Over the past two decades, watershed restoration has dramatically increased internationally. California has been at the forefront, allocating billions of dollars to restoration activities through legislation and voter-approved bonds. Yet, the implications of restoration remain ambiguous because there has been little examination of restoration accomplishments and almost no analysis of the political context of restoration. This article addresses these gaps, utilizing a case study of the Russian River basin in Northern California. We identify trends that shed light on both the ecological and the political implications of restoration at a basin scale by examining a database of 787 restoration projects implemented in the Russian River basin since the early 1980s. Although a total of over $47 million has been spent on restoration in the basin, dominant forms of restoration are limited in scope to small-scale projects that focus on technical solutions to site-specific problems. The majority of restoration efforts are devoted to road repair, riparian stabilization, and in-stream structures, accounting for 62% of all projects. These types of projects do not address the broader social drivers of watershed change such as land and water uses. We suggest that restoration can become more effective by addressing the entire watershed as a combination of social and ecological forces that interact to produce watershed conditions.

Over the past two decades, watershed restoration has dramatically increased internationally. California has been atthe forefront, allocating billions of dollars to restoration activities through legislation and voter-approved bonds. Yet, the implications of restoration remain ambiguous because there has been little examination of restoration accomplishments and almost no analysis of the political context of restoration. This article addresses these gaps, utilizing a case study of the Russian River basin in Northern California. We identify trends that shed light on both the ecological and the political implications of restoration at a basin scale by examining a database of 787 restoration projects implemented in the Russian River basin since the early 1980s. Although a total of over $47 million has been spent on restoration in the basin, dominant forms of restoration are limited in scope to small-scale projects that focus on technical solutions to site-specific problems. The majority of restoration efforts are devoted to road repair,riparian stabilization, and in-stream structures, accounting for 62% of all projects. These types of projects do not address the broader social drivers of watershed change such as land and water uses. We suggest that restoration can become more effective by addressing the entire watershed as a combination of social and ecological forces that interact to produce watershed conditions.

California’s hydropower system is composed of high and low elevation power plants. There are more than 150 high-elevation power plants, at elevations above 1,000 feet (300 m). Most have modest reservoir storage capacities, but supply roughly 74% of California’s in-state hydropower. The expected shift of runoff peak from spring to winter due to climate warming, resulting in snowpack reduction and increased snowmelt, might have important effects on power generation and revenues in California. The large storage capacities at low-elevation power plants provide flexibility to operations of these units under climate warming. However, with climate warming, the adaptability of the high-elevation hydropower system is in question as this system was designed to take advantage of snowpack, a natural reservoir.With so many high-elevation hydropower plants in California, estimation of climate warming effects by conventional simulation or optimization methods would be tedious and expensive. An Energy-Based Hydropower Optimization Model (EBHOM) was developed to facilitate practical climate change and other low-resolution system-wide hydropower studies, based on the historical generation data of 137 high-elevation hydropower plants for which the data were complete for 14 years. Employing recent historical hourly energy prices, the model was used to explore energy generation in California for three climate warming scenarios (dry warming, wet warming, and warming-only) over 14 years, representing a range of hydrologic conditions. The system is sensitive to the quantity and timing of inflows. While dry warming and warming-only climate changes reduce average hydropower revenues, wet warming could increase revenue. Re-operation of available storage and generation capacities help compensate for snowpack losses to some extent. Storage capacity expansion and to a lesser extent generation capacity expansion both increase revenues, although such expansions might not be cost-effective.

A independent science panel review concludes that the California's Central Valley Project Improvement Act's salmon doubling program has failed to achieve its goal for the number of reasons. The panel also makes a number of recommendations.