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'New' river subject of on-ground survey |
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Wednesday, 17 October 2007 |
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By Jon Klusmire
Register Staff 10-11-2007
Monitoring the progress of the Lower Owens River has become a high-tech marriage of old-fashioned legwork and new-fangled computer technology.
Crews laced up their boots, took bottles of water, digital cameras, GPS locators and data sheets and then made three laps around the 62 river miles of “new” river. While walking a total 187 miles in 12 days, the crews literally took a “snapshot” of the conditions along the riverbanks, in the river and within eye shot.
The resulting data was then layered over the top of a Google Earth map of the river stretch to allow managers and the public to pinpoint everything from stands of new willows to roads to fire rings.
“It’s cool, but it’s also a tool,” Chris Howard, the computer and data expert at the Inyo County Water Department, said of the linking of ground data with satellite maps. The Inyo County Board of Supervisors was impressed by the gritty gathering of raw data, and maybe even a bit dazzled by the “gee whiz” impact of seeing a satellite camera zero in on the Owens Valley from space.
The result of the first annual “Rapid Assessment Survey” (RAS) “will be a very important component for management of the Lower Owens River Project,” said Tom Brooks, director of the county Water Department. The data will provide managers with the kind of information they need to direct staff time, resources and money to the most important and critical tasks when they start to decide on the 2008 LORP work plan, said Brooks.
“I was very impressed with the level of work” on every aspect of the RAS, said Brooks.
The RAS was one monitoring technique outlined in the 2004 LORP Environmental Impact Report, the more recent LORP court order and the adaptive management plan for the new river, he noted.
Brooks praised the staff at the county Water Department for diving into the data-gathering effort and working creatively and cooperativelywith their counterparts from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Ecosystem Sciences, the consulting firm hired by LADWP to help with LORP-related issues.
“It was gratifying to see the staffs do it themselves,” by getting together to address numerous potential problems and find workable solutions, Brooks said. “It was a very good working effort” among staffers from all three entities. He noted that Debbie House, who took the lead on the RAS effort for LADWP, was instrumental in getting the effort organized and keeping it on track.
Irene Yamashita, vegetation specialist for the county Water Department, described the groundwork. The crews set out to walk the entire length of the LORP, from the Aqueduct Intake where 40 cubic-feet-per-second of water is released into the river channel, to the Owens River Delta at the Dry Lake. In addition, the data-takers toured all the off-river lakes associated with LORP, and the various units of the Blackrock Waterfowl Habitat Area, she noted.
Using the GPS locator, a crew would stop at a specific location and record what it actually saw at that spot, by writing down observations on a data sheet and also taking digital photos, she said. The crews set out to simply record the conditions they found, Yamashita said, and made no value judgements on what they found, whether it was a broken fence or a tamarisk tree.
Based on the EIR and the adaptive management principles that will guide LORP management, the crews looked for specific features that fell into the following general categories:
• Recreation, which would include access roads, fire rings, trails, etc.
• Beaver activity, be it ponds and dams or chewed-up trees.
• Woody recruitment, which is science-speak for “new trees.” The crews identified locations where young cottonwoods were taking root, and also spotted stands of willows and other “woody” vegetation.
• Exotic/noxious weeds, from perennial pepperwood to tamarisk. These were noted in order to document the scope and level of such unwanted vegetation to help with future eradication efforts.
• Tamarisk slash piles. Though they were not part of the required monitoring, the crews took note of piles of dead tamarisk that had been placed along the riverbank.
• Grazing, including documenting where cattle were being fed and other impacts.
• Fencing, including nice, new fences and old, falling down fences.
• “Other,” including such items as trash piles and just random trash along the riverbank.
With two to five teams tromping up and down the river every day and reporting back every evening, “the data adds up fast,” said Howard.
He took all that information and put it into a database and then created “a visual tool” using Google Earth.
The database includes all the sheets containing the observations of the crews about each category they observed.
The “cool” tool was created when Howard put all that data on a Google Earth map.
Bringing the map up on his computer, Howard could click on a category, say beaver activity, and in a flash, the Google map of the Lower Owens River had “balloons” on it where the crews observed the beaver work.
The “visual tool” goes a bit farther. Howard “pasted” the “woody recruitment” category on the big Google map, and plenty of balloons showed up. He clicked on one and there was the digital photo taken at that specific site that showed some new willows. Click again and a bigger picture and the related, written observations pop up on the screen.
Since all those balloons are identified by GPS coordinates, crews can go back year after year to the same location to check on the growth of the willows, for example, Brooks noted.
More important for policy and management decisions, the overview and data on the map will give the county and LADWP a virtual road map that can be used to guide ongoing work projects.
Brooks said that the RAS work will help managers to decide how to allocate money and resources, since the RAS data shows what’s actually happening on the “new” river.
“Sixty-two miles of river can take up a lot of money,” Brooks said of the mandate that the county and LADWP jointly manage the “implementation” stage of the LORP, and also split the costs of such work.
First District Supervisor Linda Arcularius said the RAS work and resulting data “sets the adaptive management plan in real life, not in theoretical, ‘what ifs.’” Responding to what is actually happening along the river and in the nearby flood plain by using data gathered “on the ground” would be far more productive and preferable than relying on theories or computer models predicting what should happen on the LORP, she noted.
Determining what kind of actual work will occur on the LORP in 2008 is the next step in the process. Brooks said a draft workplan should be completed by the end of October, which will be reviewed by the county and LADWP before a final list of projects and work is created.
Then both the Inyo County Board of Supervisors and the LADWP board will have to approve that plan, he noted, before work can begin in the summer of 2008.
The same cycle will then be repeated, with a RAS effort undertaken later in the summer of 2008 that will drive the tasks and goals of the 2009 LORP workplan.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 12 December 2007 )
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