Platte River Channel Becomes a Focus for Platte River Cooperative Program Studies2001

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01/26/01 18:27 FAX 303 445 6331 PLATTE RIVER EIS OFFICE 0006 #2 Recently, Governor Johanns's Advisory Committee on the Platte River Cooperative Agreement asked the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to provide a briefing on issues related to restoring habitat on the central Platte River for whooping cranes, piping plovers and least terns, and the pallid sturgeon in the lower Platte. Habitat restoration is part of the three - state cooperative initiative to implement an endangered species recovery plan tha 1 enable current use of Platte River waters for irrigation and power generation t ti 'n compliance with the Endangered Species Act. The future implementatio of this e program will be funded 50 percent by the federal government and 50 p by th The Advisory Committee was briefed (December 14, i xing'to the to loss of river habitat and potential options for improv e h at enough t als of the recovery program. The information presented at thi was recently the ct of a Kearney Hub editorial (January 11, 2001). The key points presented to the Advisory Committee 1. The river provides vital habitat for the 3 require wide channels, shallow flows, unot, 2. Eighty. percent of the channel the cooperative program to re 3. To understand how to changed&ad how the ff species. These species for roosting and nesting. n 'on that grows in the channel and along the banks. As ents a Platte historically had very large springtime floods a.nd.is regular flooding maintained a very wide channel the last 150 years, construction of dams and diversion of river ring flow in the central Platte from roughly 20,000 cfs to about e large dams and reservoirs (particularly on the North Platte) have dams, reducing the fine sand transported through the central Platte that these changes have allowed trees and shrubs to fill in most of the historic ri . he river is now much narrower, deeper and flows faster than before. Engineering studies indicate that the river is still adjusting to these changes in flow and sediment load, and that the trends will continue until the river channel from Lexington to Grand Island narrows to approximately 800 feet in width over the next 50 years. This would represent roughly an additional 25 percent loss of remaining river habitat in this reach. These trends threaten the success of the proposed recovery program: Engineering studies show that if current trends are not addressed, any program of habitat recovery will be undermined as