G. Mathias Kondolf

Professor of Environmental Planning and Geography
Chair, Portuguese Studies Program
Department of Landscape Architecture 
and Environmental Planning
202 Wurster Hall, University of California
Berkeley, California 94720-2000
kondolf (at) berkeley.edu
Telephone 642-2904 is OUT OF ORDER
Please contact by email

Biography

Research

See other research areas described below under Research Topics

Publications

Recent Symposia

  • ReEnvisioning the Delta
  • Berkeley River Restoration Symposia
  • California Water Symposia
    • Shortcourses 2008
    River Restoration: Fluvial-Geomorphic and Ecological Processes
    Beaumont du Ventoux, Provence, France 23-27 June 2008

    Geomorphic and Ecological Fundamentals for River and Stream Restoration
    Sagehen Creek Field Station, Truckee, California 11-15 August 2008

    Semester courses

    Office hours (Spring 2008)
    Office hours most Thursdays 10a-12n, but check signup sheet outside office as hours may differ week-to-week
    Rm 300 Wurster Hall
    Telephone number is out of order - please contact via email
    Email: kondolf  'at-sign' berkeley.edu    		 There is something vital about rivers, and irresistible. Whether seeking the flash of a salmon, or feeling your boat pulled into the next rapid, or falling asleep to the sound of water roaring down a steep mountain channel, moving water exerts strong magic on most of us, inspiring no shortage of analogies. Life is a river, a river is life. More than this, rivers provide drinking water to tens of millions (most of California certainly), and we depend on their self-cleaning abilities for our basic needs. Our rivers on the Pacific rim support runs of anadromous salmon, a rush of life that can still awe in Alaskan waters, where commercial fishing is still a potent economic force. Pity that we have lost so many of our wild stocks of Pacific salmon and steelhead trout in California. Before the Anglo invasion in 1849, two to three million Chinook salmon, mostly spring-run, passed through the Golden Gate and ascended the rivers of the Sacramento-San Joaquin system during the annual snowmelt. We have efficiently exterminated most of these runs, and will probably succeed in wiping out more during our next drought. The reasons are many: overfishing, pollution, dams and diversions that block access to natal streams and alter flow regimes, river channels transformed to canals, banks rip-rapped and leveed, floodplains that no longer flood (in most years) and which are colonized by industrial agriculture or spreading suburbs, gravel extracted from river bottomlands, leaving pits that function as lakes where none existed naturally – creating ideal habitat for exotic species like large-mouth bass that can consume the majority of the salmon young on their way to the sea.

    More and more we seek to restore rivers. If there is something about rivers that is vital and elemental to humankind, restoring rivers is spiritual renewal, it is community, it is often grassroots, a new, mature environmentalism. It is also an industry supporting small rural practitioners and government bureaucracies. And it does not always work, frequently because humility is lost and we impose our ideal forms on the river, without taking the time to learn the river's history, to measure her processes, to understand what has been irretrievably lost to ‘progress’, to see with vision what processes can be restored. When we try to fix the river, we can treat each intervention as an opportunity to learn about the river, so next time perhaps we can do better.

    My research and teaching focuses on rivers, their transformations by humans, their resilience and their active restoration. I work on salmon-bearing rivers and Mediterranean-climate rivers, and effects of human alterations like dams and gravel mining. In my classes, I emphasize understanding of physical and ecological process and river history as a basis for restoration strategy, the need to learn from each restoration project, and the need for scientific rigor when approaching restoration..

    Research Topics


    River Restoration
    Effects of Dams and 
    Diversions

    Cumulative Effects and 
    Catchment Management
    Gravel Mining in Rivers

    Flow Releases from 
    Dams and Diversions
    Spawning Gravels of 
    Salmon and Trout

    Stream-Groundwater 
    Interactions

    River-dog Clyde (1992-2005) and friends