Redwood Reader

Today’s story on the Mattole low flows is the very issue that led me to this information about glomalin and forest processes. My creek has been going dry since 1989 and there are hardly any users on it, and only a few uphill. We get over100 inches of rain a year in our little watershed, a tributary of the Mattole. Users are not responsible for the water running off the landscape, it is the destroyed vegetation, root zone and drainage that have led us to lands that slough off over 2.7 million gallons(8.3 x 324,600 gals per acre foot)of precipitation a year per acre going dry in the summer. The UN has us penciled in for desertification by 2020 and we should be mad as hell about it.
I sat in on a few MRC Board meetings when this issue came up. It is a sure community divider on a resource that should be abundant. Battling over who is using what will not solve the problem. It is far more important to restore the natural precipitation interface and storage mechanism, which has shrunk the depth of root zone water storage, or the problem will continue to get worse and lead to more scrapping instead of renewing the resource to its former abundance that sustains all users.
Research has led me to the conclusion we have destroyed the lands ability to absorb and store surface water over a large percentage of the landscape. The mechanism is the soil glue glomalin, produced by mycorhizzia in the vast majority of plant life. Knowledge of the way plants convert carbon dioxide into soil products gives us the key to many problems n the environment, enabling us to restore natural systems from the bottom up.
The real secret is that left alone the landscape will grow back simply because water using and producing forests will grow expanding their ability to store water in the root zone in ever increasing amounts. Unfortunately this leads to fire risk, so early vegetation management or stand characteristic thinning should be done relatively early in the stands life, and then allowed to remain undisturbed for as long as possible while the water storage capacity is improved and restored, and then allowed to operate naturally. These same processes will allow large amounts of carbon to be stored, or sequestered in the soil for extended periods. This is a global solution to several global problems and needs to seen as such. It is why reforestation works in bringing streams back up to standards. It is simple and cheap but not business as usual, although there are plenty of economic benefits that are perhaps better understood in the third world, like clean water.

http://www.times-standard.com/cda/article/print/0,1674,127%257E2896%257E2645152,00.html

Report presses for changes along summer-parched Mattole River
By John Driscoll The Times-Standard
Monday, January 10, 2005 -
As rain washes the North Coast, it's hard to imagine a dry riverbed anywhere. But in nine months, it's likely that several rivers will be parched. The Mattole River has in recent years been reduced to an underground freshet in some places, and a recent report looks at how people can make that worse, and how they might make it better.
Mattole residents in the dry fall of 1999 became alarmed at the depleted river, once a salmon- and steelhead-heavy stream. Not only do fish use the river, but so do many people in the area, many of whom draw water for household and agricultural use from the river.
Last September, the report reads, the entire river flow upstream of Bridge Creek was less than 2.3 gallons per minute -- less than an average shower. Around the upper watershed, the story was similar. And dissolved oxygen critical to young fish had dropped significantly in various places along the river.
Tasha McKee, the Sanctuary Forest Inc. stewardship coordinator who drafted the report, pointed to climate change, land use practices past and present, and increased use of water as the likely causes behind the river's draught. "The problem is really serious and there are things that can be done about it," McKee said in an interview with the Times-Standard. "We can make some changes. It's not too late."
Precipitation patterns, though not total rainfall, may play an important role in the seasonal river dryness, McKee postulates. Heavy logging of the 1950s and 1960s also filled in channel and pools, causing streams to flow subsurface, she wrote. Logging may also have reduced shade and increased evaporation in many tributaries downstream of Ettersburg. But logging may also have prompted the growth of thickets in the Mattole headwaters, which may sap water from the river.
The population of about 1,100 in the area is up by 250, a 34 percent increase, from the past decade. Many homes along streams come with riparian water rights that allow the property owner to pump from the river.
Since the 1970s, many in the basin can afford pumps, and have indoor plumbing and washing machines that can be inefficient, and many have lawns.
"If population and water use continue to increase," McKee wrote, "it is expected that low flow impacts to households will become more widespread affecting more households in the Mattole Headwaters as well as downstream communities."
Scott Downie of the California Department of Fish and Game said that the low flow in the river may have occurred without human influence, but it almost certainly exacerbated it. He credited residents and groups like Sanctuary Forest, the Mattole Salmon Group and the Mattole Restoration Council with working toward water conservation. "They've really grabbed the bull by the horns on this one," Downie said.
McKee proposes a number of education, conservation and management measures to avoid future water deficits, as well as compulsory and regulatory means. It often doesn't cost much to upgrade water systems, she said, using low flow shower heads, faucet aerators and automatic shut off valves on storage tanks to prevent tanks from overtopping. Irrigation systems for gardens can be modified to be more efficient.
Also, McKee said, public funding could be sought for water storage tanks. These 25,000 to 66,000 tanks can be used -- and already are by households able to afford them -- to store water taken from the river or creeks before Aug.1, after which critically dry conditions set in. McKee said compulsory measures to limit growth could also be considered. Declaring the Mattole a water conservation area could limit lot sizes and hence limit density.
She said most water rights often allow a landowner to take far more water than they need, and often don't consider the effects of that on neighbors or fisheries. In part, McKee said, the biggest challenge may be to help people change how they think about using the land and its water. "Do you really want to live next to a dry river?" McKee asked. McKee said she's in the process of getting support from the boards of the area's nonprofits, which have not yet approved the recommendations.