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New Maps Show Spread and Impact of Drought On California Forests (latimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a new study 58 million trees are dead or dying due to the California drought and hundreds of millions could die if the conditions persist. The LA Times reports: "The researchers used an airplane, high-tech remote sensing technology and satellite imagery to produce the first maps that show how much water the state's trees have lost. Virtually every forest has been affected in some way, said study leader Greg Asner, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University. Asner said he was struck by the 'sheer degree of loss and mortality' in Southern California forests as he flew over the depleted trees."
OMG, trees in a desert are going to die?
Most of California isn't a desert, and most of the desert parts of California don't have trees (because, you know, it's a desert).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
OMG, trees in a desert are going to die?
Most of California isn't a desert, and most of the desert parts of California don't have trees (because, you know, it's a desert).
It's not a desert yet. If the drought continues and they continue to pump every last drop out of the ground it might become one.
The days when California could rely on taking other jurisdictions' water are long long gone. It was pretty much an undeclared war when Southern California began redirecting every significant source of fresh water its way eight decades ago, but this time around I think it would get even more violent. California's agriculture industry has been on an unsustainable path for the last hundred years.
Gobbling up natural aquifers that took millions of years to form to grow fucking almonds. I can't imagine a surer sign of the sheer stupidity of humanity than that.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yes because desalination is so inexpensive and environmentally friendly that you can create so much fresh water in order to replace the rain missing on the mountains. /s
If it's too expensive to supply most drinking water in many places in the world then why do many people keep on thinking that you can use desalination for watering crops which would require magnitudes more water? If agriculture isn't feasible then supplying water for nature is completely out of the question.
Drive around some more then. Lots of orchards were being left to die in summer, so rain in winter does no good. Others were cut back to their stumps to have new growth grafted. Kind of scary to see brown everywhere.
Also as far as those maps go, many trees in Sequoia & Kings Canyon have died off due to pests (tussock moth), which could account for much of those low-water canopy sections. Of course the largest wild fire by far this year was in Sequoia and Kings Canyon, 151 thousand acres (612 square kilometers). Not sure if the maps were before or after the fire.
Southern California is not the same as Northern and Central California which do not get water from other states but rely on snow pack, reservoirs, and wells (aquifers drying up though over the last hundred years). Almonds are not the biggest crop, and until relatively recently were mostly concentrated in only a few areas. Biggest problem is the byzantine water rights issues, with rights handed out in the early days when the state was small which are still in effect today.
Southern California relies on the Colorado River -- which is drying up due to drought, dams, and water being diverted for farmlands. It now ends 50 miles inland instead of reaching the sea.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
California doesn't receive enough rainfall to support the agriculture grown in the region (except maybe the north west portion). Almonds may not be the biggest crop, but they are among the ones which require the most water, and almond growers say that even though they're now giving their almond trees brackish water from wells, they plan to grow more almond trees b/c they're very profitable -- water shortage be damned.
Most farmland is in mid-eastern to eastern half of the US... which gets enough rainfall to support crops. California generally doesn't rely on rainfall - it needs water pumped from rivers, aqueducts, and aquifers. The areas of CA that get the most rainfall are the mountains which feed a few rivers. It's not sustainable. Water rights issues won't matter if there's no water to squabble over. CA needs to build more storage for fresh water -- often, when it rains, water washes quickly into concrete channels and is fed out to the sea instead of stored. Sad, really.
https://www.crwr.utexas.edu/gi...