The Franks Tract State Recreation Area (Franks Tract) is an example of a complex contemporary park mired in ecological and socio-political contestation of what it is and should be. Located in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, it is a central hub in California’s immense and contentious water infrastructure; an accidental shallow lake on subsided land due to unrepaired levee breaks; a novel ecosystem full of ‘invasive’ species; a world-class bass fishing area; and a water transportation corridor. Franks Tract is an example of an uncommons: a place where multiple realities (or ontologies) exist, negotiate and co-create one another. As a case study, this article focuses on a planning effort to simultaneously improve water quality, recreation and ecology in Franks Tract through a state-led project. The article examines the iterative application of participatory mapping and web-based public surveys within a broader, mixed method co-design process involving state agencies, local residents, regional stakeholders, consultant experts and publics. We focus on what was learned in this process by all involved, and what might be transferable in the methods. We conclude that reciprocal iterative change among stakeholders and designers was demonstrated across the surveys, based on shifts in stakeholder preferences as achieved through iterative revision of design concepts that better addressed a broad range of stakeholder values and concerns. Within this reconciliation, the uncommons was retained, rather than suppressed.

Current planning and legislation in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta call for the large-scale ecological restoration of aquatic and terrestrial habitats. These ecological mandates have emerged in response to the region’s infrastructural transformation and the Delta’s predominant use as the central logistical hub in the state’s vast water conveyance network. Restoration is an attempt to recover what was externalized by the logic and abstractions of this logistical infrastructure. However, based on findings from our research, which examined how people are using restored and naturalized landscapes in the Delta and how these landscapes are currently planned for, we argue that as mitigatory response, restoration planning continues some of the same spatial abstractions and inequities by failing to account for the Delta as an urbanized, cultural and unique place. In interpreting how these conditions have come to be, we give attention to a pluralistic landscape approach and a coevolutionary reading of planning, policy, science and landscapes to discuss the conservation challenges presented by “Delta as an Evolving Place”. We suggest that for rewilding efforts to be successful in the Delta, a range of proactive, opportunistic, grounded and participatory tactics will be required to shift towards a more socio-ecological approach.

Effective management of water resources requires signaling the scarcity value of water to society. However, accurate signaling is often limited by incomplete and/or untimely accounting of hydrologic stores and flows of water. In this opinion piece, we advocate an incisive yet conceptually simple framework for transparent, real-time accounting of water stores and flows, including both groundwater and surface water, to inform water markets organized around a central clearinghouse. This framework promotes forthright collaboration among disciplines to improve system efficiency and increase water-management transparency. We use California water management as an example for the potential for a central clearinghouse framework that has proven so beneficial to transparency of energy markets in that region.

Doi: https://doi.org/10.15447/sfews.2017v15iss3art3 Current legislation and plans for the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta (Delta) call for large-scale restoration of aquatic and terrestrial habitats, which will require significant changes in waterways, land uses, and cultural patterns. These re-made landscapes will be subject to a variety of new human uses, which Delta planning and adaptive management literature has yet to adequately consider. Failing to account for human uses and evolving place values can lead to diminished performance and public support for Delta restoration efforts. Our empirical study examined restored and naturalized Delta landscapes using an integrative landscape approach that seeks to reconcile multiple goals and land-use agendas that span ecological, social, economic, and political domains. The research design consisted of six overlapping methods that included a planning, policy, and law review specific to the Delta; surveys and interviews with approximately 100 land managers, scientists, land-owners, law-enforcement personnel, agency representatives, and Delta residents; nine case studies of restored and naturalized delta landscapes; GIS mapping; and extensive field work. Findings derived from the synthesis of these methods show that human uses of the Delta’s re-wilded landscapes are diverse and pervasive. Given the infrastructural and urbanized context of the region, these environments are subject to multiple and sometimes conflicting uses, perceptions, and place values. Though these myriad uses cannot be fully predicted or controlled (nor should they be), findings showed that more proactive and inclusive planning for human uses can encourage or discourage particular uses while also building constituency, support, and active engagement in ecological restoration efforts. We conclude that reconciling human uses with ecological recovery in the Delta will require a more localized, multi-functional, and creative approach to designing and adaptively managing these emergent landscapes. We recommend that more resources and experimental prototyping be dedicated to such work.

In this article, we describe ecological recovery efforts – restoration – as a crucial component of strategic delta planning. We present restoration as a design process at once biogeophysical and territorial that entails socioecological uncertainties. Adaptive management is an approach to dealing with uncertainties through active monitoring and recalibration of actions taken. We have developed a ‘socioecological monitoring’ program that uses existing biophysical monitoring protocols to collect data on human use. Beyond provisioning demographic and use data, this program also helps to change the relationship between the monitors and managers involved in adaptive management and diverse non-scientific publics, who have thus far been removed from the process. Our approach highlights the importance of user experiences and affective labor to bring people into the design of restoration areas, both as actors to be managed for, as well as agents whose values and desires can help guide landscape evolution.

Like inhabited deltas worldwide, California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has been intensively and irreversibly transformed by certain human activities. This case study joins research from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta with global discussions about Anthropocene landscapes in general and Anthropocene Deltas in particular, which we understand to be both shaped by people and shaping people. Through engaging with this case study, we expect readers to be able to think about how an evolving Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta exemplifies an Anthropocene landscape and engage with the implications of a pivot away from economic growth and toward sufficiency as a central management objective.