Water

When ecologist Jackie Charbonneau learned that cattle ponds in the East Bay hills are vital to rare amphibians, it came as a surprise. Stock ponds can be so muddy and trampled that “they can look [...]

In 2016 the Bay Area voted on Measure AA, which will raise half a billion dollars to restore the tidal marshes that protect against rising tides. The measure passed in a landslide, prompting the [...]

When Brenda Goeden first started working on mud, silt, and sand in the San Francisco Bay two decades ago, dredgers and contractors couldn’t get rid of all the sediment they excavated fast enough. [...]

When most people think of sea otters, they picture these charismatic creatures wrapped in kelp as they float on their backs in the ocean. But this iconic image is only part of the story. Sea [...]

People have dreamed of turning salty water into drinking water since the early 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy famously said, “If we could produce fresh water from saltwater at a low cost, [...]

As a little girl in Iran, Stanford water researcher Newsha Ajami always knew she could achieve whatever she wanted. “I was raised as a gender-blind child,” she recalled. “I was taught that I [...]

Stroll through just about any of the cities ringing the San Francisco Bay and you’re likely walking on water. Not literally, of course. Rather, chances are that somewhere along your way, there’s [...]

The San Francisco Bay Area is already crowded, ranked among the nation’s top ten most congested metropolitan regions, and soon it will be even more packed. Over the next two decades, our [...]

Resiliency has become a buzzword in recent years, and with good reason — it’s a useful term to describe the ability of a person or a place to confront, and even thrive in, the environmental [...]

Last winter was so wet for so long that we could hardly get rid of all that water fast enough, as jaw-dropping volumes of stormwater rushed along gutters, into stormdrains, and ultimately out to [...]