Policy Brief: Storing Water for the Environment

About the Authors

Sarah Null is the 2021–22 PPIC CalTrout Ecosystem Fellow at the PPIC Water Policy Center and an associate professor of watershed sciences at Utah State University. Her research includes environmental water management, improving aquatic habitat objectives in water resources systems models, evaluating tradeoffs between human and environmental water uses with uncertainty, and identifying climate adaptations for water systems. Her work focuses on California and the American West. She holds a PhD and master’s degree in geography from the University of California, Davis and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Jeffrey Mount is a senior fellow at the PPIC Water Policy Center. He is an emeritus professor of earth and planetary sciences and founding director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. A geomorphologist who specializes in the study of rivers, streams, and wetlands, his research focuses on integrated water resource management, flood management, and improving aquatic ecosystem health. He has served on many state and federal boards and commissions that address water resource management issues in the West. He has published more than a hundred articles, books, and other publications, including the seminal book California Rivers and Streams (UC Press). He holds a PhD and MS in earth sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Brian Gray is a senior fellow at the PPIC Water Policy Center and professor of law emeritus at the University of California in San Francisco. He has published numerous articles on environmental and water resources law and coauthored a variety of PPIC reports, including the 2011 interdisciplinary book on California water policy, Managing California’s Water: From Conflict to Reconciliation. He has argued before the California Supreme Court and the US Court of Appeals in cases involving wild and scenic rivers, water pricing reform, takings, and water rights and environmental quality. He is a recipient of the William Rutter Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Outstanding Professor Award. He holds a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA in economics from Pomona College.

Kristen Dybala serves as principal ecologist in the Pacific Coast and Central Valley Group at Point Blue Conservation Science, where she directs strategic research to inform conservation and land management strategies that are science-based and climate-smart, and that provide multiple benefits for people, ecosystems, and wildlife. Much of her work has focused on the conservation and restoration of riparian and wetland ecosystems in California’s Central Valley and Delta, working with partners to establish science-based conservation objectives, analyze the impacts of habitat restoration and incentive programs, quantify associated co-benefits, and project the multiple benefits and trade-offs of large-scale changes to the landscape. She earned her PhD in ecology at the University of California, Davis conducting research on the impacts of weather and projected impacts of climate change on songbird demography and population dynamics in California.

Gokce Sencan is a research associate at the PPIC Water Policy Center. Her research interests include water markets and climate-water policy interactions. Prior to joining PPIC, she worked on several projects, including water purchasing opportunities for environmental flows from retiring coal-fired power plants and the financial benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions through land-use interventions in California. She previously worked as an intergovernmental affairs intern at the United Nations Environment Programme in New York and as a climate change research intern at Istanbul Policy Center. She holds a master’s degree in environmental science and management from the Bren School at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a BS with a double major in chemical-biological engineering and molecular biology from Koc University, Istanbul.

Anna Sturrock is an assistant professor and UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Essex in the UK. She also runs a working group for a European network (COST Action CA19107 – Unifying Approaches to Marine Connectivity for improved Resource Management for the Seas) focused on advancing methods to quantify and predict movements of individuals at sea and across the land-sea interface. Her research primarily focuses on fish migration timing, habitat use, growth and survival, and how salmonids respond to stressors such as drought and habitat loss. She completed her MSc at the University of Otago in New Zealand and PhD at the University of Southampton in the UK, focusing on marine fish population structure, behavior, and physiology. During her postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and the Center for Watershed Sciences at University of California, Davis, she focused on Chinook salmon in the Bay–Delta estuary system and the impacts of dam operations and hydroclimatic variability on the diet, growth, behavior, and survival of juvenile life stages. She is passionate about translating science into practical solutions for ecosystem conservation and management.

Barton “Buzz” Thompson is the Robert E. Paradise professor in natural resources law at Stanford Law School and senior fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He previously served as director of the Woods Institute, Special Master for the United States Supreme Court in Montana v. Wyoming, and a member of the Science Advisory Board for the US Environmental Protection Agency. His research focuses on the role of law, institutions, and markets in effective water management, and he is the author of numerous books on water and the environment, including Legal Control of Water Resources (6th ed., 2018). He holds both law and business degrees from Stanford University.

Harrison Zeff is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He develops risk-management solutions to a wide range of environmental issues, including drought impacts on California agriculture and flood hazards within the Houston Ship Channel. Prior to his time in California, he spent time as a teaching fellow at Tubingen University, Germany and as a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. He holds a PhD and an MSEE in environmental science and engineering from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a BS in civil and environmental engineering from Pennsylvania State University.

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