Critical Landscapes

California's Bay-Delta is facing ongoing drought and declining fish populations. The water in the Delta arrives primarily from the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, supplying water for more than 22 million people. This water source supports California’s trillion-dollar economy—the sixth largest in the world—and its $27 billion agricultural industry.

The Colorado River system provides about 35 million Americans with a portion of their water supply. It irrigates 5½ million acres of land in the West and provides water to tribes, parks, and wildlife. The system serves parts of seven States and Mexico—but reservoir levels have crept lower over the past several years, sparking questions about how much water remains and who will have access.

“We’re seeing the loss of forests in many places,” said Matthew Hansen, a professor at the University of Maryland. “Dynamics include increasing tropical deforestation, more frequent and severe boreal forest fires, disease in temperate forests and the commoditization of subtropical forests.”

Living in the Outer Banks means living with the power of the sea. Jutting out from North Carolina’s coast into the Atlantic Ocean, this series of sandy barrier islands is particularly vulnerable to damage from major storms. In April 2016, another nor’easter was set to strike, but this time, Dare County officials were approached by their local weather forecaster with a new kind of prediction.

On a windy July morning on Lake Superior’s Whitefish Bay, fisherman Ralph Wilcox of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians and his son, Dan, netted 300 pounds of wriggling whitefish. The mild-flavored salmon relative is served in restaurants, in smoked fish spreads, and as gefilte fish at Passover. However, two of the fish in the Michigan fishermen’s nets were badly wounded.

The sagebrush landscape has long been valued by humans; first by the Native Americans, who lived off the resources in this vast landscape, then the European colonizers, who established large-scale livestock operations. Local economies throughout the West are supported by the many unique aspects of the sagebrush landscape.

Certain types of wetlands are extraordinarily efficient at storing carbon through biological sequestration. The Great Dismal Swamp is an especially productive place to study how different approaches to managing the land could potentially increase carbon storage.

Richard Batiuk got to know the Chesapeake Bay in the early 1970s. During visits with his friends and family, they would swim and boat, and fish would practically jump aboard. He was young but knew he wanted to live and work on the bay.

For the Swinomish people of northwestern Washington, water is life. But this symbiotic relationship between man and nature has been disrupted, and increasingly threatened, by sea-level rise and changes in Northwestern storm and rainfall patterns.

Habitat for the Pacific walrus in the Chukchi Sea is disappearing from beneath them as the warming climate melts away Arctic sea ice in the spring, forcing the large mammals to “haul out” of the ocean and temporarily live on land.

In 2003, wildlife scientists carrying out regular nighttime road surveys in Everglades National Park started to see fewer medium-sized mammals. Over the next few years, rabbits disappeared completely, and populations of foxes, raccoons, possums, bobcats, and white-tailed deer were either small or absent.

The water supply in the Red River Basin has been stressed in recent years due to drought, and its effects are compounded by increasing demands for consumptive use by metropolitan areas in Oklahoma and Texas.