Science

How a water scientist hopes to save California habitats that could be pumped dry

Published

1 month ago

May 26, 2024

How a water scientist hopes to save California habitats that could be pumped dry

WELDON, Calif. —

California is recognized as one of the world’s hotspots of biodiversity, with more species of plants and animals than any other state. And a significant number of the state’s species, from frogs to birds, live in habitats that depend on groundwater.

These rich ecosystems — including spring-fed streams, wetlands, riparian forests and oak woodlands — are vulnerable to declines in groundwater levels. In areas where unchecked pumping from wells severely depletes aquifers, once-thriving wetlands and forests can dry up and die.

Spotting threats to vulnerable natural areas has become a mission for Melissa Rohde, a hydrologist who has spent years analyzing satellite data and water levels in wells to come up with strategies for preventing ecosystems from being left high and dry.

“Nature has been getting the short end of the stick. It basically gets whatever is left behind, which oftentimes is not enough,” Rohde said. “How do we ensure that these ecosystems are protected?”

More than 300 species of birds have been seen at Kern River Preserve.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

California is the only state with a groundwater law that includes provisions intended to protect groundwater-dependent ecosystems. But the law, adopted in 2014, gives considerable leeway to local agencies in developing water management plans that prevent “significant and unreasonable adverse impacts.”

When Rohde and other scientists examined the local plans for parts of the state that fall under regulation, they found only about 9% of groundwater-dependent ecosystems are adequately protected, while the remaining 91% are vulnerable.

When they looked at the entire state, they determined only 1% of the ecosystems are sufficiently protected under measures adopted to date.

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Rohde has been focusing on finding ways to change that, in California and around the world.

Often working at home, she has pored over satellite data to spot decreases in vegetation greenness during drought, a telltale sign of die-off caused by declining aquifer levels. And she has analyzed how different types of trees, including willows, cottonwoods and oaks, fare when water levels fall depending on the depth of their roots.

Rohde and other researchers recently published a study outlining how California can set targets for maintaining groundwater levels — based on a formula including the type of vegetation, local water data and satellite imagery — to ensure the plants that anchor each ecosystem will be able to reach water and survive during dry times.

Cattle graze at the Kern River Preserve.

“If we don’t have groundwater levels that are able to support these diverse native vegetation ecosystems, then basically we run the risk of losing that important habitat for a lot of our threatened and endangered species,” Rohde said. “When you play around with keeping groundwater levels too deep to support the habitat, then you could lose species, and then that’s irreversible. The consequences can be severe.”

In California’s Mediterranean climate, trees, shrubs and the species they support are naturally adapted to drought. But excessive pumping from wells can push habitats beyond ecological limits by depleting the sources that sustain them.

With humanity’s heating of the planet intensifying droughts, the strains affecting these ecosystems continue to grow.

Already, California has lost the vast majority of its original wetlands to development, water diversions and agriculture. To avoid losing what remains, Rohde said, the state needs “a precautionary and preventative approach that can ensure that these ecosystems can withstand the intensification of droughts in climate change.”

During a recent visit to Kern County, Rohde and several conservation specialists walked in the shade through a lush forest of cottonwood trees near the south fork of the Kern River, visiting a nature preserve she had previously seen only in satellite images.

Scientist Melissa Rohde stands in a riparian forest.

At the edge of a clearing, she came upon the bare, sunbleached skeletons of dead trees.

She said satellite data had revealed that parts of the forest died along this part of the Kern River during the drought between 2012 and 2016.

“That’s because the groundwater levels rapidly declined,” Rohde said.

After that die-off, she said, groundwater levels rebounded in the area, and the native vegetation has been growing back.

A sign reads "Kern River Preserve" on a gate, with trees in the background.

It helps that this forest is protected as part of the Kern River Preserve, which is managed by the National Audubon Society, and that some nearby farmlands have been retired and converted to conservation lands over the years.

The preserve’s managers, working with the organization Ducks Unlimited, have also restored an expanded wetland by diverting water from the river and flooding a section of pastureland where cattle used to graze.

The wetland attracts birds, such as coots and tricolored blackbirds, and also recharges the aquifer that the roots of cottonwoods and willows tap into.

