Cultivating climate resilience in California agriculture: Adaptations to an increasingly volatile water future.

California agriculture will undergo significant transformations over the next few decades in response to climate extremes, environmental regulation and policy encouraging environmental justice, and economic pressures that have long driven agricultural changes. With several local climates suited to a variety of crops, periodically abundant nearby precipitation, and public investments that facilitated abundant low-priced irrigation water, California hosts one of the most diverse and productive agroecosystems in the world. California farms supply nearly half of the high-nutrient fruit, tree nut, and vegetable production in the United States.

Disparities in Drinking Water Manganese Concentrations in Domestic Wells and Community Water Systems in the Central Valley, CA, USA.

Over 1.3 million Californians rely on unmonitored domestic wells. Existing probability estimates of groundwater Mn concentrations, population estimates, and sociodemographic data were integrated with spatial data delineating domestic well communities (DWCs) to predict the probability of high Mn concentrations in extracted groundwater within DWCs in California's Central Valley.

Evaluating health outcome metrics and their connections to air pollution and vulnerability in Southern California's Coachella Valley.

The ongoing desiccation of California's Salton Sea has led to increasing concerns about air quality and health for its surrounding communities, including the nearby Coachella Valley - a region already experiencing severe air quality and health disparities. Here we explore spatial air pollution and human health disparities in the Coachella Valley with particular attention to disparities arising across population characteristics including both socioeconomic and demographic vulnerabilities. We use two different measures of respiratory and cardiovascular health outcomes at the individual and census tract levels - one measure based on a randomly sampled telephone survey and the other measure based on emergency room visitation data - to investigate the degree to which these health outcomes are connected to air pollution and socioeconomic metrics.

The implications of drought and water conservation on the reuse of municipal wastewater: Recognizing impacts and identifying mitigation possibilities.

As water agencies continue to investigate opportunities to increase resilience and local water supply reliability in the face of drought and rising water scarcity, water conservation strategies and the reuse of treated municipal wastewater are garnering significant attention and adoption. Yet a simple water balance thought experiment illustrates that drought, and the conservation strategies that are often enacted in response to it, both likely limit the role reuse may play in improving local water supply reliability. For instance, as a particular drought progresses and agencies enact water conservation measures to cope with drought, influent flows likely decrease while influent pollution concentrations increase, particularly salinity, which adversely affects wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) costs and effluent quality and flow.

Wastewater Reuse for Agriculture: Development of a Regional Water Reuse Decision-Support Model (RWRM) for Cost-Effective Irrigation Sources.

Water scarcity has become a critical problem in many semiarid and arid regions. The single largest water use in such regions is for crop irrigation, which typically relies on groundwater and surface water sources. With increasing stress on these traditional water sources, it is important to consider alternative irrigation sources for areas with limited freshwater resources.

Tropical countries may be willing to pay more to protect their forests.

Inadequate funding from developed countries has hampered international efforts to conserve biodiversity in tropical forests. We present two complementary research approaches that reveal a significant increase in public demand for conservation within tropical developing countries as those countries reach upper-middle-income (UMI) status. We highlight UMI tropical countries because they contain nearly four-fifths of tropical primary forests, which are rich in biodiversity and stored carbon.