Episode 40: Whiplash & Reflection
“What does ecological drought mean in a Mediterranean climate and how might that be different from another climate?”
A conversation with Drs. Sam Sandoval, Faith Kearns, and Mallika Nocco about the 2023 Water Year so far, weather whiplash, and what it means for California agriculture and communities. Released February 10, 2023.
Transcript
Sam Sandoval
Bienvenidas a Water Talk. In today's episode, we will talk about water so far in 2023, and what we're expecting. This will be a conversation with, yes, you guessed right, my two co-hosts and colleagues, Dr. Mallika Nocco and Dr. Faith Kearns, about some of the water scene in 2023 and what we're seeing this year. We will discuss where we are in terms of weather conditions, some of our thoughts, and how to cope with the current and ever adjusting climate, considering the social and environmental context of California. Faith, Mallika, bienvenidas.
Faith Kearns
Thanks, Sam, it's great to be back for season four of Water Talk.
Mallika Nocco
Yeah, who knew we would still have stuff to talk about? I mean, we all knew we'd still have stuff to talk about. Not a serious question. But it is fantastic that we are all here, that the band is back together again, to move into 2023.
We all thought it would be an interesting idea to use the expertise that the three of us bring to the table, and just reflect a little bit on the 2023 water year as it's gone down so far, and just think about what's happening. And use some numbers, but also think past the numbers a little bit too. Because when we were talking about doing a reflection of the 2023 water year, Faith, you'd mentioned how these things can be helpful in some ways when you just look at the numbers, but then there's a lot that the numbers don't capture, too.
Sam Sandoval
We also wanted to share with our audience some of the conversations that we have while we are not explicitly recording, because I think it's good that also you listen to some of these discussions.
So let's actually jump right in there. I will provide some of the numbers, nonetheless, I think they should be contextualized. So, let's start with some of the water conditions. And I always want to bring four different places where we should look at.
So the first one: rain and snow. And yes, at this moment, we are above what is supposed to be during the rainy season. And we're almost there, when we're thinking of the overall amount of rain and snow that we should get by the end of the rainy season. So, we are in the 80 - 85% range.
In terms of reservoir storage, we are at the levels that we're supposed to be right now at the beginning of February. Nonetheless, the reservoirs at the end of last year’s growing season, in September and October, were so low that their relative storage, when we're comparing it to how full the reservoirs are at their total capacity, they are about half to 60%. So yes, we have some water in there, but reservoirs are not full.
Groundwater storage, that is a difficult one. And it is difficult because basically, we have been over- extracting and depleting groundwater resources so that, yes, this is a good year for aquifer recharge. Nonetheless, we have a long deficit to go and that will take a lot of time.
Finally, soil moisture and while some of the records mentioned that yes, we have a lot of soil still in good conditions, there is a long way to go. We are still in February. Soil moisture can be depleted. So, there is still some to go.
I think it will be also good to remind that we are living in these conditions that are really in opposite directions. Coming from a drought now into the wet, heavy rains that we have had and a lot of the impacts that this rainy season have had in the last month.
Mallika Nocco
Sam, I want to be cognizant of some of our Water Talk listeners that may not be heavily entrenched in the world and numbers of the California water. I thought it was counterintuitive at first or, I wouldn’t say counterintuitive, I just didn't know, when we look at cumulative, we're always talking about since October 1, right? That's when the water year starts in California. And so these numbers are always relative to the water year before, right?
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, that is correct.
Mallika Nocco
And that storage, the reservoir storage part of things is really interesting to me too. Because there's this difference between storage capacity and average that is really strange. And I guess can you say, maybe Faith, you know a lot about the history of this too. How much water were these reservoirs designed to hold? And what like, what are the wildest numbers the two of you have seen here? Trying to contextualize these numbers is always really interesting to me.
Faith Kearns
I think I also have struggled with the reservoir storage thing, because my understanding is that storage capacity is sort of the lofty aspiration, right? Like, the dams actually have a storage capacity that we rarely reach. And so, most of the time, we end up looking at it compared to what you know, you'll call average, or normal, which also takes on its own whole challenges, because what is that baseline that you're comparing to?