Scientists and conservation specialists stand on a rock formation overlooking a wetland.

The 3,300-acre preserve has expanded as adjacent alfalfa fields have been purchased and agricultural wells have been shut down, said Reed Tollefson, the preserve’s manager. These efforts have helped protect a refuge for birds including willow flycatchers and yellow-billed cuckoos.

As he pointed to several dead trees poking from the living cottonwoods, he said protecting the forest from groundwater pumping and climate change will require additional effort.

“I think it’s tenuous,” he said. “We’ve got more work to do to try and really sustain this.”

The dead trees that have appeared here and elsewhere in California over the past decade represent the sort of die-off that water managers need to focus on preventing, Rohde said.

“It has to be an intentional practice of setting thresholds, monitoring, using satellite data or other scalable means to measure the impacts, in order to make sure that we are not allowing this to happen on a wider scale,” she said. “From a biodiversity perspective, it’s absolutely critical.”

Rohde said she felt hopeful seeing the forest rebounding and much greener than it was several years ago, with many young trees coming up.

Some other parts of California haven’t fared nearly as well.

One rainy day last month, Rohde visited an area along the Santa Clara River in Ventura County where several hundred acres of willows and cottonwoods dried up and died during the drought in the mid-2010s.

When groundwater pumping by farms and communities caused aquifer levels to fall, many trees died along the river near the city of Fillmore.

“We saw this catastrophic drop in groundwater at this site,” Rohde said.

She visited the area with a research colleague and two managers from The Nature Conservancy. They stood on a gravel road next to a lemon grove, checking on what remained of the forest.

Scientist Melissa Rohde stands beside tall reeds.

Where native trees died, an explosion of invasive reeds has taken over. The nonnative reeds, called arundo, have grown into thickets more than 20 feet tall. And unlike willows, Rohde said, arundo offers little value as habitat for birds.

“When we had that massive die-off, and the groundwater levels remained deep, there was no way for the native vegetation to regenerate,” she said. “But arundo is extremely efficient at extracting soil moisture. And so it was able to outcompete the native vegetation.”

She said efforts to prevent this sort of habitat degradation should be prioritized.

When managers of local agencies set goals for maintaining groundwater levels, she said, they can tailor targets to the type of vegetation — whether there are cottonwood trees, with roots averaging about 9 feet long, or oaks, with roots that average nearly 30 feet but can grow much deeper.

Her colleague Michael Bliss Singer said when native trees are ravaged by multiple years of low water levels, they will start losing leaves and then dropping branches.

In one study, Singer and others documented a “brown wave” of trees drying along the Santa Clara River between 2012 and 2016 — a loss they saw in satellite images.

“It’s completely transformed the ecosystem here,” said Singer, a professor at Cardiff University in Wales who is also a researcher at UC Santa Barbara.

When plants die off like this and don’t recover, it’s a symptom of an ecosystem in decline. To prevent more of these losses in an era when climate change is driving more severe droughts, Singer said, it’s crucial to “come up with creative solutions for the worst-case scenario.”

Rohde has found in her research, however, that most local groundwater plans in California haven’t adequately accounted for climate projections.

Previously, Rohde did other types of climate research, including a stint in Antarctica in 2010, where she was part of a drilling team collecting ice cores. From that experience, Rohde said she realized that “I didn’t want to spend my career convincing people that climate change was an issue; I wanted to do something about it.”

She wore a faded cap with an Antarctica map, a memento of that trip. Rohde said her recent work is motivated by concerns about the climate crisis and biodiversity, as well as a conviction that proactive steps to protect ecosystems can make a difference.

“I have two young kids. I really want to make sure that I’m doing the best thing that I can to ensure a sustainable future for them, where they can access nature,” Rohde said.

A man holds binoculars as he observes a wetland.

“Often groundwater is out of sight, out of mind,” she said. “We don’t measure it, we don’t understand it and we misuse it. And we need to make sure that we are managing groundwater so that it is supporting us, and making sure that we have a sustainable future.”

Rohde now works as an independent scientist. Previously, as a researcher for The Nature Conservancy, she helped write an atlas of threatened and endangered species that rely on groundwater.

