CEE 86Q: From the Foothills to the Bay: Perspectives on the Sacramento River & SF Bay-Delta
General Education Requirements
Effective Aug 30, please note unit and schedule change: 3 units, M/W 3:30pm - 4:50pm.
Course Description
Stanford University sits on the shores of one of the world’s great estuaries, the San Francisco Bay-Delta—the connection of the inland river systems of the Central Valley, notably the Sacramento River, to the Pacific Ocean. This course is intended to provide an introduction to these California waters including elements of California history, current scientific understanding of its physical and ecological functioning, descriptions and underpinnings of engineering manipulations of the system, and the intersection of science and engineering with policies designed to manage its resources. Because of the important effects that water resources development have had on the system, Bay-Delta science, engineering and policy are completely intertwined with the management of the water supply of California. Thus, we will also examine relevant issues in California water that touch on the Bay-Delta including an overall description of California hydrology, the State and Federal water projects and how they are managed, legal and governance issues, including the application of the Endangered Species Act to several species of Bay-Delta fish, and recent and ongoing attempts at balancing protection/restoration of the ecological functioning with maintenance of a sustainable, stable water supply for the state of California in the face of changes in hydrology associated with climate change.
Besides descriptive exposition, this course will introduce students to some of the quantitative approaches used to analyze physical and biological processes in rivers and estuaries, analyses that form the basis of much of how policies are set. Accordingly, the course is designed to satisfy the AQR (Applied Quantitative Reasoning) Ways requirement, and so expose students to the use of quantitative models for environmental analysis. Likewise, since models are only as good as the data used to inform them, there will be at least one field trip involving making oceanographic measurements in San Francisco Bay.
Finally, the course will parallel a similar course, albeit focusing on the Thames River and Estuary, that has been taught by the instructor of this course and that will be taught at the Stanford Centre in Oxford in Autumn 2024. Accordingly, there will be several joint meetings between the two classes, with timing and topics TBD.
Meet the Instructor: Stephen Monismith
“I am a Bay Area native who received all my degrees from UC Berkeley and have been at Stanford in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) since 1987 and the Oceans Department in the Doerr School since 2022. I have been an RF, a department chair, and have taught BOSP courses at Berlin and Oxford. My research interests include the physics of estuarine and nearshore flows, focusing on processes that are central to ecology and environmental management. Throughout my time at Stanford, I have been involved in Bay-Delta science and its application to management. In recent years, much of my research (and travel) has focused on the physics of coral reef flows in exotic locales such as the Gulf of Aqaba, Hawaii, Moorea, American Samoa, and Palau. I have parallel interests studying (and diving in) the inner shelf flows found near and inside the kelp forests of California, including their use for greenhouse gas removal.”
