Skip to content

Discovery and Innovation for a Resilient Water Future

The UC WATER Security and Sustainability Research Initiative is focused on strategic research to build the knowledge base for better water-resources management. Unprecedented climate change, population growth and changing landcover are radically altering the water cycle, with dramatic impacts on human and environmental uses of water. In 2015 the University of California established the UC WATER Initiative to address these issues. UC WATER brings researchers together from multiple University of California campuses—Berkeley, Davis, Merced, Santa Cruz, San Diego, and CITRIS.

UC WATER initiatives:

  • UC WATER is developing innovative, quantitative water accounting and analysis methods, and introducing modern information systems into California’s aging infrastructure. Current water policy lacks salient, credible, and legitimate water information forcing policymakers to rely on century-old technology and analysis techniques.
  • UC WATER will improve our understanding of the way water flows through the natural environment, and how it is extracted, conveyed and stored in built and natural infrastructure. This initiative also contributes to research by developing understanding of landcover changes on source-water areas, and tools and techniques for better groundwater management.
  • UC WATER tightly weaves legal and policy research into our findings. Our research will help facilitate more integrated water management institutions in California and aid in the development of the capacity to adapt to 21st-century stressors.

Headwater Management

 

"Vegetation density in the Sierra Nevada forests is much higher than it was prior to widespread fire suppression, and land managers are committed to restoring forests to more-sustainable conditions. The aim is to reduce forest densities in a way that lowers the risk of catastrophic wildfire, and, thus, enhances the expected ecosystem-service benefits."

Our primary research goal is to provide quantitative, credible assessments of the water-cycle impacts of forest vegetation density, structure, disturbance, and management actions in the Sierra Nevada (and other forests). A second, possibly equally important goal, is to develop data and tools for further assessments of sufficient accuracy to guide investments and build partnerships. Quantitative information to enable meeting the goals, across the heterogeneous landscape of the Sierra Nevada, is sorely lacking. Our approach to achieving these goals involves carrying out intensive hydrologic and vegetation measurements, plus hydrologic modeling, of treatment and control catchments, following silviculture prescriptions that provide end-member information for assessments. We will extend assessments across the region using lower-intensity measurements, meta analysis, hydrologic modeling, and economic studies.

UC WATER near term plans:

  1. Develop a view paper based on studies in progress (SNAMP, CZO) and relate to both research needs and projected forest-management scenarios. 
  2. Initiate a regional assessment of water stress in the Sierra Nevada associated with the drought, and identify potential target areas for forest management, plus possible impacts of forest thinning. After one year publish a paper on the findings.
  3. Initiate an on-the-ground detailed study of the water impacts of forest management to be carried out at one or more headwater locations of opportunity where land managers are doing thinning.

These activities are planned under the UC WATER umbrella in part because of the importance being given to management of headwater areas as a component of current and future water security. Many debates in the water-resources community are underway, and the current drought has increased the attention on them.

The initial UC WATER lead is Mohammad Safeeq msafeeq@ucmerced.edu