Assessing the combined effect of dams and climate warming on streamflow in California's Sierra Nevada for regional-scale adaptation

Dams and their operations harm river ecosystems, in part by altering the natural flow regimes that those ecosystems depend on. In the multi-reservoir water management systems of California's Sierra Nevada, greater emphasis is being placed on re-operating existing reservoir systems to recover downstream ecosystems. However, climate change is changing inflow patterns, affecting both ecosystems and traditional water system benefits across the region. As new reservoir operation schemes will be needed to manage for natural resources management objectives at the regional scale, characterizing historical and future environmental impacts of current operations across the region can aid in prioritizing planning efforts. We used a coarse-scale water resources simulation model developed for the western Sierra Nevada to explore the independent and combined effects of dams and climate warming on the flow regime directly below reservoirs, the focal point for instream flow requirements in operations licenses. We quantified changes to mean annual flow, annual low flow duration, annual runoff centroid timing, and weekly rate of decrease under binary combinations of management (unregulated/regulated) and climate (historical/future) conditions. We demonstrate that although rivers in the Sierra Nevada are currently managed in ways that are harmful to instream ecosystems, and that streamflow effects of operations are typically much worse than climate change effects, there are signals that reservoirs can potentially be used to help adapt to some of climate changes harmful effects with little additional effort in some cases. This study is the first step toward a better understanding of the environmental costs from and opportunities afforded by the current stock of reservoirs in a large hydroregion under changing social and environmental conditions.