Wildlife – Enviro Updates

Op-Ed: If feds want Potter Valley dams, they should buy them

December 28, 2025

PRESS DEMOCRAT EDITORIAL

President Donald Trump’s California derangement syndrome is back as his administration tries to prevent PG&E from removing aging dams in the Potter Valley Project.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has moved to intervene in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission process to determine whether PG&E may tear down two dams and a mothballed powerhouse. Rollins wants FERC to deny the application.

Agriculture secretaries often get involved in these sorts of proceedings. Major changes to watersheds can impact farmers, after all. What is unusual in this case is that in supporting irrigators, a supposedly pro-business administration undermines private enterprise.

PG&E wants to surrender its license for the hydropower system on the Eel River because it now costs more than it is worth. The dams and powerhouse are more than a century old and are nowhere close to meeting modern standards. They require costly repairs and upgrades to remain safe. PG&E absorbs those costs, and no doubt passes some onto ratepayers.

Water, Wildlifedams, Eel River, endangered species, Potter Valley Project, Russian River, salmon, salmon habitat

Trump administration intervenes in dispute over future of Potter Valley Project

December 20, 2025

Phil Barber, PRESS DEMOCRAT

See also the article by the Lost Coast Outpost

Opponents of a plan to remove two Pacific Gas & Electric-owned dams from the Eel River in Lake and Mendocino counties have officially won a huge ally: the Trump administration.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Friday filed a notice to intervene in the utility giant’s bid to decommission its waterworks in the rural area, which also include a century-old power plant that helps to shunt Eel River water into irrigation canals that support Mendocino County’s Potter Valley and dump into the upper Russian River, boosting supplies for farms and hundreds of thousands of urban dwellers in the North Bay.

PG&E’s application to decommission the so-called Potter Valley Project is being considered by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, which oversees licensing of the nation’s hydroelectric facilities.

Water, WildlifeEel River, endangered species, PG&E, Potter Valley Project, Russian River, salmon

California bans harvest of red abalone until 2036

December 11, 2025

Claire Barber & Anna Hoch-Kenney, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Just outside Mendocino in the middle of Van Damme Beach, a weathered placard educates bystanders about the region’s red abalone, a once prolific sea snail whose mild taste and iridescent shell attracted throngs of divers up the Northern California coast.

But in November, the beach was quiet aside from small waves lapping against the shoreline and a steady stream of cars racing along Highway 1. Commercial abalone fishing has been illegal for decades, and recreational diving for abalone has been banned since 2018 due to significant population decline. Now all that remains of abalone culture here is the old sign, with its illustrated abalone fading in the sun.

“Abalone diving was part of Northern California culture. It was huge,” said Matt Mattison, a lifelong abalone diver and president of NorCal Underwater Hunters, a spearfishing nonprofit based in the region. “It was a big deal for a lot of families.”

It will be at least 10 more years before Californians get the chance to dive for abalone again. On Thursday, the state’s Fish and Game Commission voted to extend a ban on abalone harvesting in Northern California until 2036, citing continued decline in red abalone populations and ongoing environmental challenges — the longest extension since its initial 2018 closure.

Habitats, Sonoma Coast, WildlifeFish & Game Commission, fisheries, kelp forest, red abalone

Coho salmon found in Sonoma Coast creek for first time in 60 years

December 8, 2025

Amie Windsor, PRESS DEMOCRAT

The excitement started with a flash of silver followed by a hefty dose of disbelief.

A team of conservationists and biologists from The Wildlands Conservancy, the nonprofit that manages the 5,600-acre Jenner Headlands Preserve on the Sonoma Coast, couldn’t believe what they were seeing: the telltale color and shape of juvenile coho salmon, darting back and forth in the clear current of the East Branch Russian Gulch.

It had been decades since the endangered fish had made its way to that arm of the watershed.

And yet there they were, as Ryan Berger, Corby Hines and Luke Farmer of The Wildlands Conservancy looked on.

“I had never heard of coho being in the Russian Gulch in recent memory,” said Hines, a ranger with the group.

Coho salmon once thrived in the coastal watersheds of Sonoma County and the broader North Coast, where winter rain, summer fog and the protective canopy of towering redwood forest sustained young fish and spawning adults over millenia.

