The Pajaro River Watershed

The Purpose of this Website

The purpose of this website is two-fold. First to serve as a repository and information resource for a community of researchers and other parties interested in the future of this watershed. As such it is organised more as as a reference library (primarily aerial photographs) rather than telling a story.

Then, as a secondary function it also provides a brief overview of the current state of the watershed (and how it got that way) for those who want to learn more about the issues and ideas on how to tackle them.

Update as of April 2006. For an update reflecting the current status of the Pajor River and its watershed, a excellent summary is provided starting on Page 11 of the report entitled America's Most Endangered Rivers 2006. This report identifies the 10 most endangered rivers in America - the first in this list of ten is the Pajaro River. This report is available as a PDF file (3 Mbytes) under the following link: Report (Report kindly provided by courtesy of AmericanRivers.org)

What?

The Pajaro River Watershed covers 1,300 square miles, and overlaps four counties; Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, Monterey, and San Benito. The mouth of the river is near Watsonville, where it empties into Monterey Bay, just north of Elkhorn Slough. (A river's watershed is all the land around it that contributes water to that river, such as from rainfall run-off. It is also sometimes called the drainage basin.)

The Problem

In a nutshell - over time the river has become increasingly flood-prone in its last few miles - where it passes close to downtown Watsonville. This has become a problem not because we are getting more rainfall... It has become a problem because the natural behaviour of the river has been changed by man.

Complicating this physical problem is one of politics. Because the watershed has a geographic span covering four counties, and a jusrisdictional span involving numerous governmental agencies, any corrective or mitigation measures have to involve balancing the diverse and sometimes conflicting interests of all the interested parties.

The Obvious Fix

Unfortunately - the first and strongest instinct is to "fix" the problem by addressing its symptoms - namely the occasional high-water level and potential for flooding that occurs in these last few miles of the river's course. This is typically done by applying "roto-rooter methodology" to these sections of the river. The river-bed is is given a "clean" concrete bed, flood-benches are established on both banks which are stripped of all vegetation by clearing them regularly to assure a minimum of hindrance to flowing water. And finally, levees are built along the outer edges of the flood-benches as the ultimate wall through which it is hoped the water will never break.

The Consequences

That is how you could fix the symptoms. But in doing so - not only have you ignored the underlying cause (which won't get better on its own, but likely continue to deteriorate further and raise the stakes in years to come) but you have also effectively ruined the river from an environmental perspective. As just one example - consider the steelhead trout which needs cool shaded and clear water in order to be able to migrate upstream and then spawn. The few we have left will be gone forever - not only from the Pajaro River, but from all its tributaries (Corralitos, Uvas, Llagas, San Benito, Pacheco, Santa Ana...) and the literally hundreds of streams that feed into these.

That's just the steelhead...

Please Browse and Learn More...

We encourage you to browse this site and learn more about the watershed - as well as how we can heal the river by giving nature a hand in the upper reaches - rather than by applying yet more concrete at its final confluence, and envronmentally strangling the whole network of rivers, creeks, and streams that feed into it.

Click on any of the buttons above to explore this site further - or to begin with - if you would like to see a more detailed version of the map below, you can click on the map anywhere above the horizontal line (near the middle of the map) to see the top half in full detail, or click anywhere on the map below that line to see the bottom half in full detail.

(Caution - each of these detailed maps is around 700 Kbytes in size - you may want to do this only if you have a high-bandwidth connection. If you are connected via a conventional modem, loading these maps could take a while)