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UC Davis News: General Interest
Delta Future: Expert Sources on New California Delta Report
Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700
This week's unprecedented, science-based report recommending a peripheral canal as the best solution to the California Delta's ecological and economical problems was written by a multidisciplinary team from UC Davis and the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). The authors were Jay Lund, William Fleenor, William Bennett, Richard Howitt, Jeffrey Mount and Peter Moyle of UC Davis and Ellen Hanak, PPIC associate director and senior fellow. Here are descriptions of, and contact information for, the Delta report authors. Color, high-resolution photos of authors are available from Sylvia Wright, swright@ucdavis.edu. For more information about the new Delta report ("Comparing Futures of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta"), as well as the 2007 related report ("Envisioning Futures for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta"), see: Delta report of July 17, 2008: http://www.ppic.org UC Davis news release of Feb. 7, 2007: "Deteriorating and Deadlocked, California's Delta Is a Disaster in Waiting" http://www-news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8034 WATER SUPPLY AND DEMAND MANAGEMENT -- UC Davis professor Jay Lund specializes in the management of water and environmental systems, from California's large statewide system to local city and regional water systems. His research has included system optimization studies for California, the Columbia River, the Missouri River and several other systems -- as well as studies of climate change adaptation, water marketing, water conservation, water utility planning, and reservoir operations. He and his colleagues have developed computer models of how California's water system can adapt to changes in climate, infrastructure, water policies and droughts. Using one of those models, Lund said in 2003 that the landmark dam at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir is expendable. He served on the advisory committees for the 1998 and 2005 California Water Plan updates, is a former editor of the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, and has authored or co-authored over 200 publications. Lund is the Ray B. Krone Professor of Environmental Engineering in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department and an associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. Contact: Jay Lund, Civil and Environmental Engineering, (530) 752-5671, jrlund@ucdavis.edu, http://cee.engr.ucdavis.edu/faculty/lund/. WATERSHEDS, RIVERS AND STREAMS -- UC Davis geology professor Jeffrey Mount specializes in the rivers of California and land-use impacts on watersheds, rivers and streams. His research and teaching interests include the conservation and restoration of large river systems; natural function of rainfall and snowfall in watersheds and floodplains; levee safety and floodplain management. He holds the Roy Shlemon Chair in Applied Geosciences at UC Davis, is the director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences, and chairs the CALFED Independent Science Board. He is author of California Rivers and Streams: The Conflict between Fluvial Process and Land Use (1995). Contact: Jeffrey Mount, Geology, (530) 752-7092, jfmount@ucdavis.edu. FRESHWATER AND ANADRAMOUS FISH -- Peter Moyle is a professor of fish biology at UC Davis and the foremost expert on native freshwater and anadromous fishes (such as salmon) of California. He can discuss their declines and the environmental impacts that are responsible, such as droughts, water diversions and alien species. Moyle has worked on fish and ecological issues in the San Francisco Estuary, the San Joaquin River and the Sierra Nevada since the 1970s. He was head of the Delta 145 Native Fishes Recovery Team and a member of the Science Board for the CALFED Ecosystem Restoration Program. He has authored or coauthored more than 160 scientific papers and five books, including Inland Fishes of California (2002). He is an associate director of the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. Contact: Peter Moyle, Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology, (530) 752-6355, pbmoyle@ucdavis.edu. FISH ECOLOGY -- William Bennett is a professional researcher in fish ecology with the John Muir Institute of the Environment at UC Davis. His research has focused primarily on understanding the population dynamics of fishes in the San Francisco Estuary and near-shore marine (salt-water) environments in California. He has worked extensively with the Interagency Ecological Program and the CALFED Bay-Delta program to investigate the delta smelt and striped-bass populations in the San Francisco Estuary. His work with the Pacific Estuarine Ecosystem Indicator Research Consortium has focused on tidal-marsh goby populations. He has also studied the relative influences of fishing intensity and climate change on the near-shore rockfish fishery. Contact: Bill Bennett, John Muir Institute of the Environment, (530) 754-9354, wabennett@ucdavis.edu. WATER QUALITY -- William Fleenor is a professional research engineer in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at UC Davis. Fleenor uses field data collection and computer models to examine how physical properties of water influence water quality. From the water temperature of reservoir releases to water chemistry in stratified water systems, hydrodynamics play a large part in the resulting water quality. Fleenor develops models to examine hydrodynamic influences in lakes, reservoirs and estuaries. He has been involved with numerous hydrodynamic and water-quality research projects in the Delta and is currently the project manager for two water-quality modeling efforts funded by the CALFED Bay-Delta program. Contact: William Fleenor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, (530) 752-5669, wefleenor@ucdavis.edu. WATER