Habitats, Water, Wildlifecoho salmon, endangered species, redwoods, Russian Gulch

Green Valley revival reconnects creek to floodplain

November 20, 2025

Dewey Watson, SONOMA COUNTY GAZETTE

A partnership between Iron Horse Vineyards, the property owner, and the Gold Ridge Research Conservation District (Gold Ridge), with funding from California Fish and Wildlife and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Restoration Center (NOAA), has restored and improved a large part of the middle reach of Green Valley Creek to provide overwintering habitat for coho and steelhead salmon. Construction on the project, which took years of planning, began in April and has recently been completed.

“Now it is up to nature, assisted by teams of workers planting native grasses and willows to restore what has been lost for over a century and bring back healthy salmon to the creek and the Russian River,” said chief scientist and project manager John Green.

Green Valley Creek was once considered critical habitat for salmon because of its proximity to the Atascadero Plain, offering one of the largest basins for young salmon to grow strong enough to survive ocean challenges and return to breed.

This area of the creek, at the bottom of the Iron Horse vineyard property, was once a flat field, prone to annual flooding and quick drainage. It offered no shelter for fish or the insects that support them. Now, after years of planning and months of construction reshaping, the site hums with quiet anticipation as a stream begins to come back to life.

Habitats, Water, WildlifeCA Fish & Wildlife, coho salmon, Gold Ridge RCD, Green Valley Creek, habitat restoration, NOAA, Russian River, steelhead

Northern California’s next kelp forests might be growing in a lab

November 15, 2025

Carly Naim, COURTHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

Kelp once formed “underwater rainforests” on the California coast, but these fragile ecosystems have largely disappeared. At a marine lab near the Bay Area, scientists are trying to bring them back.

On a rainy day in September along a craggy slice of California shore, some young bull kelp floated around in a cement tub as if enjoying a bubble bath.

Unlike some of their kin elsewhere at this marine laboratory, ecologists had collected these specimens earlier that day. The scientists working here at UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory hope the kelp will grow, reproduce and eventually spore — an essential step for restoring the kelp forests that once flourished off the coast of Northern California.

This species — Nereocystis luetkeana, commonly known as bull kelp — is the foundational species in kelp forests, an ecosystem that provides habitat and food for countless other marine animals and plants.

An algae, it only lives for a year but can grow up to a foot per day and reach heights of nearly 100 feet. That’s taller than many trees.

Sadly, California’s kelp forests are in what researchers call “massive decline” as climate change disrupts natural processes in the Pacific Ocean. In around the past 10 years, they estimate more than 90% of these ecosystems have disappeared.

Sonoma Coast, WildlifeBodega Marine Laboratory, kelp forest, restoration, sea urchins, warm ocean

Op-Ed: Mismanagement pushes salmon toward extinction

November 10, 2025

Tom Philp, PRESS DEMOCRAT

For California water managers, the Sierra snowpack has always been like money in the bank. With steady kisses of spring sun, snowmelt reliably flows ever downward until reaching the state’s vast network of reservoirs downstream.

But in the spring of 2021, in what turned out to be the second year of a scorching three-year drought, something happened to a meager snowpack. Much of it unexpectedly vanished into the sky or ground. Summer, as it now tends to do, had arrived early.

Faced with a cruel choice of who gets the limited water and who goes without, human decisions designated the remnants of California’s once-massive salmon population as the losers. The operators of the state’s largest reservoir, behind Shasta Dam, had already begun to honor contracts that guarantee farmers a lot of water, come drought or deluge. That meant less water in the Sacramento River to keep its inhabitants alive.

When adult salmon returned from the Pacific Ocean that winter, they swam upstream to below the dam where they would traditionally spawn. But the low flow in the river was lethally hot. Nearly all the salmon eggs failed to produce offspring.

The tragic loss of these salmon is one of too many examples of how California keeps harming an iconic fish species it is supposed to protect. A drought is a setback for salmon in the best of times. Here is how the last one could not have been worse, thanks to human mistakes.

Water, Wildlifedrought, endangered species, Sacramento River, salmon, salmon habitat, salmon season, water allocation