New York Times Features the Sonoran Institute 

 

We have some exciting news to share.

 

The New York Times recently featured a major story about the work of the Sonoran Institute in the Colorado River Delta. 

 

Henry Fountain, senior science writer for the Times, spent a few days travelling through the Delta with our own Francisco Zamora, touring our project areas and restoration sites. Henry's wonderful story from his visit - and video - Relief for a Parched Delta, was featured on the front page of the Science Section of the Times on April 16, 2013. 

 

Both the article and an accompanying video by Erik Olsen are provided below for you to enjoy.

 

We are grateful that our hard work in the Delta - and our many substantial successes - is worthy of a New York Times feature story.

 

Importantly, we thank our funders and supporters for making it all possible. 

 

Sincerely,

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maria Baier 

Chief Executive Officer

 

 

 

April 16, 2013

By Henry Fountain for the New York Times

 

 

CUCAPÁ EL MAYOR, Mexico - Germán Muñoz looked out at the river before him and talked about the days when dolphins swam here, 60 miles from the sea.

"The wave made noise like a train," he said, describing the tides that would roll up the Colorado River from the Gulf of California and then a mile or so up this tributary, past his family's land. "There would be all kinds of fish jumping, very happy. And then the dolphins would come, chasing the fish."

That was in the 1950s, when the Colorado still flowed regularly to the gulf - as it had for tens of thousands of years, washing sand and silt down from the Rocky Mountains to form a vast and fertile delta. In the last half-century, thanks to dams that throttled the Colorado and diverted its water to fuel the rise of the American West, the river has effectively ended at the Mexican border. The Colorado delta, once a lush network of freshwater and marine wetlands and meandering river channels and a haven for fish, migrating birds and other wildlife, is largely a parched wasteland.

Mr. Muñoz last saw a dolphin as a teenager in 1963, the year the last of the big Colorado dams, the Glen Canyon, began impounding water 700 miles upstream. "The river doesn't come here anymore," he said.

But after decades of dismay in Mexico over the state of the delta, there is reason for some optimism. An amendment to a seven-decades-old treaty between the United States and Mexico, called Minute 319, will send water down the river once again and support efforts to restore native habitat and attract local and migratory wildlife.

Water for the environment is only one part of Minute 319, which also calls for more water-sharing between the two countries, and the amounts for the delta are a trickle compared with the huge volumes siphoned off for cities, farms and industries. But a regular base flow of even a small amount of water should breathe new life into the riparian corridor, the river's main channel.

The amendment, which is in effect for five years, also calls for a larger one-time release of water that will mimic the once-common floods that rejuvenated the delta every spring, scouring out sediment and old vegetation and opening up areas for new vegetation to thrive. During this pulse flow, the Colorado should once again reach the sea.

"The new agreement will definitely help to restore the Colorado," said Efraín Nieblas, director of the environmental protection agency for the state of Baja California. In the tidal estuary at the northern end of the gulf, the influx of fresher water will reduce salinity, aiding members of the indigenous Cucapá community and others who fish for gulf corvina and shrimp. "It's really important to connect the river with the ocean," Mr. Nieblas said.

The delta will never be like it was before the dams - for one thing, much of the riparian corridor is now hemmed in by irrigated farmland - and Mr. Muñoz surely will not see dolphins frolicking past his door again. The amounts of water are less than American and Mexican conservation groups, which have been studying the delta ecosystems and undertaking small restoration projects for years, recommended in a report nearly a decade ago. But the groups say the agreement is a good first step - a pilot project that they hope will become permanent.

"We'd been working hard for many years to have something like this," said Francisco Zamora, director of delta projects at the Sonoran Institute, which is based in Tucson. "We know it works. You add a little bit of water, and the trees will grow."

Nowhere is this more evident than at Laguna Grande, a stretch of the main river channel about 20 miles south of the border. Over the past two years, staff members and volunteers with the Sonoran Institute and other groups, including Pronatura Noroeste, which is based in Ensenada, Mexico, have been removing acres of salt cedar, an invasive shrub that makes for poor habitat for birds, and planting native willows and cottonwoods, irrigating them with water bought from farmers. The trees are thriving, and both total bird counts and the number of species - towhees, cuckoos and flycatchers among them - are increasing.

"The problem in the riparian corridor is that the lack of water created the perfect conditions for salt cedar, not the native vegetation," Dr. Zamora said. "Now in this area we have more trees than in the entire corridor."

