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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Colorado sportsmen’s concern runs deep for fish habitat in wake of Yellowstone River oil spill

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“One of the things we always look at is the economic impact of hunting and fishing to the state economy,” said Gaspar Perricone, co-founder and co-director of the Denver-based Bull Moose Sportsmen’s Alliance. “In Montana, wildlife-related activity generates $1.1 billion annually, and of that, $759 million comes specifically from hunting and angling.

“Any time there’s a threat to the habitat, you obviously run the risk of impairing some of the tourism to a place like Yellowstone as well as the opportunity for quality hunting and fishing.”

 

 

Oil in Montana’s Yellowstone River.
Alexis Bonogofsky of the National Wildlife Federation

Friday’s pipeline break, which the company now admits spilled more than 1,000 barrels of oil (or at least 42,000 gallons) is more than 100 miles downstream from Yellowstone National Park. But the river near the town of Laurel, where the rupture occurred, is known for world-class fishing.Wildlife officials told MSNBC they don’t expect to see short-term impacts such as dead fish floating on the surface, but they are worried about long-term effects on small forms of aquatic life that fish eat. That would adversely impact the fish habitat on the nation’s longest undammed river.

As of Wednesday, more than 440 people were working to soak up the oil, according to a press release from Region 8 of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which includes Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.

“[Wednesday] EPA issued an order to ExxonMobil, pursuant to the Clean Water Act, directing the company to take a number of clean-up and restoration activities as a result of an oil spill into the Yellowstone River,” the release reads. “EPA will continue in its role in directing and overseeing the cleanup and restoration of the river and ensuring the protection of human health and the environment.

“EPA is coordinating its response actions with the Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service and state and local agencies and will take whatever steps are necessary to ensure ExxonMobil, as the responsible party, addresses any and all potential impacts of this spill.”

Environmental groups have already begun questioning Exxon’s estimates of the size and scope of the spill.

Alexis Bonogofsky, whose family farm is in Laurel, told CNN oil has polluted the edge of her farmland to the point that she can’t let her animals graze. “You go down to where the oil is,” she said, “and you don’t hear anything anymore. No birds, no toads, no crickets, nothing. It’s just silent.”

Bonogofsky is the daughter of Debra Bonogofsky, a moderate Republican businesswoman who last year told the Colorado Independent she was the victim of a “smear campaign” orchestrated by Western Tradition Partnership – a pro-oil-and-gas political advocacy group originally registered in Colorado.

Bonogofsky filed a formal complaint against the group with the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices, whodetermined WTP violated Montana campaign finance and disclosure laws in a 2008 legislative race. WTP, now American Tradition Partnership, describes itself as a “no-compromise grassroots organization dedicated to fighting the radical environmentalist agenda.”

WTP and ATP have been very active in Colorado political races in recent years, targeting Democrats who favor more renewable energy and challenging the state’s aggressive renewable energy standard.

While Colorado in recent years has not seen a high-profile spill along the lines of the Montana pipeline break or recent ruptures in Michigan and Illinois, Perricone’s Bull Moose group in May released a report detailing more than 1,000 small spills of more than 5.6 million gallons of oil, wastewater and other drilling fluids in three western Colorado counties over the past decade.

“If we develop our natural resources in an appropriate manner, then wildlife-related activity is a well than can be tapped in perpetuity,” Perricone said. “However, if we get to the point where the extraction of our natural resources damages wildlife and wildlife habitat to the degree that it can’t recover, then that certainly is not a place that we’d like to find ourselves.”

Official: ‘Misperception’ to blame for proposed suit over fish habitat

Another View: Give managed forestry credit for the fish habitat at Battle Creek

Re “Governor needs to keep pledge at Battle Creek” (Editorial, June 21):

The Bee’s editorial board took what should have been a positive story about removing dams and instead pandered to unfounded fears to suggest that forestry harms fish-recovery efforts, even though forestry is included in watershed restoration precisely to benefit salmon. Not only is forest management not an obstacle, forestry helps fund restoration that must otherwise be paid for by taxpayers or wouldn’t happen at all.

At issue is the Battle Creek Salmon and Steelhead Restoration project, which according to the California Department of Fish and Game will “re-establish access to 42 miles of premier spawning and rearing habitat for spring- and fall-run chinook salmon and steelhead.” This ideal fish habitat has been created by decades of active forest management in the watershed, including clear-cutting that some want to ban.

Science shows that carefully managed forestry operations can create ideal spawning habitat, conserve water resources and protect watersheds against high-intensity wildfire. California clear-cuts create small openings, are replanted with native species by law and establish biologically diverse forests of all ages on the landscape.

Humboldt State University’s John-Pascall Berrill notes that “clear-cutting is a process that cannot be judged in a single moment in time” and that the “water-quality impacts of clear-cutting in California are likely within the range of natural disturbance.” Site-specific research from Battle Creek shows virtually no negative impacts on water quality from harvest activities.

Rather than note that forest management has established ideal salmon habitat at Battle Creek, The Bee assumes that restoration will not be managed carefully and that having two agencies work to conserve water quality is a conflict of missions.

The Bee’s editorial went on to encourage Gov. Jerry Brown to adopt a budget that would impose new harvest-plan review fees. We think this could add about $40,000 per plan to fees already roughly 10 times higher than those in neighboring Oregon and Washington. This short-sighted suggestion fails to recognize that additional fees would cripple businesses already reeling from the highest permitting costs in the nation, cost jobs in rural communities suffering disproportionally high unemployment, and dismantle the infrastructure absolutely essential to addressing California’s wildfire crisis.

Harvest-plan review costs have nearly doubled since 1997 despite an 80 percent decline in harvest operations. Imposing fees on forest landowners will not make the process more efficient but could eliminate the forestry sector in California, bankrupt counties struggling to provide social services and kill the rural way of life.

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