists kind of tightening over what they had, recognizing how valuable their water needs were. And it was fascinating to me.
I'm really grateful that I got to have that experience because I was fascinated from the start by these complex physical systems. You have hydrology, that's variable through time as well as through space, you have these hydraulics that as a river guide and as a scientist, as a researcher, you need to understand those patterns of depth and velocity and shear stress to understand how these rivers form and function. And then you have the complex ecological systems overlaid on top all of the different native species. And then we get into the human water management system, particularly in these drought conditions where your water supply is contracting.
You could really highlight the needs on the systems and you could see a river coming out of the Sierra with just incredible recreation opportunities for boating and fishing. Major habitat for species and then just downstream, almost all of that water would be taken out for agricultural diversions, obviously for other important needs for crops for agriculture, but looking at it from the perspective of being instream, looking along the river corridor. It was pretty dramatic and you could see changes in water quality, changes in the vegetation composition.
Sam Sandoval
As you're talking about how you're seeing all these different changes in the landscape, or as you're moving with the river, and you're seeing all of this, I think you got some very interesting findings from your PhD dissertation.
Belize Lane
So as part of my experience as a river guide, I recognize this need to identify synergies across users so that we could get the biggest bang for our buck with the water that we have, recognizing that it's limited and increasingly uncertain. So as part of that, I kept that statewide view, that large spatial scale view. And given how complicated our river systems are, and how variable in both space and time, I wanted to organize these complex systems for the water science and management community. I was interested in understanding what patterns and groups emerge from the data.
When you look over these large datasets, we really have a rich data set in California, even though we will forever be data limited. So trying to understand when we evaluate all unimpaired streamflow records for the entire state of California, or 1000s of channel reach field surveys, looking at slope and sediment composition, what are the patterns that emerge from those big datasets? And so these efforts in my PhD were based on our current conceptual understanding of how rivers are organized, the seasonality of climate that we have across the entire state, the fundamental concept that sediment supply and sediment transport capacity are these dominant controls on the river channel. But fundamentally, within that, I wanted to let the data speak for itself.
We applied a fundamentally data driven clustering and classification approach. And at the end of the day, even though all these rivers exist along a spectrum, as all natural systems do, we're able to delineate distinct groups either of streamflow patterns, or channel morphology. My hope is the direction we're moving now is that those can be used to help facilitate decision making and facilitate the transfer of information from systems where we have a lot of information, those that are well studied, well monitored, well-funded, to the many across the state where we don't have that information. To best use the data that we do have to inform decisions over these large spatial scales so we can make decisions now and then continue to fill in the gaps and improve our understanding through time after that.
Sam Sandoval
I think it really kind of shows the hand of this statewide vision, but also the complexity of the statewide water system, where Belize was talking about grouping all these different flow regimes or flow signatures, and also grouping the morphology. And these are concepts that you came across. When was that – 2006, 2007? Back when you start thinking about your dissertation research? Could you explain to us a little bit more about that, Marisa?
Marisa Escobar
I moved here, I did my masters at UC Berkeley. And that's when I started seeing the contrast of how here in California you're already trying to recover what has been lost in terms of habitat because of the impacts of infrastructure, whereas in Colombia, we’re starting to just see the effects on water quality, not so much the big infrastructure effects. So that was a big contrast. For me, you also start seeing these kinds of scarcity of water in comparison to Colombia where you don't have that everywhere and where you do have water available.
I started thinking about that, and California for me is kind of the future of what other developing countries can be right? And what they shouldn't do and what they should do once they start facing some of these problems and challenges based on infrastructure development. I started seeing these efforts to repair some of the damages from infrastructure here. And that's when I started getting interested in the connection between the physical processes and the biological response.
From Berkeley, I moved to Davis, when I did my PhD on river restoration. That made a lot of sense to me, river restoration was really the subject to cover. And I started thinking about this kind of more high level approach to systematize the ecological function of river flows and recognize the need for applied tools to evaluate the capacity of rivers to provide habitat conditions for instream species. And that's when we came up with the definition of functional flows as values that serve ecological functions in a river. In very simple term terms, functional flows is a simple representation of the work that the river does to create the conditions for habitat. In the end, water is kind of the architect of the habitat in landscapes and rivers. If we wanted to see how that process happens, and to estimate the work that work that the river does to either move sediment in high flows, to make gravel, create the habitat, or flows to clean the gravel for other functions like spawning and laying the eggs for salmon, it was possible to know whether the flows were functional, right? Meaning if they were providing those specific conditions of interest to create the habitat.
