About

Rainfall to Groundwater is a (mostly) online community learning & collaboration program founded by Verna Jigour, PhD. Occasional live connections are part of the intent.

Mission

Serve all who depend on water by hastening understanding, planning and collaborative action to restore degraded watershed detention functions.

Goals

Historically degraded detention functions are restored through strategic watershed/ catchment restoration
Groundwater is fully replenished, sustaining baseflows supporting salmonids and driving back seawater intrusion
Humans and ecosystems thrive collaboratively

Vision

Native plant associations and their corresponding soil ecosystems have sustainably established throughout formerly degraded catchments and humans have incorporated their ecohydrological economics.

Groundwater is sustained through its timeless, evolutionary connection to global and regional hydrologic cycling (Budyko 1986).

The most novel part of the vision is that, starting with California, watersheds aka catchments historically degraded to nonnative annual grasslands are restored to native cover types, potentially along with other permacultural land covers that capture rainfall where it lands, routing it to groundwater.

The holistic vision is that corollary expansion of riparian zones and floodplains complements the detention functions offered by uplands, for overall reduction in flooding and seawater intrusion, along with additional water available for replenishment of aquifers we depend on.

History of Rainfall to Groundwater

Learning Program Vision

About Verna Jigour, PhD & Evolution of Rainfall to Groundwater

Verna Jigour, PhD Resume

Citation

Budyko, M. I. 1986. The evolution of the biosphere – translated from the Russian by M.I.
Budyko, S.F. Lemeshko and V.G. Yanuta. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Division of
Kluwer, Dordrecht/ Boston.