California’s groundwater-dependent ecosystems lie not only along streams, but also in habitats such as mountain meadows, coastal redwood forests and mesquite bushes among desert sand dunes. The species they support range from tiger salamanders to desert pupfish, and from songbirds to mammals such as ground squirrels and bighorn sheep.

“The risks are high when species are on the verge of extinction,” Rohde said.

Rohde and other scientists have found that ecosystems sustained by groundwater are under threat worldwide. Some of the few regions that have measures intended to protect them, she said, include Australia, the European Union and California.

Still, even with California’s groundwater regulations and endangered species laws, Rohde said, “we continue to miss the mark in actually protecting them.”

Rohde said state officials should give local water agencies clear direction to ensure they’re using science-based methods to safeguard ecosystems in their state-mandated plans. She said agencies can now use the approaches scientists have outlined to map strongholds of biodiversity and set targets for maintaining aquifer levels.

“It’s very attainable,” she said. “Now, it’s just basically up to political will, or enforcement by the Department of Water Resources, to ensure that that happens.”

Walking in the rain at the Santa Clara River Preserve, Rohde followed her former Nature Conservancy colleagues Peter Dixon and E.J. Remson on a trail through a stand of healthy trees.

A man in a hooded rain jacket hikes along a soaked trail.

They stood on the banks of the fast-flowing river, watching the muddy water churn past.

In the summer and fall, this part of the river usually dwindles to a trickle.

And during the next drought, when the river dries up, the forest will depend on the same groundwater that nearby communities and farms also use.

If the water needs of this and other ecosystems aren’t prioritized, Rohde said, vital habitats will suffer.

“We need to be deliberate about the planning, and ensuring that they get their fair share,” she said. “Their existence is potentially imperiled if we don’t act.”

Science

AI and memory deletion: Inside the medical quest to cure grief

Published

1 hour ago

June 26, 2024

Press Room

AI and memory deletion: Inside the medical quest to cure grief

When Cody Delistraty lost his mother in 2014, he was surprised by the various ways that he, his brother and his father dealt with their grief. The journalist and speechwriter had expected his family’s experiences to be aligned, that there would be a, “homogeneity to grieving.” The differences led Delistraty to wonder whether loss was more complicated than advertised.

In America, grief is often framed as a journey from Point A to Point B, a linear path efficiently chugging through stages like denial and anger, ultimately heading toward acceptance. But anyone who has experienced a loss firsthand understands that it isn’t so simple. Grief can be isolating, confusing and unyielding.

Shelf Help is a new wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life.

In 2022, a new addition to the DSM-5 (“Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”) caught Delistraty’s eye: prolonged grief disorder. It’s a rare condition in which grief becomes so severe that it interferes with daily life. The classification opens the door to medical solutions: pharmaceuticals are in early testing stages, and a slew of new digital, psychedelic and other treatments are emerging.

Delistraty’s new book, “The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss,” (Harper) follows his inquisitive sampling of available and future therapies, all while wondering whether grief is a problem that needs to be solved.

Your understanding of grief initially centered on a concept known as the five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. How did that shift?

Portrait of Cody Delistraty standing in front of a bookcase

When Elisabeth Kübler-Ross came up with the five stages, she was talking to patients who were coming to terms with their own deaths, not with their own grief, which is similar but also very different. There was a study that tracked grievers from various demographics and found that most people actually experience a progression, but my issue with the typical interpretation of the five stages is that it’s presented as the right way to grieve, that there’s a method you can master and that the end game is acceptance.

America has a culture of individuality and mastery — we want to achieve, we want to overcome, we want to bootstrap our way to success. But in grief, we only set ourselves back trying to do this. After a loss is the time to pause and reflect, and even if you do go through these stages to some degree, trying to rush through them or extract value in order to get to acceptance and move on is a fundamentally wrong way of looking at it.

“America has a culture of individuality and mastery — we want to achieve, we want to overcome, we want to bootstrap our way to success. But in grief, we only set ourselves back trying to do this.”

— Cody Delistraty, author of “The Grief Cure.”

Your book confronts the isolation of grieving and how it’s so often considered unseemly or inappropriate when done publicly. Grief is culturally framed as an individual journey, and yet it’s a universal fact of life. What do you think accounts for this disconnect?

