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Objective: Drinking water instead of beverages with added sugar can help prevent obesity and cavities and promote overall health. Children spend much of their day in school, where they have variable access to drinking water. In 2010, federal and state law required California public schools to provide free potable water to students in areas where meals are served and/or eaten. The current study aims to identify factors associated with an excellent drinking water culture in schools.Design: A qualitative assessment of barriers and facilitators to providing excellent water quality and access in a purposive sample of California schools. In-depth interviews with key informants were conducted using a snowball sampling approach, after which data were analysed using both inductive and deductive methods.Setting: California public elementary, middle/junior and high schools.Participants: Knowledgeable individuals involved in initiatives related to school drinking water accessibility, quality or education at each selected school.Results: Thirty-four interviewees participated across fifteen schools. Six themes emerged as prominent facilitators to a school's success in providing excellent water access to students: active and engaged champions, school culture and policy, coordination between groups, community influences, available resources and environmentalism.Conclusions: While policy is an important step for achieving minimum standards, resources and interest in promoting excellence in drinking water access and quality can vary among schools. Ensuring that schools have dedicated staff committed to advancing student health and promoting the benefits of water programs that are more salient to schools could help reduce disparities in drinking water excellence across schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding resource managers' perceptions of climate change, analytic capacity, and current adaptation activities can provide insight into what can help support adaptation processes at the local level. In California, where a major drought currently demonstrates some of the hardships that could be regularly encountered under a changing climate, we present results from a survey of drinking water utilities about the perceived threat, analytic capacity, and adaptation actions related to maintaining water quality in the face of climate change. Among surveyed utilities ( n = 259), awareness is high in regard to climate change occurring and its potential impacts on water quality globally, but perceived risk is lower with regard to climate impacts on local drinking water quality. Just over half of surveyed utilities report at least some adaptation activity to date. The top three variables that most strongly correlated with reported adaptation action were (1) perceived risk on global and local water quality, (2) surface water reliance, and (3) provision of other services beyond drinking water. Other tested variables significantly correlated with reported adaptation action were (4) degree of impact from the current drought and (5) communication with climate change experts. Findings highlight that smaller groundwater-reliant utilities may need the most assistance to initiate climate adaptation processes. Trusted information sources most frequently used across respondents were state government agencies, followed by colleagues in the same utilities. The finding that frequently used sources of information are similar across utilities presents a promising opportunity for training and disseminating climate information to assist those systems needing the most support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within reservoirs, production, transformation, and loss of dissolved organic matter (DOM) occur simultaneously. While the balance between production and loss determines whether a reservoir is a net sink or source of DOM, changes in chemical composition are also important because they affect DOM reactivity with respect to disinfection by-product (DBP) formation. The composition of the DOM pool also provides insight into DOM sources and processing, which can inform reservoir management. We examined the concentration and composition of DOM in San Luis Reservoir, a large off-stream impoundment of the California State Water Project. We used a wide array of DOM chemical tracers including dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration, trihalomethane and haloacetic acid formation potentials (THMFP and HAAFP, respectively), absorbance properties, isotopic composition, lignin phenol content, and structural groupings determined by 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). There were periods when the reservoir was a net source of DOC due to the predominance of algal production (summer), a net sink due to the predominance of degradation (fall–winter), and balanced between production and consumption (spring). Despite only moderate variation in bulk DOC concentration (3.0–3.6 mg C/L), changes in DOM composition indicated that terrestrial-derived material entering the reservoir was being degraded and replaced by aquatic-derived DOM produced within the reservoir. Substantial changes in the propensity of the DOM pool to form THMs and HAAs illustrate that the DBP precursor pool was not directly coupled to bulk DOC concentration and indicate that algal production is an important source of DBP precursors. Results suggest reservoirs have the potential to attenuate DOM amount and reactivity with respect to DBP precursors via degradative processes; however, these benefits can be decreased or even negated by the production of algal-derived DOM. [Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Lake and Reservoir Management to view the supplemental file.] [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]