Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

Your weather is headed my way. Supposed to hit 100 for three straight days.

Good Luck, sweetie...................

Regardless, we have saved another tree today................

Thank you all............................

AND!!! Thank you all clickers who don't post ---BUT, click!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Many thanks......................................

Seeing Trends, Coalition Works to Help a River Adapt
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
NISQUALLY NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Wash. — For 10,000 years the Nisqually Indians have relied on chinook salmon for their very existence, but soon those roles are expected to reverse.

Based on current warming trends, climate scientists anticipate that in the next 100 years the Nisqually River will become shallower and much warmer. Annual snowpack will decline on average by half. The glacier that feeds the river, already shrunken considerably, will continue to recede.

Play the scene forward and picture a natural system run amok as retreating ice loosens rock that will clog the river, worsening flooding in winter, and a decline in snow and ice drastically diminishes the summer runoff that helps keep the river under a salmon-friendly 60 degrees.

To prepare for these and other potentially devastating changes, an unusual coalition of tribal government leaders, private partners and federal and local agencies are working to help the watershed and its inhabitants adapt. They are reserving land farther in from wetlands so that when the sea rises, the marsh will have room to move as well; they are promoting hundreds of rain gardens to absorb artificially warmed runoff from paved spaces and keep it away from the river; and they are installing logjams intended to cause the river to hollow out its own bottom and create cooler pools for fish.

Jeanette Dorner, the director of the salmon recovery program for the Nisqually Tribe Natural Resources Department, grew up wading along a creek that feeds the river, hunting freshwater mussels. Even though protecting the rivershed requires herculean feats of coordination among various authorities and has cost roughly $35 million over the last decade, she said, “it is urgent we do not just walk away.”

Many scientists and policy analysts believe the best course of action is to do what conservationists have long tried to do — return ecosystems to their strongest natural health and then stay out of the way. This approach is known as resiliency.

But as humans come to be adversely affected by the stepped-up pace of ecological change, they also increasingly look to help Mother Nature out in more active ways.

In North Carolina, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service has teamed up with The Nature Conservancy to buy parcels just behind Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge to allow the swamp to roll inland as the sea rises from glacial melt and to help black bears and red foxes migrate to inland refuges. In Montana the Wildlife Conservation Society is working with land trusts and others to secure corridors just outside Glacier National Park for wide-ranging cold-sensitive species like wolverines.

Such projects are on the rise, in part, because an executive order signed in 2009 by President Obama has led to a mandate that federal agencies integrate adaptation to climate change into all of their planning. But they often remain, like Nisqually, complex collaborations spurred more by imminent local ecological catastrophes.

Warm Water Fish

The Nisqually begins as a fast chute off Mount Rainier, rushes through shattered rock carved from the glacier above and then plunges through thick pine forests for 78 miles until it broadens into a rich estuary connecting with Puget Sound.

It remains a relatively healthy watershed because in 1989 — long before “global” and “warming” were inextricably linked — the Washington State Legislature, in the face of local protests and a court battle over Indian fishing rights, created the Nisqually River Council, the first watershed-wide protection council west of the Mississippi.

The council provided a framework for parties along the river to discuss their needs and goals. Financing came through many sources: via lawsuits brought to protect native endangered species like the chinook and the spotted owl, state and federal grants, the Park Service in Mount Rainier, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Nisqually Tribe, which has prospered since the legalization of gaming on Indian lands.

For its first 20 years the council concentrated on undoing manmade damage, pursuing efforts like persuading the operator of the hydroelectric dam on the river to add salmon gates. Last year, as the council was updating its management plan, it began looking at the river “through the lens of climate change,” said David Troutt, its chairman. Suddenly restoration was not going to be enough.

Amy K. Snover, a director of the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington, said that computer modeling showed that as early as 2020 there would be “significant” increases in rain in the Nisqually Basin in November and December. Sixty years beyond that there would 50 percent less snowpack at the end of winter, according to the average-climate projection. Warmer air and less snowmelt would mean a much warmer river and depleted soil moisture in summer, which would stress forest vegetation.

Ducks Unlimited, a conservation group founded by hunters, predicts that the entire low-lying wetlands at the river’s mouth, a prime fish nursery, will be inundated by the sea in the next 50 years, meaning that the species the council was working to save would be imperiled all over again.

Christopher S. Ellings, a salmon research biologist with the Nisqually Indian Tribe, said any of the changes — on its own — could significantly alter the local food web. He identified the chinook, a keystone species that is a mainstay food for many predators, as a prime example. “A warmer river would favor fishes that don’t have a long freshwater rearing,” he said.

Meaning, not the chinook, which spend their early lives at the edge of the salt water, bulking up to travel the sound.

EATONVILLE EVOLVES

There are still shuttered businesses in Eatonville, Wash., along North Mashel Avenue, lingering signs of the decline of the timber industry. But there are also signs of new life as the town transitions to an ecofriendly bedroom community. Eatonville is important because it sits between the Nisqually’s main tributaries, the Ohop and the Mashel, and had been contributing to their warming.

Water that falls on Eatonville’s roads and parking lots is directed through storm drains into Ohop Creek. By contrast, water falling on unpaved spaces seeps into the ground, raising the moisture level in the soil and eventually feeding into the Mashel River, a shallower tributary that is in greater danger of overheating.

