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Telephone 642-2904 is no longer valid
Please contact by email or via departmental receptionist

News: Leaf Litter Interview with Professor Kondolf (Winter 2008)

Biography

Students

Research

See other research areas described below under Research Topics

Publications

Recent Symposia

Semester Courses

River Restoration Shortcourses Office hours (Spring 2009)
Office hours most Thursday mornings 10AM-1PM, but varies week to week. Always check the signup sheet.		 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