The groups have restored about 50 acres and are working on 35 more, where earlier this year crews went in and ripped out the stubborn salt cedar, leaving it in large heaps to be burned or chipped. Then thousands of small willows and cottonwoods will be planted, grown from cuttings in small greenhouses in a nearby village.

The goal is to restore about 200 acres here and more in similar areas up and downstream, for a total of about 2,300 acres over the five years of the agreement, at a cost of $8.5 million. That is only a fraction of the 40,000 acres in the corridor, but the plots do not have to be contiguous to be effective habitat, Dr. Zamora said.

For any amount of restoration work to succeed, however, water is a necessity.

Colorado River water is a precious commodity - most years, every drop is spoken for. About 90 percent of the river's annual flow of roughly five trillion gallons goes to California, Arizona and the five other Western states in the Colorado basin. Over the years these states have argued over how the water is shared, and they will no doubt fight more as climate change and population growth put pressure on already overtaxed supplies. But Mexico has largely been an onlooker during such squabbles; under the 1944 treaty, it is guaranteed about 500 billion gallons a year.

That water reaches the border at Morelos Dam, the last on the river, where it takes a sharp right turn into canals for delivery to Mexican farms and cities for drinking water. Unless heavy winter snows in the Rockies lead to higher spring flows than the upstream reservoirs and canals can handle - which last happened to any significant degree 15 years ago - no water goes through the dam and down the riparian corridor.

But that does not mean there is no water to be found. There is Colorado water in parts of the delta; it just gets there in roundabout ways.

To the east of the river channel, for example, La Ciénega de Santa Clara, a 12,000-acre wetland that is a stopover for migrating waterfowl, is fed by water that drains from irrigated cotton fields in Arizona. A smaller wetlands west of the corridor, Las Arenitas, was created by the conservation groups to help treat the outflow from a Mexicali sewage treatment plant - and Mexicali consumes Colorado water. The treated wastewater continues into the Hardy River, the Colorado tributary that slowly flows past Mr. Muñoz's land.

At Laguna Grande, the river channel is filled much of the year with water that seeps in after draining through nearby fields of wheat and cotton. That is good for restoration efforts - the water table remains high enough so that after two or three years of irrigation the roots of willows and cottonwoods can reach it - and is a main reason the area was chosen for a project.

But for more areas to be restored, more water is needed, and it must come down the corridor. The river must flow.

As part of the agreement, the conservation groups pledged to provide the water for the base flow, roughly 3.5 billion gallons a year, by buying unused water rights from Mexican farmers. They have already acquired about 40 percent of that amount - although as Dr. Zamora noted, ideally the base flow would be closer to 20 billion gallons a year. The water will be used to irrigate plantings and to raise the water table along the corridor to enable the water-hungry cottonwoods and willows to survive.

The pulse flow - about 35 billion gallons, to be released over one or two months by spring 2016 at the latest - will be provided by Mexico. The idea is not to cut amounts currently being used by farms and cities, said Francisco Bernal, director of the Mexicali office of the International Boundary and Water Commission, the binational organization that administers the 1944 treaty, but to save water through conservation improvements, some of which under Minute 319 will be paid for by water districts in the United States in return for some of Mexico's water. Those improvements include lining canals so less water seeps through.

"We want to conserve enough water to share with the environment," Mr. Bernal said.

Scientists are also trying to better understand hydrologic conditions in the delta so that the pulse flow will be effective. Jorge Ramírez, a hydrologist at the University of Baja California, said that in some areas along the corridor the water table is very low because so much water has been pumped out for agriculture. If the pulse water is released too slowly, much of it may be absorbed in these dry areas and no water may reach the gulf.

"This is the key - how fast we're going to put in the water in order to have the water flowing down the whole river and into the estuary," Dr. Ramirez said. "We need to be very careful."

Dr. Zamora said that he had no doubt that the pulse flow would reach the gulf, and that in addition to environmental benefits there would be social ones.

"One thing that people haven't seen in many years is the river flowing, the river making noise," he said. "People here in Mexicali, sometimes they don't even know there's a river, because they don't see it - they haven't experienced that in their lives. So it's really the process of reconnecting people with the river."

 

Story by Henry Fountain, New York Times

April 16, 2013

 

Link to original New York Times Story