A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
September 20, 2007
3. Watersheds
DELTA ISSUES:
What's Killing the Delta; The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is facing challenges that could greatly affect San Diego's water supply - Voice of San Diego
INVASIVE SPECIES:
Lake Davis pike eradication plan begins with a drip - Plumas County News
SIERRA CONSERVANCY FUNDS:
Millions of dollars in grants available from conservancy - Auburn Journal
DELTA ISSUES:
What's Killing the Delta; The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is facing challenges that could greatly affect
Voice of
By Rob Davis, staff writer
Thursday, Sept. 20, 2007 | ON THE SACRAMENTO-SAN JOAQUIN RIVER DELTA -- Two men in a fishing boat slide through the glassy, slate-green water here, throwing hopeful casts in search of trophy bass.
Jeffrey Mount, a tan, energetic geology professor from
"All signs point to that as the future of the delta," the professor says, from the deck of a touring catamaran. "It’ll be a good place to have a boat."
The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta sits 450 miles north of
When the winter snows blanketing the Sierra Nevada melt, the runoff cascades into rivers that flow west toward
But the delta, which is one-fourth the size of
Trouble in a far-off estuary might not be concerning, except that San Diego County gets as much as 70 percent of its water from the delta, a triangle-shaped area bounded by Sacramento, Tracy and Antioch and home to 515,000 people. A major earthquake could shut off that spigot for years.
Attention has turned to the delta this summer, however, because of the threat posed by manmade problems -- not the natural kind. The population of the delta smelt, a three-inch-long fish listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act, has dropped to its lowest recorded levels. The tiny fish, considered a bellwether of the delta’s ecological health, sits on the verge of extinction.
Invasive species have reduced the fish’s major food source. And massive pumps that draw water out of the delta and send it to
“It’s like Murder on the Orient Express,” says Bruce Herbold, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency biologist. “Everyone did it. Everyone’s guilty.”
To help protect the fish, Fresno-based U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger ordered a decrease in the amount of water pulled out of the delta next year. The goal: To reduce pumping when the fish are likely to be nearby. The ruling could cut the amount of water exported from the delta by 37 percent. Some
The judge's order is temporary, and the future of the delta is uncertain. Billions have been invested in its infrastructure. To understand why billions more will be spent in coming years, you have to understand the complexity and breadth of the problems that afflict the smelt, the delta and your water supply.
Savior or Killer?
Standing inside a fluorescently lit warehouse, a man with a diamond-studded ring and matching tie clip makes a bold pronouncement.
"We don’t kill fish," Michael Miller says loudly. "We save them."
A few feet away, in a holding tank filled with swirling water, a dead fish floats belly-up, its pale body spinning in clockwise circles, around and around.
Miller is a tour guide for the state Department of Water Resources, the agency responsible for operating the pumps that push water out of the delta over a mountain and into an aqueduct where it’s destined for 750,000 acres of agriculture and 23 million faucets.
No habitat exists downstream of the pumps, just a 444-mile-long cement channel and a reservoir that satiates
On a recent morning, a man with a ballcap and a Fu Manchu pawed through a haul to record every trapped fish. Each got two numbers.
"One, 42," the man says. "Six, 20."
The first identified the fish. On this day, that meant the pumps were pulling in American shad and threadfin shad. The second was its length in centimeters. Most small fish were barely as long as a Matchbox car -- just a spine, two googly eyes and a translucent body. The process was imperfect. The man dropped some fish on the floor, where they writhed against the wet cement. He would scoop them up and toss them into the next holding tank, where that dead white fish spun in endless circles.
Around this facility, the delta smelt is bad news. In May, the smelt began showing up in those routine counts. That's a sign the smelt were hanging around near the pumps. The weak swimmers aren't strong enough to escape the pumps' pull. The stress of the screening process complicates the problem, increasing the likelihood that a fish -- even one that has been kept out of the pumps -- will die.