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, definitely. I mean, the concept has evolved, other people are working currently on it. And that is part of the science, what I do want to share with the audience is looking at how water is passing through a river channel. But not only how is that water passing, but how the channel is changing, and how its evolving moving sediment, and letting the river work its way to provide or helping the river to develop this function so it can benefit what is living there now in terms of the natural regimes in California, which to me is super cool. So you went out there and kind of got the signature of them - explain a little bit how many flow signatures or natural flow regimes we have, and also, how were you also working to estimate the same but for the channel forms.
Belize Lane
Our research group identified nine distinct natural stream classes, ranging from high elevations snowmelt dominated streams, in the southern Sierra, primarily, to winter rainstorm dominated streams, like those in the north coast and everything in between -- mixed rain and snow variations, groundwater dominated stable streams, flashy ephemeral streams. Something that was interesting, though, is that there were very clear groupings, or depending on the dominant mechanisms of runoff generation, we could very clearly identify these natural ranges of the start of the spring recession period, or the start of the dry season, or the start of the wet season, where you really start to increase your base flow. So those seasonal signals coming from our larger climate patterns, combined with the geology and the topography and the land use that those rivers are moving through, those watersheds existence leads to some very clear patterns. That was very exciting to me, because it sets us up for developing flow targets based on these natural ranges of stream flow patterns that we can identify using a combination of machine learning and signal processing and hydrologic modeling.
Sam Sandoval
So we are laying the ground here of the different key concepts that of functional flows. So let me just ask Marisa, I know that you lead a team that worked very closely with agencies to develop these strategies to balance water for humans or the environment, all of these concepts that we're talking about here. Can you share with us a project or any specific research that you're doing related with this?
Marisa Escobar
Very central to our work at SEI is what we do with the world valuation and planning system because we developed that software and we have about 35,000 users around the world immediately share what we've been doing more at the water utility/water district level in the Santa Clara Valley Water District, in Valley Water. They have been using it for many years for their community for water planning, but they needed to start defining more targeted flows for fish, and then we need to be able to have the resolution for those flows. So about four years ago, we started working with them. We had to move it from a monthly model to a daily model. And then we had to increase the data resolution and try to represent different habitat units, such as pools, riffles, and runs. And then start seeing how the units and the flows that go through there would interact with the system to create the conditions for different life stages.
Sam Sandoval
So this is very technical. And I will say we are now at that capacity to do it now, before we didn't have the software. But you're also very well known, or SEI is actually very well known, for stakeholder involvement. Could you provide us a little bit more about working with Santa Clara? How did you engage into this project listening to their needs? I also know that you have done a lot of work evaluating different uncertainties and different strategies, how you have done the visualizations? I mean, SEI is super good at this. Could you talk about that?
Marisa Escobar
Yes, I mean, this was embedded in a process with the stakeholders. This was a technical working group. And that was part of the process, the fish and aquatic habitat collaborative effort that has also been ongoing for many years. We try to bring in these different steps of technical analysis as I just described, but also connecting it with the stakeholder engagement. So, people can be sitting at the table and bringing their own perspectives and all of that is being represented into the modeling work and analysis that we are doing. And the last part of it is when once we have those models and once we can produce those scenarios, we need to develop ways in which we communicate those results.
Sam Sandoval
I think environmental flows are also very important in light of Proposition 64 related to the adult use of cannabis in 2016. Assembly Bill, Proposition 64 was passed that allows the adult use of cannabis for recreational purposes in the state of California. Cannabis has been grown in California since 1795. Yes, you heard it right. Cannabis was grown in the Spanish missions when they came here. But since 1975, it has been grown more intensively throughout the state mostly in the so-called Emerald triangle, which are the counties of Trinity, Humboldt, and Mendocino. It has been estimated that in 2010, 79% of the cannabis nationwide came from California. Since 2018, cannabis growers now need to come up to compliance for different regulations, including requesting and obtaining a water right permits to grow cannabis. Many cannabis farms are also located close to creeks that have good habitat conditions, as we were talking here. I know that both of you are working on projects related with this issue. Belize, could you share with us your experience in this project?
Belize Lane
Yeah, Sam, I think you set that up really well, because the first thing we have to do is go from what is a common conception of a California river, which is something draining the Sierra Nevada, and then there's a big reservoir. And you're dealing with designing an operational scheme for the reservoir that balances the needs of instream flows for ecosystems and out of stream diversions for agriculture, for municipal uses, what have you. In this case, it's actually a much more complex problem, because you have distributed water users, and you have little to no storage for the water. So you're very dependent on the natural hydrology, which is highly variable. We have, again, our very seasonal climate, these streams are mostly in the winter rain driven stream class, so most of the vast majority of the water comes during winter. And the majority of demands for this water out of stream are for agricultural or small municipal demands are in the summer, when there's higher evapotranspiration rates.