So, when people start to get really nerdy about this stuff, they may talk about recorded record, right, as opposed to going back 2000 years or things like that, where only paleoclimate records can show us maybe what had been going on. And when they're talking about average, it's a moving window of the last three years on many of these things. So yeah, it's really challenging. I mean, you really have to put these things into context. And so when you're looking at the numbers that have to do with storage capacity, they tend to be fairly low. And so if I were looking at reservoir storage, I would probably be looking more at the average, with the context that that's only the last two, three years, it's not averaged over the last 10, 100, and certainly not into the non-recorded record time period.
Mallika Nocco
That's super, super helpful, and hopefully helpful to all to think about that, because I know, for me, it's been interesting to just start learning about and think about what these numbers mean. The groundwater one, I think, we've been talking about in my lab, and a lot of students have been thinking about, are we out of a drought? Are we in a drought? And using language like that.
I even saw our previous Water Talk guest, Daniel Swain, has been doing all of these YouTube lives. And it's interesting to listen in to see what the comments look like. And a lot of folks have this, like, "Oh, are we done with drought?" kind of questioning. And the groundwater storage numbers here are, I think, really telling about the hydrology of California and what the significance of heavy rain, or heavy precipitation, in one year really means when in the context of our practices and our general use.
Sam, if you want to speak to that? I've been hearing a lot of numbers, you know, among water nerds, and just folks who are interested about just how many years like this would it take to get us to make a dent in the groundwater numbers? You know, and I don't know if Sam, you have any ideas as to that.
Sam Sandoval
Not necessarily on this specific number of years, but I think in the long term, and I kind of tend to think about this in terms of, yes, this year, we're making a nice dent, putting more water recharge than what we're extracting, but over the long term, it has been the opposite. And now that we are trying to paddle back, I think this can be a good start.
Ideally, I mean, if we consider SGMA and other regulations, this can be a good jumpstart to actually reach that specific goal. But this has to be a long-term practice. So, when we have this excess water, or we have these good recharge years, leave it in there. But start being more conscious about the water that we are extracting out.
This is a good year, yes. We need to work all the years to actually reach some of those non-overdrafted, non-over-exploiting groundwater resources. I'm thinking it’s more like two or three decades.
Mallika Nocco
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And just like how I am having that conversation about the groundwater component related to what's happening above ground because sometimes there is a disconnect in what we can see and what we can't see.
So when we were talking about doing a reflection of the water year, beyond the numbers, I just want to think and reflect a little bit about what water whiplash feels like, because we talked about climate and weather whiplash when we'd had Kat Gonzalez and Daniel Swain on. And it's this idea and this phenomena of moving between extreme drought and extreme flood years. But it's really interesting to be in the middle of that to be experiencing that type of whiplash.
I had a weird moment, because I was working on writing a scientific paper, thinking about weather whiplash and system resilience and agroecological systems. And then it was like, during these nine back-to-back atmospheric rivers, right, so it's just weird to be reading these articles about, you know, whiplash, and then being in it.
When you study something, and these extreme events start to happen, there's this weird predatory glee that you get. But it's, I really don't want us to be there when there's so much damage to communities and to lives. These whiplash events are serious in terms of their human impact. So, like, I think we should talk about that a little bit. Faith, I know that you've been really documenting, and thinking about that a lot.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, it's always interesting to hear these numbers. I think scientists, researchers, technical folks can certainly get really caught up in the, like, wow, something's happening to the system that I study. And, and then there's this extra piece that I've talked about in my book and elsewhere, where it's like, you also have this very embodied experience of the actual thing that you're writing about researching, you know, which takes on a different tone.
There was a really interesting article in The New York Times about how the weather science community is really struggling with how to communicate about some of these events where they're both coming up with new terminology, like 'bomb cyclone', and all these things that sort of indicate some really massive, challenging event, right? It's a bomb, right? What does that really mean? And what is it conveying to people when you talk about the weather in that way? I think this is something that a lot of folks are struggling with, when you're trying to apply something that you're an expert in and sort of have this real wonder and awe about, but also has these very real impacts in people's lives, including probably your own. Right, we all live in the place where we're experiencing this stuff as well.
I think what's been really challenging about this past year is just remembering that flooding, excess water, which in many ways in California a lot of us are hoping for, and so water comes in, and I don't want to reduce the joy about that, it's awesome to have so much water, or snow, precipitation falling from the sky, and to have time to play in the snow and do all that kind of stuff. And at the same time, you know, the loss in terms of economics and lives and all of that stuff has been fairly high. Right now, it stands at 22 people, I think, that have died from flooding and related events like debris flows, extreme winds, like trees falling on top of homes, a couple of children, young children have died in events like that this year. And these are higher numbers than past couple years of wildfire deaths combined, which, again, I think we tend to think of as more deadly than flooding. And there are lots of reasons for that that we could talk about. But I think that that is true.
