Pescadero is a small yet important coastal town in California. Nestled between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, it offers beautiful vistas, hiking, rolling hills, and delicious homemade artichoke bread from a nearby market. The bread alone makes Pescadero a noteworthy place.
In the way of water, Pescadero faces some interesting challenges. The Pescadero and Butano Creeks drain approximately 81 square miles of the Santa Cruz Mountains in western San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties, which enter the Pacific Ocean through Pescadero. Also, the area is tectonically active and influenced by things such as: local bedrock, rising sea level, faulting between the Pacific and North American Plates, and deformation/faulting due to the proximity to the Santa Cruz Mountains.
To further complicate things, Pescadero has a predictable, yet non-ideal rainfall pattern. The watershed averages about 40 inches of rain annually, yet 100% of that precipitation falls during the 6 month “wet season”. There is little to no rain for the other 6 months of the year.
You must be thinking: Wow, maybe I’ll set up a surf school there. Or a tourist shop. There’s not much else to do with no rain…
Sit down, surf bums. Take a seat, shop owners. Since 1820, the most common land uses in the area can be attributed to intensive agricultural activities. That’s right. I’m talking about ranching and dairy farming.
However, these ranchers have been struggling. As drought conditions have worsened, unsustainable water withdrawals from streams during low-flow periods, problems with water circulation and management in Pescadero’s lagoon, impending saltwater intrusion and degraded water quality have created a number of watershed issues.
Through establishing a model for surface and groundwater movement in the area, I hope to create a useable resource for ranchers in the Pescadero Watershed in order to mitigate damage to these areas. Ideally, ranchers will be able to input general parameters (such as what their topography is like, what kind of vegetation is on the land, and their proximity to various creeks), and will be able to see how water is flowing on their property. From there, it will be relatively simple to generate a water management plan for their ranch.
Go With The (Hydrologic) Flow 