At the same time, you have these endemic native species, particularly well-known are the various salmonid species in these north coast streams that we've probably all heard of over the drought period, were really suffering. And we were seeing streams going completely dry for extended periods of time. And you're dealing with systems and species that are adapted to extreme variability. So there's a part of that they can handle and actually would prefer to a very stable system. But then if we take it to its extreme, and we're pulling all of the water out, the first thing I tell my engineering students is that fish need water. At the end of the day, that's what we're dealing with here. At one point, we just need to keep some water instream.
And then there's the question of how do we manage those systems. So the problem includes first identifying all of our various water demands, which include the permanent water rights, and then we have all of these unpermitted demands. And these unpermitted demands are primarily for cannabis. We don't have people just coming up to us and telling us how much water they're using. So this requires aerial imagery analysis, researchers and managers to go out and speak to these people to try to get around the problem of quantifying the unpermitted demands. And then we need to think about what is probably an even more complex question, which is how much water needs to stay instream, when and where, to maintain these salmonids. So quantifying their needs is already very complicated. And we have some phenomenal modeling tools available to us now. And a lot of my work on that front was really inspired by Marisa’s work and her PhD.
So we've developed tools to automate and expand this evaluation of aquatic habitat response under different stream flows. And under different channel morphologies to the network scale. Because this is another issue, we're dealing with distributed stream networks, not just one extended channel reach. You also have on the north coast in the South Fork Eel River, in particular, very distinct geologies, on the west coast, and then further to the east. So the same climate drivers can lead to very different streamflow responses, depending on whether that water stays in the stream as baseflow or goes straight into the water table by late summer. We have to identify and then quantify our different water demands through space and time.
Then we can start to talk about integrating all of that information within one of the systems coming out of SEI, this water allocation model that we've developed for the South Fork Eel, and this required as input unimpaired hydrology estimations, so that model had to be developed and then we can start to think about okay, who has priority in the systems? And can we play some games? Can we develop some scenarios to evaluate? What if we had 10 times that of the unpermitted water demands that we have estimated, which may actually be the case, because that's something that there's a lot of uncertainty around. And then at the end of the day, again, we're trying to develop web based interactive tools that can allow stakeholders to evaluate the impacts of current water management and water use practices, as well as alternative strategies with respect to the human and ecological performance as we understand it. It's also the language that we use and developing language and terms that are standardized, and that we all understand even though we're speaking across many different stakeholder groups. How do we describe and then define what constitutes good ecological performance or good water resources performance, when you're dealing with these complex systems that vary through space and time and have different values surrounding them?
Marisa Escobar
When I think of all this, I think this is sort of like the next generation of environmental flows, right? I mean, I think environmental flows is a good concept, but I think it falls short in terms of providing the mechanics by which you can define the flows that work for the ecosystems, the function of flows, right? I also wanted to say that, you know, there are plenty of organizations that can do more of the advocacy work, but I think our niche is this kind of knowledge production. And I hope that some of this work can be connected to more of that advocacy, because I think there's need for those organization's to continue doing that, but we need to continue to produce the information.
Sam Sandoval
What would you like our listeners to know about what you do? How can we support your work?
Marisa Escobar
We haven't solved the water issues in the world, right? We haven’t solved them in California. There's something that's missing, right? So when we think about it, and I have shared with both of you, this idea of the water beyond boundaries initiative, we feel like Integrated Water Resources Management is lacking a few things. It’s great, because we've made progress, but that is lacking in space, time, in scope. In scope, because when you think about a watershed, sometimes you are kind of at a meso level, and you are not connected to what's happening at the rest of the world. And we are not connecting to what's happening at the community or ecosystem level, right?
All these planning processes happen for you know, many years. But then you miss what's happening, what is important for the fish. Every water data counts, so we need to downscale those kind of larger planning processes to what's happening daily. For example, in particular, we are not considering equality issues. Sometimes when we are doing this planning, water planning processes. So we feel that's what's missing and that's where there are opportunities to try to fill in those gaps. We can bring a more teleconnections approach to connect what's happening at the smaller scale, mesoscale, and larger scale. We can think about ecosystems not as an afterthought, but since the beginning. We can think about the stakeholders, and the quality of water access for all, not only for the ones that are sitting or have the power to sit at the table. That's what we are trying to tackle with water beyond boundaries. And I hope that that's something we can work on more with you soon.
Sam Sandoval
Belize, how can we support your work?
Belize Lane
It's important that we all recognize that because the systems are so complicated, and you have the linked physical, biological, human aspects, it's going to take time to get it right. We will never do it perfectly, but acknowledging that we have enough information and tools now to really improve decision making. So there's a lot that we can do now, while still staying humble and acknowledging that we don't have all the answers.