And, as with everything, I think it's obvious that some communities are more vulnerable than others, although wealthy communities also certainly have these kinds of impacts. So, thinking about the fact that Montecito was evacuated, again, on the very date that the debris flows that happened in 2018, and killed a number of people, had happened? And Montecito is well known as being a very wealthy Santa Barbara Community? And then at the same time, you have all these effects like just, you know, power losses that can impact people who, for example, are disabled, who might have, you know, electronic equipment that they depend on to stay alive.
There's been some interesting reporting just even in the last couple of days. Ezra David Romero at KQED in the Bay Area, the NPR station, has a well-reported story about how folks in East Palo Alto, which is known to be much lower socio-economic conditions than the rest of Palo Alto where tech is centered on peninsula of the San Francisco Bay area, people are dealing with really extreme flooding. And a theme that comes up a lot is that it's really difficult to get disaster assistance, particularly for people who don't have the means to get that. So even though President Biden, for example, declared disaster in 17 California counties in the end, it was sort of done three counties at a time, how people actually get access to that and how the most vulnerable get access to that is really challenging.
Hannah Hagemann at the San Francisco Chronicle was reporting on farm worker conditions in Santa Cruz County, Watsonville, things like that where, farm workers, day laborers, they can't even work in that kind of severe weather. And that just means no income, right? There's no backup system for how folks actually make money when the working conditions are not open to them, unlike the people they work for, right, who often do have access to Farm Disaster Assistance or something like that.
You know, and that's just a small subset of things. There really have been effects from this flooding all over the state. You know, we saw in Sacramento, the capital of California, there's this tremendous amount of tree loss, falling on cars and houses and all of that kind of stuff. There was a highway flooding along 99 in Sacramento. So, it's been a really, really interesting year. $30 billion, they're talking about in flood damages, again, very similar to the wildfire conditions, even though we tend to think of wildfires as more challenging. And so, I know Malika, that you've had a pretty personal experience of being in a flood. And I'm hoping that you're willing to share that with folks today.
Mallika Nocco
Yeah, absolutely. To think about everything that you mentioned with that the loss of life being so, so upsetting, and so, so profound, and then the tree losses, and then just I think, I wonder how many people are sitting where I am. Back when I was in the Midwest, there were some extreme rain events in Wisconsin, in 2018. And I was in a flash flood. I imagine there were many people during this flood season here in California, who went through something similar to what I went through.
Flash floods can happen really fast. And you're always told this, right? Like, I'm an adult, I'm a scientist, I study water. I know that, right? But then on this particular day, I just wasn't that far from my home, you know, I was working on some data at a coffee shop. And I thought like, "Oh, I can make it," you know, I am so close to home, I should get home before this gets worse, because the coffee shop was going to close. So, I was like, "Oh, then what am I going to do?"
So, I got in my car, and I drove home. And it did just happen so fast. That was the part that was wild, it was all of a sudden, it just felt like a heavy rain. And it moved into this space, very quickly, and I couldn't get out of my car. And a person had gotten out of their car. And they had to pull against, and I pushed, so I could just get out of my car and run away to safety, basically to a high place. And in the moment, it was really surreal. And I was, at that time, a postdoc, and I had my laptop. And I was just thinking like, oh goodness, when is the last time I backed up? Like what, what is happening to all of my data on this laptop? So, I mean, it's just one of the many, you know, apocalyptic backup your computer stories I have to tell people now.
The other surreal part of it was related to race in a weird way. There were maybe 20-25 of us who had this happen and we all ran away. And everybody was white except me and the person who had helped me out of my car also happened to be an Indian American man. But when people were talking to us, as these flood victims, they kept saying "You and your husband". I was like I just met that guy. He is super friendly and he let me out of my car, but the whole thing was surreal. But then I keep on having to tell everyone that that person wasn't my husband was like, extra surreal, on top of everything.