At the same time the smelt appeared at the screening facility, biologists trawling for the smelt elsewhere in the delta found precipitous drops in its population. Survey nets that had previously raked in almost 3,000 smelt pulled in only a few dozen.
So for nine days, the state turned off the pumps. It is a precursor of what the federal judge ordered next year.
The pump’s effects are "very subtle," says Bill Bennett, a research ecologist at the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis.
The problem isn’t how many fish the pumps kill, but which fish the pumps kill.
"The pumps have been acting against natural selection," Bennett says. "They’re taking some delta smelt that apparently are very necessary for the population to survive critical periods. They’re taking some of the robust individuals on a regular basis."
By summer, when the weaker smelt migrate to the delta’s western fringes, they settle in an area that doesn’t have as much food as it once did -- another subtle impact.
For that, researchers blame a bivalve known scientifically as Corbula amurensis.
The overbite clam.
The Clam Invasion
It’s easy to picture: A hulking freighter, steaming across the Pacific Ocean with a belly full of cargo and, out of sight somewhere below deck, a foreign invader lurking in the shadows.
It was 1986. A ship packed with Nissans journeyed into
When the freighter dumped its ballast in the bay -- scientists have been able to trace the incident to the exact ship, a rarity -- the clam went with it. A community college professor discovered the bottle cap-sized clam during a routine voyage to sample the bay’s water quality.
Each year, hundreds of species find their way into
The clam’s move inland underscores the reason that scientists are often concerned about the introduction of nonnative species. New organisms can tip the balance of sensitive ecosystems. The clam started feasting on phytoplankton, the basic building block of the food chain. That meant less food for zooplankton, the next building block and a mainstay of the delta smelt’s diet.
Other fish have been affected by the pumps and the clam, too. Since 2001, the delta’s populations of threadfin shad and striped bass also declined precipitously, says Bruce Herbold, the EPA biologist. But the delta smelt is unique. It’s the only declining fish found exclusively in the delta. The longfin smelt, which has been proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act, lives longer and has a more widely distributed population, found as far north as
But for the delta smelt, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is its only home. For better or worse, the delta is its aquarium.
And, says Bennett, "it’s a very different aquarium than it was 30 or 40 years ago. [The smelt] are a really good poster child for what the delta system was."
The Shifting Delta
Before the first miner struck gold, the delta looked nothing like it does today.
Rivers flowed freely. Freshwater tidal marshes covered two-thirds of the land.
Today, 1,100 miles of earthen levees have turned rivers into manmade channels. Farmers’ fields and subdivisions have supplanted the wetlands, capitalizing on the delta’s rich soil.
The transformation started in the mid-1800s. Gold rush fever hit, and Manifest Destiny drew out a generation of Civil War soldiers. Many who didn’t strike it rich turned to agriculture, providing sustenance for burgeoning mining towns.
Gliding on the boat along the sun-drenched Sacramento River, Mount, the UC Davis geology professor, reflects on the region’s evolution from pre-Gold Rush wetlands to turn-of-the-century asparagus hub to today’s vital-but-fragile water source. Soon, Mount predicts another shift. The question is to what.
"This is not a static landscape," Mount says. "It is constantly evolving. The delta is going to be something different. And we’re in the process of deciding that." #
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2007/09/20/news/01deltaone092007.txt
INVASIVE SPECIES:
By Diana Jorgenson, Portola Editor
Phase I of the implementation of the Pike Eradication Project began at the headwaters of Big Grizzly Creek Sept. 10 and ended five days later, according to schedule. By mid-Friday, crews were heading home.
This phase is the first of two, possibly three, chemical treatments of the tributaries and streams supplying the
More than a dozen reporters and photographers from both print and television media sources, as well as members of the Lake Davis Steering Committee, were on hand to view and record the poisoning of Big Grizzly Creek.
Stafford Lehr, senior biologist for the Department of Fish and Game, manned the drip station set up at the headwaters station and described its simple workings - a can of diluted compound on a stand with a hose dripping the solution into the water.
