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An Opportunity for Scientists and Policy Makers Alike
It is with particular pleasure that I introduce the first
issue of San Francisco Estuary and Watershed
Science. My experience over the past three years as Lead Scientist
for the CALFED Bay-Delta Program has clearly demonstrated the need for a way to
more fully communicate, to all interested parties, the rapidly growing body of
new scientific information being generated about California’s Central Valley
and the San Francisco Estuary, in a peer-reviewed format. The rate at which new
science, of the highest quality, is being generated in this system has
increased, perhaps dramatically, since 1997. That new science often includes
details that are critical to Bay-Delta and watershed issues, but might be less
interesting to a generic international audience. Many of our new studies are
widely interdisciplinary; often the traditional, discipline-specific journals
capture only a part of the audience interested in such work. As stated in the
welcome by the Editors in Chief, the flexible electronic journal format will
accommodate a wide range of papers from technical notes to monographs. In this
way it also can help meet the need for a way to communicate both tightly
focused individual studies and papers such as longer or more detailed reviews
of the state of a science that are applicable to the issues of our system. It
is exciting, then, that the purpose of this journal is to provide an outlet of
the highest quality for new knowledge about our system, and to expand access to
that knowledge. It seems to me that this is an opportunity for scientists from
all relevant disciplines to publish rich detail about our region that might be
cut from a more generic journal article or might end up in files and office
reports, while maintaining the professional stature that comes with peer-reviewed
publication.
The new journal is also an opportunity for the growing
knowledge base to find the audience that is most likely to directly apply it to
one of the important issues of our time. Over the next three or more decades
CALFED and its member agencies will be working to restore riverine and
estuarine ecosystems and at the same time beneficially use the water flowing
down the streams to the estuary for California’s cities and farms. Making this
all work will require some tough decisions – decisions which in many cases must
be based on a strong scientific foundation. The new journal will be an
important component of this foundation. When regionally-specific studies are
accepted for publication in international journals, they can miss a good portion
of that local audience where they might have their most applied impact. The
journal is one way to help avoid that. Similarly, publication in its pages
could become one of the ways we implicitly define the credibility of the
science applicable to these issues. Due to the almost unprecedented scope and
complexity of our water management and restoration efforts in this system, we
also hope the scientific information will be of general interest to scientists
and managers who are contemplating or conducting similar efforts elsewhere.
The new journal is one part of a growing effort in our
system to communicate scientific knowledge, as it develops, among various
audiences. The Interagency Ecological Program has a long history behind its
effective annual workshop and quarterly technical newsletter. The Science
Program, within the California Bay-Delta Authority, sponsors numerous seminars,
workshops and symposia. CALFED sponsors a biannual Science Conference, and
works with the San Francisco Bay’s Estuary Project on the biannual State of the
Estuary Conference, both of which highlight much of the new work leading to
better understanding of the multiplicity of scientific studies underway – from
groundwater modeling to water conservation to the life histories of endangered
fish. The Bay-Delta Science Consortium (the sponsor of this journal) is an
active new entity dedicated to facilitating collaboration and communication
among institutions. All these efforts help us improve the quality of science
and encourage investigators – whether they work for state and federal agencies,
universities, NGO’s or in the private sector – to disseminate their results.
The goal of the new journal is to supplement these efforts and those of the
existing scientific journals, not supplant them.
In conclusion I thank the Editors in Chief, the Managing
Editor, the California Digital Library staff, the members of the Bay-Delta
Science Consortium, the CALFED Science Program, and staff of the UC Davis’ John
Muir Institute for the Environment for moving the journal from a concept to a
reality. I also thank Larry Brown and the co-authors of the first issue for
agreeing to be the test case – and for their patience – as we all learned the
intricacies of electronic publication.
Please consider publishing some of your latest results in
this new journal.
Samuel N. Luoma, Lead Scientist
California Bay-Delta Authority's CALFED Bay-Delta Program
Sacramento, CA