What I think is important to share to anyone who this has happened to is that the trauma is there. I didn't really think of that as it was happening. I didn't think of it as a traumatic event, because so many worse things happen to people during those floods. I was just someone who had this moment, I lost my car. It was what it was. But in the grand scheme of things, I was fine, right. But then it's rearing itself in weird moments and in strange ways. I'm fortunate where I have a very close friend who's a clinical neuropsychologist, and I was just telling her about some of the things that I feel now when heavy rains happen. And she was just like, you know, these trauma responses. And it's just interesting to me, how much of this that we're now experiencing might be falling into this realm of trauma. And how if this is happening to you, if you're undergoing this extreme event related trauma, even if it seems moderate, it's worth exploring.
I thought that was really interesting as a frame, just like the day that I learned that I was a trauma scientist or disaster scientist, I should say, I was like, wait, what? Oh, because I study these things. Now, I'm also studying disasters, and I just hadn't thought of myself that way. This is the same thing where I just hadn't really thought of myself as someone who had been through some sort of climate related trauma. But here we are.
Sam Sandoval
When I came to California in 2011, the drought started. And then I started working on the drought. And we always mentioned like, okay, Sam Sandoval, working on the drought. First year, and then second year. By the third or the fourth year, you're like, oh, man, another year of drought. And, I think, okay, it went. So, we have a relapse period. I think drought is a continued portion of time, we're just kind of in the different parts of it. And then when once again, the severe part of the drought came back the last three years, it really feels like "Oh no, drought again?" And I mean, we know from the earlier experience, I know what was coming through, some of the things that will happen. So, this actually bring the question to, are we still in a drought? Or what kind of droughts are we talking here?
Mallika Nocco
Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad we're talking about it. I just want to point out before we talk about this, Faith, you wrote an article on the conversation called, "What would it take to end California's drought?" And it's dated September 1st, 2015. And it's still just incredibly relevant, even though that was eight years ago, just everything about this. Because we were talking about this episode. It's like, oh, well, Faith already kind of wrote this whole thing that we're thinking, like a lot of these concepts. So, we'll definitely link out to Faith's article, you know, thinking about what drought means.
So, there are several types of drought, right? And if you are learning about it in school, we talk about meteorological drought, we talk about hydrological drought, we talk about agricultural drought, we talk about socio-economic drought, and then we also talk, more increasingly, about ecological drought. So, there's definitely many different kinds of flavors of drought. And depending on who you're talking to, and what they care about, the importance of a particular drought may be tantamount to whatever that person is interested in or that group is interested in.
So agricultural drought is, you know, we think about that as when there are damages or impacts on crop production. But I think this is interesting, too, right? Because that is dependent on the system of crop production that's in place, right? To some extent. So like what agricultural drought looks like in areas that rely on and have a game plan for a soil moisture bank in the springtime is very different from what agricultural drought looks like for places who don't necessarily, or systems of ag, that don't necessarily rely on there being ample soil moisture in the beginning of the going season. And I can kind of keep growing through. But I don't know how much of this we want to be like a glossary, either.
But Faith, you actually had some interesting thoughts about ecological drought. And ecological drought, I think is one that is a little bit more nuanced, just because it's thinking about ecosystems in general, and driving them past a threshold, right of what we rely on or what we think about as services and functions/functionality of those ecosystems. But those who study ecosystems and ecology, I think it can relate to how complicated it might actually be to diagnose ecological drought scenarios.
Faith Kearns
I think it's helpful in the sense that, you know, certainly for myself growing up, and until I started really trying to think about that question of like, when would California be out of a drought? You get into this, realizing that your basic sense of drought really is about meteorological drought. Is it raining or snowing or not? Right? And then you start to go well, that's so interesting, because in a lot of ways, in California, we're always in agricultural drought, right? Like there's, there's almost always this sense that we need water for agriculture. And we have an ongoing socio-economic drought, where people do not have household level water.
And then ecological drought is this sort of newer category that I think was defined by a workgroup at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UC Santa Barbara just a few years ago, I heard the concept explained in maybe 2016. And I do think it's a helpful addition because we do tend to leave ecosystems (fish, forests, etc.) out of the drought equation a lot of the times. And so, it is a helpful categorization.
But, as Mallika, I think you're trying to allude to just thinking about what that means in, say, a Mediterranean climate like California, where your background condition is that you have eight months of a dry season. And a lot of, say fish, are adapted to that. So, lots of people, particularly at UC Berkeley, have studied these kinds of dry intermittent stream systems. And a lot of the animals that live in and around those are adapted for those kinds of conditions. So, what does ecological drought mean in a Mediterranean climate, for example? And how might that be different from another climatic type? Which is most of the rest of the US. So, I do think it's helpful but also really tricky to define.
