Cosumnes River provides model for floodplain restoration in California

By Michelaina Johnson

With California's surface drought over, the state can prioritize investing in groundwater recharge and floodplain restoration to help fight one of its biggest lingering problems: groundwater overdraft. As it does so, the relatively unknown Cosumnes River watershed has emerged as a model.

Roughly half of the groundwater basins in California’s Central Valley are critically overdrafted, including the San Joaquin Valley basin to the south of the Cosumnes. Though groundwater levels in the Cosumnes basin have also appreciably declined since the 1950s, cutting edge research at the Cosumnes River Preserve, a 50,000-plus acre public-private partnership in the eastern Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, has shown that floodplain restoration can substantially recharge groundwater as well as provide habitat and improve fish migration.

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