The creek's flow was measured - in this case, 225 gallons per minute - and the drip line flow calibrated accordingly. The chemical was released at a rate of 40 milliliters every 30 seconds, the entire can emptying over a four-hour period, at which point it would be replaced with a new can.
All told, the fish would be exposed to the poison for a period of eight hours. This particular drip station had begun application an hour earlier and already, small fish had died. None of them were pike at this point.
Along with the drip stations, which are using CFT-Legumine rather than the powdered rotenone gel balls originally called for, backpack sprayers are used to reach reedy or grassy stream sections and water holes cut off from the main stream.
Another DFG employee, George Elliott, donned a backpack sprayer and demonstrated its use for the benefit of cameras and reporters.
DFG has allotted 120 cans for the entire tributary treatment and half of them are allotted to Big Grizzly. DFG plans call for treating from the top of the watershed on down in a phased approach.
The effectiveness of the treatment will be monitored the week of Sept. 17, but no chemical treatment is planned for that time period.
Dead fish cleanup was also scheduled, but has since been deemed unnecessary since wildlife have taken care of the dead fish, which tended to be smaller fish in the streams and tributaries.
Some larger ponds were treated with larger hose-sized sprayers mounted on trailers and capable of reaching greater distances.
Because of the dryness, slower water flows and more numerous isolated pockets of water, Ed Pert, project director for the Pike Eradication Project, reported that crews ended up using fewer drip stations and more backpack sprayers than anticipated.
Julie Cunningham, DFG biologist out of the Portola field office, also reported that a cross-section of field operators had been fitted with personal air samplers. George Ozanich of Northern Sierra Air Quality Management District will be monitoring air quality with these small samplers as well as three or four larger air monitors that will be installed prior to the lake treatment.
Cunningham stated that the personal air-monitoring devices are set to monitor for three of the main chemical ingredients and many of the volatile chemicals.
In another line of attack against pike escaping from
According to Pert, this project was begun well before approvals for the Pike Eradication Project were in place. Although the strainers greatly reduce DFG's fear of pike moving into the Feather River and into the Delta region, Pert feels it is still necessary to kill all the pike in
The final risk assessment of the additional chemicals detected in the seven lots of CFT-Legumine actually received by DFG is now completed and available online at dfg.ca.gov/lakedavis. Many new chemicals were discovered but are deemed to be in quantities too small to alter DFG's original risk assessment in its environmental impact report/environmental impact statement. The supplemental risk assessment is a 24-page document.
This week, DFG will evaluate the effectiveness of the poisoning of the streams and tributaries and begin a fish rescue operation on Big Grizzly Creek south of the dam. The water flow from
http://plumasnews.com/news_story.edi?sid=5445
SIERRA CONSERVANCY FUNDS:
Millions of dollars in grants available from conservancy
Auburn Journal – 9/19/07
The Sierra Nevada Conservancy is looking for a few good projects to invest $17 million in from a bond issue approved last year by
The Auburn-based conservancy has a total $54 million allocated from Proposition 84 and the $17 million will provide grants in the current fiscal year for projects that improve watershed health and protect natural resources.
The conservancy is encouraging public agencies, nonprofit organizations and Indian tribes throughout the
"The conservancy has worked aggressive over the past couple of years to develop a strong foundation in order to undertake this grant program," State Secretary of Resources and conservancy board Chairman Mike Chrisman said. "It is an exciting time."
The conservancy covers 25 million acres in all or part of 22
Jim Branham, conservancy executive officer said the phase of grants to be considered includes funding for reducing fire risk, protecting and restoring watersheds, preserving working landscapes such as ranches and farms, and improving habitat.
Deadline for submission is Nov. 15. For more information, call the conservancy office at (530) 823-4670. #
http://www.auburnjournal.com/articles/2007/09/20/news/top_stories/02conservancygrants20.txt
####
No comments:
Post a Comment