Mallika Nocco
I had a particularly tricky time defining it recently with a group of colleagues, thinking about agricultural systems and thinking about regenerative agricultural systems, or agroecology, because how do you define ecological drought in very human dominated systems where there's been so much land use change? When we were thinking in a regenerative agricultural context, it was this context of, well, what, what do we want this system to be like? How do we envision a regenerative system? How do we envision orchard or vineyard? And how would the ecological drought concept apply to that system particularly? Because we’re asking that type of a system to do more than just produce a crop. We’re asking that system to be a piece of flood infrastructure if we wanted to do recharge on it. So the function we’re asking of a system that we want it to be a regenerative, resilient agroecological system is a little different.
Faith Kearns
And then there's layering climate change on top of all of this, right? Where what does it mean to be defining a baseline of what drought conditions look like, as the drought conditions are shifting toward what some people are even now calling, you know, large scale aridification. We're just moving toward a drier world, particularly in the desert southwest. But all of that is a little still up in the air. I think climate change just sort of complicates even thinking about what some of these terms, like drought, really mean.
Mallika Nocco
And just to take this thing full circle to our conversation with Sam, when we were talking about those groundwater numbers earlier, I think the difference in our groundwater levels, and our snowpack, and our reservoir levels right now, illustrate the difference between a meteorological drought and a hydrological drought. Right. I think it's fair to say that it's not looking like we are in a meteorological drought year. But we are still in a hydrological drought in California. Right? Is that fair to say? I think that's fair to say.
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, I agree. And that came, there are also some months to go. So, we cannot claim that we are still out of it when there are still two more months of the rainy season. Also, the last five to eight years has shown us that we have warmer temperatures, and that can help to put an important dent on all the water numbers or the water storages that we are having right now. And for me, the most important part is that we should not take our guard down.
I was in a couple of meetings with elected officials, legislators in San Diego and in Sacramento. And to me, it was very interesting that it was in everyone's mind, the drought in September, October when they requested this topic to be talked in December, January. But the ones that were talking in January, now they were shifting the floods, and I was looking at them like well, you know, there is still some way to go.
Some of the shortcomings, or things that I've seen, in terms of the drought in my short-term memory here in California 11 years, is that we are still focusing quite a lot on the water supply side. To me, the problem is not about how much water we use, it’s where we bring it. And that has been reading a lot of the history here, it has been a long-term problem. And I think at some point we need to come to the decision, to the mindset, that we need to go where the water demand is lower.
And also the water in California is everyone's. We need to think of these not as someone else's problem. Or that someone else is overusing and abusing it. It might be the case, but all of us, we can pull our weight. Besides the graph to have these conversations of not letting our guard down. I think there may be some other impacts related to droughts and floods. I don't know Mallika, Faith, any other comments about some of the shortcomings that we have seen in these drought periods and flooding periods?
Mallika Nocco
I think something to me when we're thinking about, long- and short-range thinking, it sounds like what you're asking about, right, Sam, of floods and droughts. I understand that there are challenges with where to invest. But something that I would love people to know, and I said this a little bit earlier, when I was talking about the agroecological systems work that we were doing, is that investing in climate smart agriculture, and investing in soil health, and investing in agroecological systems, is also investing in flooding infrastructure.
And it's unfortunate when you see it presented as an “either/or”, which we have been seeing a little bit this year with some of the decisions that have been made. But I also think that the scientific community, people like myself who are working in that space, we need to do a better job of showing the impacts of our work and how doing that type of work is actually building flood infrastructure. If we want to think about our agricultural lands as working lands, that would potentially infiltrate and recharge water. Which I think we all do.
Sam Sandoval
And I think for me, it is also something similar in terms of when I was hinting at always looking at the water supply because, I mean, Gavin Newsom also released some funds for increased storage. Some of it may be through aquifer recharge, but some of it again, looking at the Sites place models which is parking water in the north of Sacramento, which I think also shows how still the mindset is let's figure out where can we park all that water going into the ocean. It’s just a waste of water in rivers. Well they recharge aquifers, they improve water quality, they provide good habitat for migration. It really works and saves dollars when we are not paying for restoration projects and bringing all the Tonka Toys to the rivers. And yet, we are still kind of thinking let's build another dam. And, to me this is going to some of the most expensive, that everyone is paying, some are benefiting, strategies. What do you think, Faith?