This paradigm shift from public to private grieving is a relatively recent phenomenon. Americans, especially, are weary of talking or asking about loss. This is a symptom of “happiness culture,” where grief is considered a burden and you don’t want to seem unhappy or bring others down. The disintegration of local communities exacerbates this. And then this false idea that closure marks a victory over grief. Keeping grief private implies that you did your job. There’s morally valuable willpower. You did it. You got over it.

I think self-care has been the problematic marketing breakthrough of the 21st century, in which the more challenging aspects of being a human, like disappointment, sadness and grief, get pushed out of the frame. They’re not within our consumption narrative, and they’re not within the way we want to present to others.

What surprised me while researching is that it seems like people are actually bubbling with the desire to talk about these things. When I was researching for the book, I got sick of holing up in hotels, so I went to a bar and ended up talking with someone who told me about her recent divorce, which she called the greatest loss of her life. She hadn’t really talked to anybody about it, and it was so nice to connect over loss. When people are open, it can snowball into greater openness.

Our society can place varying value on different types of loss, resulting in some to fall through the cracks, like that woman with her divorce. But grief exists on a spectrum. In the book, you discuss ambiguous loss. Can you tell me more?

Book jacket for "The Grief Cure" by Cody Delistraty

The term ambiguous loss was coined by Pauline Boss at the University of Minnesota, who worked with the families of soldiers who went missing in Vietnam. Boss defined it as “a relational disorder caused by the lack of facts surrounding the loss of a loved one,” but today, it encompasses a wide variety of loss.

Climate grief is a big and very modern one. There was a European study that found a third of respondents are extremely worried about climate change. That’s a huge instance of ambiguous grief because there’s disappearance of species and landscapes, there’s an increase in climate refugees, but you can’t really point to a body in a casket and say this is what I’m grieving.

Relationships are another big example. In the book, I went to breakup boot camp to explore losing a loved one outside of death. Friend breakups can be devastating. I really push against the idea of hierarchies and grief. There isn’t a fundamental ranking within grief, and it is subjective to the relationship you had to that person or thing.

Your experiences brought you to the cutting edge of grief research. What do you make of the future of grief treatments?

When I was writing the AI [artificial intelligence] chapter of re-creating technologically deceased loved ones, it was super cutting-edge and wild. Then, of course, it all hit the news cycle pretty intensely with Chat-GPT. Optogenetics for memory deletion could be something we’re faced with in another decade or two. There will be medical technologies where we can take a lot of the pain and burden out of loss. My book questions whether that’s really for the best. We should be thinking about this now before the time comes.

TAKEAWAYS

from “The Grief Cure”

Psilocybin is a huge scientific breakthrough for grief. I talked to one of the most renowned psilocybin researchers, Robin Carhart-Harris, who told me about this guy, Kirk Rutter, whose mother had died, he’d been in this terrible car accident and then he went through a romantic breakup all in the span of about a year. Carhart-Harris’ team gave him just two pills of synthesized psilocybin, donned him with an eye mask and calm music, and he had this incredible perspective shift. He cycled through memories of his mom and realized he didn’t have to maintain the most painful parts, but he could still hold onto her and respect her memory. That treatment made him look at grief differently.

What is your best advice for somebody really stuck in their grief?

There’s no right way of doing it, but don’t rush it. As awful as this time is, there’s so much to be gleaned from really looking inward, reflecting on yourself and your feelings, and thinking about the person you’ve lost. I rushed after my mom died, trying to push past the pain, and here I am, a decade later, writing a book about it. These things really do take time.

I also recommend telling your people what you need from them. The vast majority of people want to talk about these things, they want to be helpful, but especially in the U.S., we are very bad at knowing what that looks like. To the degree that you can, communicate your needs. I think you’d be surprised by the degree to which people will be there for you.

Should someone in grief be aiming for closure?

I think closure is a mythical idea. Nancy Berns, a professor at Drake University, has done a lot of great work on closure and how it’s a social construct. We too often skip over the grappling-with and reflecting-on of grief in order to get to this mythical place of closure when really the truest value is being able to hold that loss in one part of your life while holding a future-looking part in another.

