This web site is under construction, please check back occasionally for updates...

What is The Recharge Initiative?
The Recharge Initiative is a focused effort to protect, enhance, and improve the availability and reliability of ground water resources. These goals will be accomplished through research, teaching, service, and outreach, in collaboration with partners from academia, federal, state, and local agencies, municipalities, and citizen stakeholder groups. The Recharge Initiative will benefit both the quantity and the quality of water resources, and will result in improvements to the sustainability of both surface and ground water through cooperation and empowerment of institutions, groups, and individuals to understand local resources and develop local solutions.

Would you like to know more?
Here is an overview describing The Recharge Initiative and a list of frequently asked questions (PDF format), including a brief description of program goals and active projects, water supplies in California, and ground water recharge. Please feel free to email and offer encouragement, criticism, collaboration, or suggestions for the web site. Andy Fisher can be reached by email at this address:

or use the phone and other contact information located here.

In case you are interested, here is an HTML version of a PowerPoint presentation that Andy made during the Watsonville Water Summit, April 2008 that discusses some options for managing an ongoing water shortage in the Pajaro Valley, central coastal California. Managed aquifer recharge (MAR) is already an important tool helping resource managers and stake holders to address ongoing challenges in fresh water supply and quality. MAR is likely to be even more important in the future, around Santa Cruz and throughout California and the U.S.

7/30/09

Here is a PDF version of a PPT presentation Andy made at a public meeting cosponsored by UCSC and the City of Watsonville, with gracious support from alumni and friends of the UCSC Foundation. Some of the material is similar to that presented at the Watsonville Water Summit (see above), but there is some new information as well. The title of this presentation is: Challenges and Opportunities in Managing Ground Water Resources for the Pajaro Valley. Although this file has been optimized to save space, it contains a lot of graphics, so it is still about 11 Mb in size.

Would you like to contribute to The Recharge Initiative?
We are looking for opportunities to develop partnerships, collaborate, and secure resources that will allow The Recharge Initiative to achieve critical goals, empower local institutions, and train the next generation of water resource specialists. If you would like to contribute to these efforts, or have suggestions as to how we might work together to achieve common goals, we would like to hear from you. We also welcome information on available resources or other programs that you think we should know about.

Current collaborators include representatives, researchers, and students from UCSC (Departments of Earth and Planetary Science, Environmental Studies, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering, the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and the Institute of Marine Science), University of Alaska, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, U.S. Geological Survey, Stanford University, Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency, the City of Watsonville, and Santa Cruz County.

Current and past support has come from many sources, including the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the UCSC Committee on Research, the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency, City of Watsonville, Santa Cruz County Resource Conservation District, and the UC Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.

Please check back later and/or visit Andy Fisher's Hydrogeology web site for more information on related topics.