Lowman, ID – A portion of the popular Landmark – Stanley Road (Forest Road 579) will be temporarily closed from July 25 through approximately August 9 at Tennessee Creek in the Bear Valley area to remove and replace two culverts.  This project received a $43,000 grant from the Southwest Idaho RAC and will improve fish habitat and fish passage, and should also help avoid a likely blowout of the road in the future.

The Tennessee Creek culvert is located approximately 30 miles north of Lowman, ID within the Bear Valley Watershed.  Tennessee Creek combines with Elk Creek, then flows approximately 0.9 miles before its confluence with Bear Valley Creek. In its current condition, the Tennessee Creek culvert requires annual maintenance to repair holes in the road, resulting from the crushing/failure of the culvert that is currently installed. Eventually, the culvert is expected to fail, likely during high flows in the spring runoff period, and complete failure of the road prism is likely to result. Replacing the culvert would eliminate the risk of the road prism failure at the site and the subsequent delivery of associated road bed materials into Tennessee, Elk, and Bear Valley Creeks.

The road will be closed approximately 0.1 mile west of the Bear Valley Campground to approximately 0.5 mile east of the Elk Creek Guard Station. The Bear Valley Campground and the Elk Creek Guard Station will be accessible during project implementation. The Deadwood Reservoir area can be accessed via the Bear Valley Road (Forest Road 582) and the Bearskin Road (Forest Road 563) or the Scott Mountain Road (Forest Road 555).

 The road will be closed to all motorized access to provide for public safety and protection during construction. The two fish blocking culverts are being replaced with a concrete box culvert, which will restore fish passage further up the creek.  Restoration of unimpeded fish passage will allow Chinook salmon, bull trout, steelhead, and other fish and aquatic organisms to access habitat in the upper reaches of Tennessee Creek.

Tennessee Creek just upstream of the road crossing

The Lake Mitchell Advisory Committee is recommending a shoreline stabilization program along Indian Village Road.

By: Tom Lawrence, The Daily Republic

The Lake Mitchell Advisory Committee is recommending a shoreline stabilization program along Indian Village Road.

The committee proposes installing riprap along the lake between the Sportsman’s Club and the Lake Mitchell Day Camp and planting trees on the lake side of the road. Trees help stabilize the soil and would also be more attractive, committee members said.

“It’s partially about aesthetics,” said Parks, Recreation and Forestry Department Director Dusty Rodiek.

The plan was discussed during a Lake Mitchell Advisory Committee meeting Tuesday at the Rec Center. The committee passed a pair of motions to move the plan ahead. It will go to the Mitchell City Council for final approval.

SolarBee update

The SolarBee installed in the lake last summer is back on the job.

The solar-power device is intended to increase oxygen, promote fish growth and reduce algae in the lake. It was purchased and installed last year but because of the heavy and steady rains last year, its effectiveness was reduced.

Algae thrives in stagnant water, Rodiek said, and is less of a concern with high, fast-moving water.

This year, the SolarBee didn’t work when it was placed in the lake this spring. It was finally determined that the battery was dead, he said.

The battery was replaced, Rodiek said, and the SolarBee has been working for a month.

If a heavy algae bloom occurs this summer, the SolarBee is expected to help reduce it.

“That’ll be a good test to see how it’s working,” said Mark Puetz, who was presiding over his first meeting as chairman of the committee.

Potential state park

The committee briefly discussed the possibility of a state park near Mitchell.

The concept was discussed with Gov. Dennis Daugaard when he was in Mitchell last month for the Capital for a Day event.

Discussions with the governor’s staffers were also helpful, Puetz said.

“There was a lot of good feedback from the community as well,” he said.

Adopt an Access area

The committee is moving ahead on a final design for Adopt an Access signs. It’s a program introduced by Greg McCurry when he was the committee chairman, a post he resigned after being elected to the Mitchell City Council.

The committee wants to spend $50 or less per sign, Puetz said. So far, more than 12 groups or individuals have agreed to “adopt” a public access area along the lake and ensure it is well maintained.

Teen help hired

A group of young people has been hired by the city to clean up access areas and do other jobs, according to Rodiek.

The city hired 15- and 16-year-olds to perform those tasks. Rodiek said there are morning and afternoon crews, both made up of about five teens,

They work about 14 hours a week in four, four-hour shifts, and are paid minimum wage.

“That’s a tough age for kids to find employment. It’s a good opportunity for them to develop some job skills,” he said.

“The plus for us, we get them started in the system and they learn some of the expectations we have and it’ll be a good feeder system for our own seasonal staff,” Rodiek said. “It’s a good source for us to hire good staff. The ones that work out, we can hire them in the future.”

Fish habitat

The committee wants to continue to place rocks and other material in the lake to improve fish habitat.

Committee members discussed the difference between round rocks and rocks of other shapes. Some members said round rocks seem to work best, although Rodiek said there is no scientific evidence that is true.

The committee said farmers have long been a source of rocks for the lake and for other purposes, but more farmers are using the rocks themselves and are less likely to give them away.

