Bottom-up, decision support system development : a wetlandsalinity management application in California's San Joaquin Valley

Conference · Wed May 10 04:00:00 EDT 2006

OSTI ID:922841

Quinn, Nigel W.T.

Seasonally managed wetlands in the Grasslands Basin ofCalifornia's San Joaquin Valley provide food and shelter for migratorywildfowl during winter months and sport for waterfowl hunters during theannual duck season. Surface water supply to these wetland contain saltwhich, when drained to the San Joaquin River during the annual drawdownperiod, negatively impacts downstream agricultural riparian waterdiverters. Recent environmental regulation, limiting discharges salinityto the San Joaquin River and primarily targeting agricultural non-pointsources, now addresses return flows from seasonally managed wetlands.Real-time water quality management has been advocated as a means ofmatching wetland return flows to the assimilative capacity of the SanJoaquin River. Past attempts to build environmental monitoring anddecision support systems to implement this concept have failed forreasons that are discussed in this paper. These reasons are discussed inthe context of more general challenges facing the successfulimplementation of environmental monitoring, modelling and decisionsupport systems. The paper then provides details of a current researchand development project which will ultimately provide wetland managerswith the means of matching salt exports with the available assimilativecapacity of the San Joaquin River, when fully implemented. Manipulationof the traditional wetland drawdown comes at a potential cost to thesustainability of optimal wetland moist soil plant habitat in thesewetlands - hence the project provides appropriate data and a feedback andresponse mechanism for wetland managers to balance improvements to SanJoaquin River quality with internally-generated information on the healthof the wetland resource. The author concludes the paper by arguing thatthe architecture of the current project decision support system, whencoupled with recent advances in environmental data acquisition, dataprocessing and information dissemination technology, holds significantpromise to address some of the problems described earlier in the paperthat have limited past efforts to improve Basin water qualitymanagement.

• Research Organization: Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley NationalLaboratory, Berkeley, CA (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE; US Bureau of reclamation G4W053
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231
• OSTI ID: 922841
• Report Number(s): LBNL--60231; BnR: 400406000
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
ARCHITECTURE
DATA ACQUISITION
DATA PROCESSING
DRAWDOWN
EXPORTS
FEEDBACK
FOOD
HABITAT
IMPLEMENTATION
INFORMATION DISSEMINATION
MONITORING
RANGELANDS
RIVERS
SALINITY
SHELTERS
SOILS
SURFACE WATERS
Seasonal wetrlands drainage salinity management decisionsupport
WATER QUALITY
WETLANDS