We see this push for closure reified across American culture. One of the biggest shocks for me was bereavement leave, where the median is only five days according to a 2024 study, and this only applies to a close family death. There’s no U.S. federal law requiring leave. This bolsters the idea that closure is part and parcel of productivity, of getting back to normal, of getting back to work.

Our rituals around grief are one-off. We go to a funeral, and that’s it. You get support for an hour, and then it’s over. We’d do well to really reflect on more personal, creative rituals that have more intimate meaning and can be continued over a longer period. This shift would help people with the understanding of time lines around grief. It all takes so much longer than we think. You miss so much when you rush through to tick the box of closure, and frankly, when you do so, you’re really not grieving at all.

a figure sit in the threshold of a door opening to a void

Endicott is a writer and multi-disciplinary artist based in Denver. Her work has appeared in a number of publications including the New York Times, Scientific American, the Guardian, Elle, Electric Lit and Bomb Magazine. You can find her on Instagram @weirdbirds.

Shelf Help is a new wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life. Want to pitch us? Email alyssa.bereznak@latimes.com.

Science

L.A. County plans to put $5 million toward wiping out medical debt

Published

8 hours ago

June 25, 2024

Press Room

L.A. County plans to put $5 million toward wiping out medical debt

Los Angeles County is moving forward with a pilot program to relieve medical debt for struggling residents, setting aside $5 million for a planned agreement with a national nonprofit that buys and erases such debts.

County supervisors voted Tuesday to allocate money for a county agreement with Undue Medical Debt to carry out the new program. The effort is expected to launch later this year, focusing on debt stemming from hospital care and targeting L.A. County’s “lowest income residents.”

“No one should be driven into poverty because they got sick,” Supervisor Janice Hahn, who put forward the proposal with Supervisor Holly Mitchell, said in a statement.

“But medical debt remains a huge problem in this country, and it can be devastating for families and their financial well-being. Luckily for us, we have an opportunity to make a difference.”

Hospitals stuck with unpaid bills can bundle and sell the debt at a discount to collection agencies that try to recoup the owed money for profit. Undue Medical Debt instead buys the discounted debt and forgives it. The nonprofit said it can erase an average of $100 in debt for every dollar that is donated.

“Five million dollars can really go a long way,” said its vice president of communications and marketing Daniel Lempert. County officials estimated that amount could eliminate $500 million of debt for 150,000 residents.

Across the country, Undue Medical Debt has partnered with local governments such as Cook County, Ill. and Toledo, Ohio. to fund such efforts. Lempert said that under such agreements, the nonprofit typically reaches out to local hospitals and other health care providers to identify and purchase medical debt affecting financially strapped patients, then gets reimbursed by the local government for the cost of debts affecting their residents.

Under its guidelines for financial hardship, Undue Medical Debt works to relieve debt for people from households making no more than four times the federal poverty level — a calculation equating to $124,800 this year for a family of four — or whose medical debt amounts to 5% or more of their income.

L.A. County is still working out who will be eligible under its pilot program, but its broad goal is to reach “our lowest-income residents and the working poor who have catastrophic amounts of medical debt,” said Dr. Naman Shah, director of the division of medical and dental affairs at L.A. County Public Health.

The L.A. County pilot program will focus specifically on medical debts for hospital care, Shah said. Local residents cannot apply directly for their medical debt to be wiped out, but will be informed if Undue Medical Debt has eliminated some or all of their unpaid debt.

“You’ll get a letter out of the blue saying, ‘X, Y or Z debts have been relieved. You no longer owe them. Keep this as a receipt,’” Lempert said.

In Los Angeles County, public health officials have estimated that medical debt totaled more than $2.9 billion in 2022, burdening 1 in 10 adults in the county — a higher percentage than suffered from asthma, according to the public health department. More than half of those who said they were burdened by medical debt had taken on credit card debt to pay medical bills, its analysis found.

The problem has persisted even as more L.A. County residents gained insurance coverage, underscoring the need for a targeted approach, the public health department said.

County officials estimated earlier this year that wiping out nearly $3 billion in medical debt for L.A. County residents through an intermediary would cost $24 million. Other municipalities have turned to funding from the American Rescue Plan Act for such debt relief, but L.A. County had “fully allocated” that money as of January, according to a staff report.