Faith Kearns
I think it's, you know it for me, it brings to mind that One Water concept that the US Water Alliance and others have put forward where you're trying to think about excess and deficit of water as similar things with similar solutions, right? And I think there are examples of that, particularly in urban areas, and maybe some of the on farm recharge kind of stuff. I'm thinking about bioswales, and things where, you know, thinking about the cost of treating stormwater. Finally, people sort of realized that that was water. And, and instead of paying a high cost to treat it, that there were biological ways to deal with that, where you could build bioswales and various things within cities. And even at more rural areas have bioswales at this point. We need trees, when we have stormwater, we can actually grow these trees in these bioswales, or, you know, similar kinds of green infrastructure, things like that.
And I think if we think about it more broadly, that kind of concept of One Water is kind of what it is. How do we make use of the water that we have? How do we prevent as much damage as we can from flooding and drought at the same time realizing they really are kind of two sides of the same coin.
Mallika Nocco
Yes, it makes me think back to last season and thinking about Slow Water, with Erica, how do we slow that water down?
Sam Sandoval
And make the community part of it. Decentralized, so spread out projects, that the community can see and that the community can participate. It really brings the sense of belonging. And that is very important. Because with that, then you can carry the passion of it.
Faith Kearns
I think there's also, with all of these things, there are equity and justice concerns, right? Who is benefiting, and who has been harmed in an effort to mitigate some of these impacts? And that's a lens that I think, hope increasingly looking at all of these proposed solutions through.
Sam Sandoval
So, as we're looking at some of the solutions, I think, something that I also want to bring across is that there is no silver bullet. We have a lot of strategies that we can prevent, but at this point, I think we need to work all the different strategies. I think one of the places in agriculture that we can work right away is soils. And I think we have a lot of opportunities in soils to improve them to promote practices that bring healthy soils. And there may be many of those. Mallika, you're our soils expert.
Mallika Nocco
I think that we in California, we should take a moment to feel good about what we are doing here, because we are leading on the Healthy Soils front in a lot of ways just through our policies, and through what we've encouraged, through even just the amount of familiarity many of our growers and agricultural systems have of how to improve soil health. But then, of course, there's always room to grow. And especially I think one of the biggest places to grow is to just move beyond the concept of: "We're going to use this amount of carbon and then it's going to make this amount of improvement in water holding capacity," which is something that I know I've even on Water Talk been super excited about and I am still really excited about it, but I also want to push myself as a scientist and all of us and all of our listeners to even think more deeply about what a healthy soil does, especially in this flood year.
I'm very jazzed about thinking about infiltration. Right now is the time, I think, for me at least that I've been thinking a lot about infiltration and thinking about moving that water into the soil when we can, and how do we create these pores and channels, you know, to have a million straws of all sizes (or millions of straws or zillions of straws) that can suck in water when it actually hits that soil. And that's what I'm thinking about with infiltration. And it is really exciting.
I don't know what I did on my LinkedIn to create the perfect echo chamber for me, which is when the storm started hitting and I went into LinkedIn, all it was photos from different farmers and different farm advisors and different you know, crop consultants of, "This is what my cover crop field looks like. And this is what my bare soil field looks like." And it was just like puddles versus like, gorgeous cover-crop- infiltrated water fields. And I was just like, gosh, how did I create this echo chamber? Because right now, it's pretty gorgeous.
That's kind of what I'm thinking of right now with soils. But there's so many fantastic things to think about. We have some really fantastic soil scientists in our research groups, in our departments, who are doing all sorts of very exciting work using NMR and imaging to look at like, where specifically does carbon gets stored in soil aggregates? Like, what are some of the relationships between soil texture, how carbon can get stored? What are the different types of carbon and how stable are they? And how reactive are they? And how deep can that carbon be stored in the soil? Like these are all really relevant and interesting questions, especially if you think about the intersections with soil health and climate change.
I think it was fantastic to just reflect a little bit and take some time to think about what we've already experienced and how it is going to inform some of the episodes that we're creating in season four. You know, in season four, we hope to really explore a lot of these topics. I think we're all really excited about everyone we're going to be speaking with over the next few months and we will be excited to talk with you again next week.