ECONOMICS AND MARKETS -- Richard Howitt is a professor and department chair of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis. He teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses in resource economics, economic theory and operations research. His current research interests include constructing disaggregated economic modeling methods based on maximum entropy estimators, testing the allocation of water resources by market mechanisms, and developing empirical dynamic stochastic methods to analyze changes in investments and institutions. He serves on advisory boards for the California Department of Water Resources and the U.S. Academy of Sciences. Contact: Richard Howitt, Agricultural and Resource Economics, (530) 752-1521, howitt@primal.ucdavis.edu. CALIFORNIA WATER POLICY -- Ellen Hanak is a senior fellow and associate director of research at the Public Policy Institute of California. She is an expert on the economics of natural-resource management and agricultural development. At PPIC, she has launched a research program on water policy and has published reports and articles on water marketing, water and land-use planning, water conservation and management of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Other areas of expertise include infrastructure finance and climate change. Before joining PPIC in 2001, she held positions with the French agricultural research system, the President's Council of Economic Advisers and the World Bank. The PPIC is a private, nonprofit independent research group focused on the forces shaping California's future. Contact: Linda Strean, PPIC Media Affairs, (415) 291-4412, mobile (415) 867-9159, strean@ppic.org.
UC Davis MBAs Design Urban Oasis for Sacramento Homeless
Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700
Sacramento's aging Marshall Hotel, now home to more than 100 of the city's poorest residents, may soon be converted to a boutique inn. If so, its tenants will need to be relocated -- perhaps to a solar- and wind-powered urban oasis designed by UC Davis MBA students. The students' detailed plan won the 17th annual Bank of America Low-Income Housing Challenge in May, and will be incorporated into a proposal that Mercy Housing -- a national leader in the development of low-income housing -- expects to deliver to the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency in August. The redevelopment agency is seeking proposals for low-income housing at 7th and H streets in Sacramento, to help make up for the anticipated Marshall Hotel renovation. "We tried to really focus on the people who will be living in this new building, and on what we could do to help them turn around their lives and become a part of the community," said Amy Barr, leader of the UC Davis MBA student team. The result is a 132-page plan that would create 160 single-room occupancy units on the city-owned half-acre site across from the Sacramento County Jail. Twenty units would be set aside for chronically homeless tenants. Residents would enjoy a rooftop patio, a ground-floor parking garage and a mural on the theme of growth and renewal. An on-site social services agency office would help address their psychosocial needs; a 24-hour security guard would keep them safe. In a first for low-income housing in the Central Valley, the complex would also incorporate commercial space, including medical offices and a café¬ to help generate income and integrate the project into the surrounding downtown area. The complex would be designed to qualify for "silver" certification under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design, or LEED, standards for new construction. Sustainable features would include solar panels and concealed wind turbines on the roof and natural daylighting and ventilation inside. A gray-water system would irrigate the drought-resistant landscape. "I think we brought a lot of idealism to the project," said Barr, who ran four community service programs for homeless and low-income families while still in high school. "But we were also solid on the financing." The UC Davis team, calling itself the SEED Group (for Sustainable, Economical and Equitable Development), proposed a stack of financing sources to develop and operate the project, from grants to tax credits. Mercy Housing, based in Denver, signed on as the proposed project's developer. "We provided them with introductions, feedback and guidance, but they did all the work," said Chris Glaudel, vice president of asset management for Mercy Housing and a 1996 UC Davis MBA. "The concept and approach that they came up with is really at the forefront of practices today. Everything they did will be relevant to us as we finalize our response to the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency's request for proposals for this project. They've given us a big head start." A panel of housing industry professionals -- including project managers from nonprofit developers, advocacy and trade organizations, tax-credit investors, lenders and architects judged this year's competition. The UC Davis team's proposal came in first overall, beating out proposals from Stanford, UC Berkeley and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. The UC Davis proposal also won the category award for financial feasibility. Each team spent four months preparing project proposals that addressed real-world planning and development challenges, such as identifying a neighborhood with sufficient market demand for affordable housing, locating a viable site for the project, identifying a developer-partner and other service providers, earning the endorsements of neighborhood activists and political leaders, and obtaining sources of funds through lenders, investors and grantmakers. The competition of Northern and Central California universities is designed to spark innovative approaches to affordable housing development and expose aspiring professionals to the real estate industry. Bank of America has sponsored the competition since 1992.