The public health department said it planned to instead use $5 million in one-time county funding for the pilot program, which it said would roll out in stages, starting with “the most vulnerable residents.” Shah said his hope was to raise enough additional money to not have to set priorities about which struggling residents to help.

A study released earlier this year raised questions about the effectiveness of buying up medical debt: A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that examined medical debt relief for more than 83,000 people from 2018 to 2020 concluded it had no effect, on average, on financial distress or mental health. The research was done in partnership with Undue Medical Debt, then known as RIP Medical Debt.

Despite the “disappointing results,” the researchers wrote, “there is still potential that medical debt relief targeted further upstream or in different populations could yield meaningful benefits.” Stanford University professor of economics Neale Mahoney said the cheapest debts to buy often date back five years or more.

By that point, “a lot of these folks had a lot of other issues, and relieving one of their issues without helping … all of the other financial issues they had wasn’t enough to move the needle,” he said. One solution is to “move more upstream,” and provide debt relief earlier, “before people are too scarred by the debt collection process.”

Mahoney praised the response of the nonprofit, saying it was “taking the study to heart.” Undue Medical Debt president Allison Sesso said in April that it had already made changes since the period covered by the study, including buying medical debt directly from hospitals before it goes to debt buyers or collection agencies.

Sesso also said her group was “collaborating with local governments across the country to concentrate debt erasure to a specific locality to deepen our impact.”

Focusing such efforts in a targeted area ramps up the chances it may be able to wipe out multiple debts for an individual patient, Lempert said.

Shah added that the study did not show what would happen if debt relief happened alongside other prevention efforts. In L.A. County, “there is a larger agenda on medical debt — of which this is just one part.”

Under a broader plan to combat medical debt in L.A. County, the public health department also wants to gather data on how hospitals collect debt and assist strapped patients, create an online portal to apply for financial help, and expand legal aid services, among other proposed steps.

Public health department director Barbara Ferrer told county supervisors Tuesday that their goal is to stop medical debt “at the source,” before it starts piling up for L.A. County residents.

“We don’t want to be coming back to you in five years trying to pay off medical debt again,” Ferrer said.

Science

L.A.'s newest dinosaur has its forever name

Published

16 hours ago

June 25, 2024

Press Room

L.A.'s newest dinosaur has its forever name

The people have spoken, and L.A.’s newest Jurassic-era resident has its forever name.

Dinosaur fans who responded to the museum’s request for input overwhelmingly chose to call the Natural History Museum’s new 70-foot-long sauropod “Gnatalie.”

More than 36% of roughly 8,100 participants in a public poll chose that name, which is pronounced “Natalie,” from among five options offered by the museum.

A rendering of the new dinosaur display at the Natural History Museum. Dinosaur fans who responded to a museum poll have decided to call the 70-foot-long sauropod “Gnatalie.”

(Frederick Fisher and Partners, Studio MLA, and Studio Joseph / NHMLAC)

The punny moniker is a reference to the relentless swarm of gnats that plagued paleontologists, students, museum staff and volunteers during the 13-year effort to unearth the dinosaur’s remains from a quarry in southeast Utah. Museum staff nicknamed the dinosaur Gnatalie while they were still digging it up, a process that lasted from 2007 to 2019.

The long-necked, long-tailed skeleton will be the focal point of the NHM Commons, a $75 million welcome center currently under construction on the southwest end of the museum in Exposition Park. Slated to open this fall, the Commons will offer gardens, an outdoor plaza, a 400-seat theater and a glass-walled welcome center that can be toured without a ticket.

“The efforts of hundreds of people contributed to what you see here, ground to mount,” said paleontologist Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

The specimen appears to be part of a new species, similar to the Diplodocus, which will be scientifically named in the future. Thanks to celadonite minerals that replaced organic matter during the fossilization process, the mounted skeleton has a unique greenish-brown hue.

The skeleton is made up of about 350 fossils from six different animals whose bones washed into a river after death some 150 million years ago and commingled.

“We are delighted to see how many people voted and how much they loved our name for this unusual dinosaur,” said Lori Bettison-Varga, President and Director of the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County.