Puetz’s parents donated a large pile of rocks stored near the lake that were used for building a trail project, and some are left over.

They are available for a variety of purposes, he said.

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Tags: news, lake, mitchell

SCIENCE — July 14, 2011 at 3:30 PM EDT

BY: JENNY MARDER

Photo credit: Young aspen trees in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by William Ripple, courtesy of Oregon State University.

Sea otters eat sea urchins and sea urchins eat kelp. When sea otters are present, the coastal kelp forests maintain a healthy balance. But when the fur trade wiped out the otters in the Aleutian Islands in the 1990s, sea urchins grew wildly, devouring kelp, and the kelp forest collapsed, along with everything that depended on it. Fish populations declined. Bald eagles, which feed on fish, altered their food habits. Dwindled kelp supplies sucked up less carbon dioxide, and atmospheric carbon dioxide increased.

The animal that sits at the top of the food chain matters, and its loss has large, complex effects on the structure and function of its ecosystem, according to an article published on Thursday in the online issue of the journal, Science.

That the presence or loss of an ecosystem’s top predator is linked to surges and crashes in the food chain is nothing new. The term for the phenomenon is “trophic cascade,” and it’s been applied to coastal sea otters, as well as the gray wolves in Yellowstone and the mountain lions in Zion National Park, to name just a few.

But what is new, authors of the paper say, is that this is ubiquitous across all ecosystems. “We see it on land, we see it on water, we see it in high latitudes, we see it in low latitudes,” said James Estes, a research scientist at the Institute for Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the paper’s lead author. “We do not not see it anywhere.”

The paper says that ecosystems are built around “interaction webs” within which every species can influence many other species. And the full impact of the loss of a top predator cannot be fully understood until the species has disappeared, but once gone, its absence can have far-reaching effects on water quality, air quality, disease patterns and fires.

Among the examples cited in the paper: A rinderpest epidemic devastated the population of wildebeest in the Serengeti, resulting in a growth of woody plants, which has led to more frequent wildfires. The decline of lions and leopards in Africa has corresponded with changes in the behaviors of olive baboons, leading them to interact more with human food and farms, and most likely causing a rise in intestinal parasites.

The article is a synthesis of the work of more than 20 scientists, and an outgrowth of a symposium held at the White Oak Plantation, near Jacksonville, Fla. in 2008 to study the impacts of large predators across global systems. “At the end of the symposium, we were all sitting around, and there was just this overwhelming sense that there really is a message here that needs to be integrated and put out there,” Estes said. “There was frustration that some of our colleagues didn’t realize the importance of large consumers. So we said, ‘let’s get a collection of credible people from around the world, mostly senior people who have worked in a diversity of global ecosystems, and see what consensus they may have.'”

The team included theoreticians and scientists who study forest, marine and freshwater ecosystem ecology in North America, South America, Africa and Europe.

“It’s not reporting on any new findings, but I would say its value is that it is a synthesis,” said Matthew Kauffman, a professor at the University of Wyoming, who is not part of the study. “It’s showing us that there are top-down effects of large predators and large herbivores among many different ecosystems, functioning in many different ways. It allows us to see the full scope of the value of having top predators in ecosystems.”

William Ripple, professor of forestry at Oregon State University, and a co-author of the study, has studied the disappearance and reintroduction of gray wolves in Yellowstone, and the influence these events have had on the surrounding animals and plants. “We cored the trees, counted the tree rings and found that the aspen trees stopped regenerating after the wolves were killed off,” he said. By connecting the dots, his team developed a hypothesis: aspen tree growth and wolves are linked. Without wolves as predators, elk populations thrived, eating seedlings and wiping out many of the young aspen trees.

Since the wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, some aspens, cottonwoods and willows appear to be growing back. Ripple believes this is because elk, which are fewer in number and more skittish when wolves are present, are eating fewer seedlings, allowing for more tree growth.

And it doesn’t stop at the plants, Ripple said. The resurgence of the plants has corresponded with more insects, birds and beavers. The beavers dam up the streams and make ponds, altering the stream ecology and fish habitat.

Scientists don’t all agree on these mechanisms. Kauffman’s research, for example, found that the behavior of the elk has not changed significantly since the wolves returned. More important to new tree growth, he said, is that wolves are directly reducing the elk population through predation.

But most scientists do agree that the influence of the presence or absence of top predators is far reaching. “It’s intuitive, it’s very obvious, yet nobody wants to talk about it,” said Paul Dayton, a professor of marine ecology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who was not a part of the study. “People like me will give talks about it and wave our arms around. “But I’ve never seen all these ecosystems and identical patterns merged into one paper.”

Estes says that there needs to be a “gross rethinking” of the way management decisions are made.”

Dayton’s hope is that the research will prompt land managers and conservationists to focus on species interactions, rather than extinctions. “Right now, we manage through the Endangered Species Act,” he said. “And it’s a horrible way to manage ecosystems. We’re not managing them, we’re trying to save little fragments in zoos. What we need to do is manage these interactions.”

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