How New Auto Fuels Will Affect Air Quality in an Era of Climate Change
Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700
As millions of cars and trucks hit the road using fuels other than gasoline, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is funding a $900,000 research project at UC Davis to learn precisely what emissions those alternative-fuel vehicles produce and how climate change might affect those emissions. The research is urgently needed to improve forecasts of how climate change will affect air quality in California, said Michael Kleeman, who is the project's lead researcher and a UC Davis professor of civil and environmental engineering. "We know from past studies that motor vehicles are a major source of airborne particles in California and across the United States, and higher concentrations of airborne particles are associated with higher death rates. So public agencies are already working to reduce vehicle emissions to protect public health," Kleeman said. "Now comes climate change, with shifts in patterns of air temperature and humidity levels. Those shifts will affect the particle emissions from cars and trucks and how those particles age in the atmosphere. So the net effect of climate change on vehicle emissions in the coming decades has major public health implications in California." Wayne Nastri, the EPA's regional administrator for the Pacific Southwest, added: "Given our complex air quality challenges, we must take an integrated approach to environmental protection using new technologies, cost-effective approaches that improve energy efficiency and cleaner fuels." Kleeman will collaborate on the four-year study with Shuhua Chen, an associate professor of atmospheric science at UC Davis with extensive experience in regional climate models, and James Schauer, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is a leading expert in the analysis of airborne-particle chemical composition. The researchers will take hundreds of air samples from exhaust pipes of alternative-fuel vehicles and analyze the size and chemical composition of the exhaust particles under a range of temperature and humidity conditions. The vehicles they will sample include: E-85 cars and light-duty trucks, also called flex-fuel or ethanol-blend vehicles; Gasoline-electric hybrid cars, such as the Toyota Prius and Honda Civic; Plug-in hybrid electric cars; and Heavy-duty trucks powered by biodiesel. Based on past studies, Kleeman and Schauer expect that each exhaust particle will consist mostly of carbonaceous compounds produced when fuel and oil are burned in the engine. One of the goals of the current project is to better understand exactly which compounds are emitted under various temperature and humidity conditions. This information will be incorporated into state-of-the-science air-pollution and regional-climate models running on hundreds of computers at UC Davis. The researchers will use the improved input data in their models to better predict how future transportation exhaust particles will age in a warmer atmosphere and what this might mean for public health. In a related project also funded by the U.S. EPA, Kleeman and co-workers will assess how the rise in zero-emission vehicles, such as all-electric vehicles and fuel-cell hybrid vehicles (which run on hydrogen), will affect future air quality in California. Even though these vehicles have no tailpipe emissions, there may be emissions produced when their electric or hydrogen fuels are manufactured. About U.S. EPA's Region 9 Air Program The U.S. EPA's Transportation and Air Quality program protects public health and the environment by regulating air pollution from motor vehicles, engines and the fuels used to operate them, and by encouraging travel choices that minimize emissions. U.S. EPA's Region 9 Air Program guides the federal management, implementation, enforcement and technical oversight of air quality in California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, the Pacific Islands, and Tribal Nations. About UC Davis The University of California is one of the world's foremost research and teaching institutions, and UC Davis, which celebrates its centennial this upcoming academic year, is the UC's flagship campus for environmental studies. UC Davis is a global leader in environmental studies relating to air and water pollution; water and land use; agricultural practices; endangered species management; invasive plants and animals; climate change; resource economics; information technology; and human society and culture. One in six of UC Davis' 1,500 faculty members specializes in an environment-related subject.
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