A long-term plan intended to improve flood protection in the Central Valley would affect tens of thousands of additional acres, including farmland that could be converted to permanent wildlife habitat, according to figures released in a new draft conservation strategy document from the California Department of Water Resources.

The draft conservation strategy is a planning document meant to provide direction for a requirement to create habitat as DWR works to develop the 2017 Central Valley Flood Protection Plan. The plan, required under the Central Valley Flood Protection Act of 2005, was adopted in 2013. The conservation strategy, released on Jan. 23, contains information on types of habitats and amounts of acres required under environmental objectives for the flood-protection plan.

After reviewing the draft conservation strategy, California Farm Bureau Federation Environmental Policy Analyst Justin Fredrickson described acreage listed in the conservation strategy as “much, much higher than was previously stated.”

Originally, the flood protection plan suggested the process would affect about 40,000 acres of farmland, mostly in the Sacramento Valley, with 10,000 acres to be used to create permanent new “flood space” or system flow capacity and wildlife habitat.

After reviewing the conservation strategy, Fredrickson found the document now calls for creation of 55,000 acres of permanent habitat in the Sacramento River region, plus 29,000 acres of additional, permanent habitat in the San Joaquin River region.

“These are amounts of new habitat the DWR document indicates are needed in connection with the flood infrastructure projects in the larger plan, to recover a variety of species, including bank-dwelling birds and insects plus a number of listed fish,” Fredrickson said.

Rice farmer Jon Munger of Yuba City, president of the Yuba-Sutter Farm Bureau, said farmers have taken action to improve flood-protection infrastructure. He said farmers want to protect against environmental takings of their land for habitat purposes for overly large setback areas that don’t provide flood-management benefits.

“We’re particularly concerned that they are not giving any credit to existing production agriculture that is wildlife friendly,” Munger said. “They just want to add more acres to the system, when they’ve proven they can’t maintain what they have.”

http://www.agalert.com/story/?id=7632

Report:
http://www.water.ca.gov/conservationstrategy/docs/cs_draft.pdf