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<br />Another issue concerns in-channel processes. As far as precipitation management is concerned, <br />the relevant in-channel processes are those that take place in unregulated streambeds in response <br />to increased average and minimum flow, but not to increased peak flow. The question that has <br />been most frequently raised concerns channels of mountain streams during the snowmelt season. <br />Is there also an important question with respect to summer-season flow in regions affected by <br />augmentation of summer-convective rainfall? <br /> <br />Vegetation Compartment <br /> <br />.'j' <br /> <br />We have come to look to the vegetational biosphere as the most important arena for the <br />engagement of prime environmental issues because of its dominance in sheer mass, extent, and <br />variety, and because it is the medium through which most impacts affecting other biospheric <br />compartments are transmitted. One issue is the role of particular receptors or classes of receptors, <br />such as agricultural crops, commercial forestry species, or grasses that may have some important <br />combination of risk potential and value. They are deserving of special attention when compared <br />with the role of studies directed at enabling us to make more generalized statements about the <br />responses of the vegetational compartment within entire environments or ecosystems. If there are <br />species that are important in themselves, or as indicators of the responses of large groups of <br />organisms, we need to know what, why, and how. <br />Precipitation management will encompass a wide variety of physical and vegetational <br />provinces. In each province, what are the critical factors that may be subjected to impact? In <br />some provinces, the frequency and severity of drought is a very important factor in species <br />composition and probably in other ways, and the capability of precipitation modification to <br />improve on drought conditions to some extent may be important enough to demand <br />consideration. <br />A decade ago, a working group of the Ecological Society of America reached the conclusion <br />that "Living things are adapted to the weather that actually prevails, and any change in that <br />weather will be generally deleterious to them." With respect to the vegetational compartment, <br />how is this statement to be viewed as a value judgment affecting long-term responses to an <br />artificial change in climate? Generally, aridity connotes sterility just as moistness connotes <br />fertility. Therefore, by what sort of value scheme do we measure the vegetational compartment? <br />Another widely held opinion is that an artificial change in climate will be accompanied by a <br />plague of weeds and pests of various sorts. How is this risk related to the rate at which the <br />climate may be altered, or be perceived as altered, in terms of vegetational responses? Are weeds <br />and pests a greater problem, on the whole, in moist climates than in drier ones? <br /> <br />Animal Compartment <br /> <br />~ <br /> <br />The issue in respect to the animal compartment exemplifies to a maximum degree the <br />intermingling of precipitation-related impacts, both direct and indirect, with impacts from an <br />enormous variety of other sources, both natural and artificial. The organism and its habitat are <br />inseparable. The Princeton statistician, Julian Bigelow, has remarked that it is not possible to <br />predict how mice make their way to the cheese, but it is possible to observe and describe it. If so, <br />then the number of observables and the number of descriptors is not only finite, it must make a <br /> <br />z <br /> <br />22 <br />