<
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30102022/mono-lake-california-restoration/>
"LEE VINING, Calif.—When Rose Nelson camped along lower Rush Creek in the
summer of 2017, the water was flowing as high and fast as anyone could
remember. The rumble and roar of the creek, she said, was the joyful sound of
nature healing.
“It was the first high runoff after a long drought,” said Nelson, now the
education director for the Mono Lake Committee, a nonprofit based in Lee
Vining, California. “I wanted to feel what that was like. One of my secret camp
spots is right next to Rush Creek, and when I slept there, just to hear the
cobbles moving down, it was like a thunderstorm the whole night. And it made me
so happy.”
High flows are a big part of restoring a landscape marred by decades of water
diversions from the creek to Los Angeles, she said. The surge of runoff pushed
big boulders downstream and created new channels. It rearranged logs and
branches to create pools for fish and trap sediments that build new shorelines.
Seeds spread by the torrent sprouted later along the revived riverbanks,
bringing Rush Creek back to life.
Equally important, the flows raised the level of Mono Lake, a bird haven and
the centerpiece of an ambitious restoration project that includes Rush Creek
and other streams feeding the lake. In 1994, under court orders, the state
finalized a plan to repair the damage to the 780-square mile Mono Basin
watershed driven by the human-caused drought.
Without protection, the lake’s ecosystem probably would have collapsed sometime
early in the 2000s under the combined pressure of water diversions and global
warming. Its persistence suggests that protected ecosystems are more resilient
than vulnerable ones, and that helping nature heal itself more effectively
prevents their decline than drastic technological and engineering
interventions.
Under the restoration plan, the city has cut diversions from the basin by 80
percent, leaving enough water for the streams and lake to start healing. Yellow
warblers flit through new riverside forests of cottonwoods and willows, some of
which can grow eight feet a year, given enough moisture. There’s a new
understory of grass and brush filling spaces between the vanilla-scented
Jeffrey pines that survived the man-made drought. Enough water has reached the
lake to keep its ecosystem of birds and bugs alive, though still far less than
mandated by the restoration plan."
Via
Future Crunch issue 190:
https://futurecrunch.com/
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
