BOARD00503

• Board Meeting Date: 5/24/2004
• Description: WSP Section - Platte River Recovery Implementation Program Update. Draft Environmental Impact Statement and National Academy of Science Update.
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

Summary

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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.

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 DOl 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 ofthe companies. As a
result, there are substantial gaps between data used by DOl 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 froin
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 ofriver cross sections is not sampled repeatedly.
Groundwater may play an important role in flows, but groundwater pumping is not
monitored.

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Long-term (multidecadal) analysis of climatic influences has not been used to generate a
basis for interpretation of short-term change (change over just afew 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 defmed 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 P lalle 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.

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