Endangered and Threatened Species of the Platte River

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Summary • connections between surface water and groundwater remain poorly known, but they are important for understanding river behavior and economic development that uses the groundwater resource. The effects of groundwater pumping, recently accelerated, are unknown but important for understanding river flows. 1] Some of the basic facts of issues regarding threatened and endangered species in the central and lower Platte River are in dispute because of unequal access to research sites. Free access to all data sources is a basic tenet of sound science, but DOI agencies and Nebraska corporations managing water and electric power do not enter discussions about threatened and endangered species on the central and lower Platte River with the same datasets for species and physical environmental characteristics. USFWS personnel are not permitted to collect data on land privately owned by some of the companies. As a result, there are substantial gaps between data used by DOI and data used by the companies, and resolution is impossible without improved cooperation and equal access to measurement sites. Important environmental factors are not being monitored. Monitoring, consistent from time to time and place to place, supports good science and good decision - making, but monitoring of many aspects of the issues regarding threatened and endangered species on the central and lower Platte River remains haphazard or absent. Important gaps in knowledge result from a lack of adequate monitoring of sediment mobility, the pallid sturgeon population, and movement of listed birds. Responses of channel morphology and vegetation communities to prescribed flows and vegetation removal remain poorly known because the same set of river cross sections is not sampled repeatedly. Groundwater may play an important role in flows, but groundwater pumping is not monitored. Long -term (multidecadal) analysis of climatic influences has not been used to generate a basis for interpretation of short -term change (change over just a few years). The exact interactions between climate and the system are poorly known because only short-term analyses of climate factors have been accomplished so far. In addition, the relative importance of human and climatic controls remains to be explicitly defined by researchers, even though such knowledge is important in planning river restoration for habitat purposes. Direct human influences are likely to be much more important than climate in determining conditions for the threatened and endangered species of the central and lower Platte River. Potentially important localized controls on habitat for threatened and endangered species on the central and lower Platte River are likely to be related to urbanization, particularly near freeway exits and small cities and towns where housing is replacing other land uses more useful to the species. Off -road vehicle use threatens the nesting sites of piping plovers and interior least terns in many of the sandy reaches of the river. Sandy beaches and bars are inviting to both birds and recreationists. Illegal harvesting has unknown effects on the small remaining population of pallid sturgeon. In each of those cases, additional data are required to define the threats to the listed species. 13