While Eatonville looks into redesigning its drainage system, the council has teamed the town up with Stewardship Partners, a nonprofit group that is promoting rain gardens specially designed for the end of driveways and other paved spaces to intercept runoff and sink it into the ground.

Stewardship has financed nearly two dozen demonstration gardens, including one in the front yard of the town’s mayor, Ray Harper. The group hopes to spawn 12,000 gardens across the Puget Sound area, including 700 across the Nisqually, which would treat about 9.3 million gallons per year, according to David Burger, Stewardship’s executive director.

Eatonville also agreed to accept a new kind of river breakwater promoted by the council. Boxes made of logs, roughly 20 by 20 feet, are placed deep into the sides of the riverbed. Angled into the water, each box acts as a natural logjam might, catching debris and causing the river to swirl in on itself and dig deep cool pools inviting to chinook. Mr. Harper said the town signed on to the council’s approach after the council and its partners paid nearly a million dollars for property to place the logjams. With those funds, he said, “we are going to be able to put a hiking trail system along the river, which is also a draw.”

The Watershed Ahead

The most crucial component to resiliency may be the most difficult — and expensive: preserving what are expected to be the crucial ecosystems of the future.

For 100 years, an earthen manmade dike kept the tidal salt water away from the marshlands near the river to create agricultural lands. Then in 2009, the refuge, working with Ducks Unlimited and other partners, took it down, and the area reconnected with the salt water in the largest estuary restoration project in the Pacific Northwest. The project was controversial, in part, because many park regulars had gotten used to the altered landscape.

The park superintendent, Jean Takekawa, kept the plan on course because wetlands and tidal flats, where fresh and salt water commingle, have been largely eliminated along Puget Sound despite being critical breeding areas for fish and wildlife.

At the same time, Ms. Takekawa was also working with partners to double the park’s acreage away from the sound. The land she won federal authority to preserve — and eventually buy if owners are willing — is mostly farmland on the other side of Interstate 5. If seas keep rising, however, it has the potential to be wetlands in the next century.

“The restoration project was an important step for the near term, but the refuge expansion creates potential for the long-term future,” Ms. Takekawa said.

The council’s efforts on behalf of the river and its chinook fishery are being carefully monitored, but effects take a long time to show up.

Elders along the river remember when it used to run black with chinook, from late summer into fall. It has not been that way for decades, Ms. Dorner, of the Nisqually Natural Resources Department, said. The species was listed as endangered in 1999.

Each year some 30,000 adult fish course back into the river, but these days, only 10 percent, at best, are born in the wild. The rest are raised in hatcheries. The council’s success will be measured, Ms. Dorner said, by how many eventually return completely on their own and can survive the heat to bear their own young.

Wrong Pipeline, Wrong Assessment
For the second time in a year, the State Department has issued an environmental impact statement about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry diluted bitumen — an acidic crude oil — from the tar sands of northern Alberta to the Texas Gulf Coast. And for the second time in a year, the Environmental Protection Agency has excoriated the State Department for the inadequacy of its assessment.

The department, which is involved because the pipeline crosses an international border, has one more chance to get it right when it issues a final environmental statement later this year. It must demonstrate that it can be an honest broker — appraising the pipeline on the merits, not because of politics or pressure from the Canadian government, big oil and the industry’s friends in Congress.

To the supporters, this is a straightforward equation: the pipeline would provide a reliable supply of “friendly” oil from a neighboring ally at a time of turmoil in much of the oil-producing world. But Keystone XL would cross sensitive terrain where a spill of diluted bitumen would be especially damaging, including the porous Sand Hills of Nebraska and the shallow Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies much of the Midwest with water.

The risks are real. An earlier pipeline — carrying tar sands oil to the Midwest and built by TransCanada, the company planning to build Keystone XL — has had several spills, including recent ones in North Dakota and Kansas. The E.P.A. suggested that the State Department also needed to give more consideration to how constructing and operating the pipeline would affect wetlands, migratory birds and the communities it would pass through.

The E.P.A. has also asked the department to re-examine its assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from tar sands oil. And, the agency notes, both of the environmental assessments failed to consider alternative routes.

These concerns should not be news to the State Department. There has been an outcry against the proposed route of Keystone XL, including protests from senators from Nebraska and Kansas. We oppose this pipeline for several reasons besides its threat to the aquifer. There is already enough capacity to carry tar sands oil from Canada to the United States, and the pipeline would have no effect on oil prices, which are set in international markets.

The extraction process also destroys precious boreal forests, pollutes regional water supplies and creates substantially more greenhouse gases than conventional crude, though Canada insists it is making significant progress toward reducing emissions. On the merits — economic and environmental — and in terms of future energy policy, this is the wrong pipeline for the wrong oil.

Morning sumac. Good article. I hate to hear about yet another oil pipeline crossing the USA. We've too many as is.

Great clicks all. Another tree asmiling.

Morning to you, Danon. We are forecast to hit 104 today. I was out early and the heat and humidity are atrocious.

Wow.......... Keep the cool air flowing and stay in it............ I'm sort of getting used to it down here in TX. But, I stay inside with the airconditioner going during the afternoon -- It has been staying in the 70's at night so that's not too bad.

Thanks for saving another tree today.

Sad news for trees - your efforts really needed http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/07/unhappy-arborists-guide-us-tree-deaths/40309/

Thanks for the article, High Seas. It was saddening but very interesting.

I agree, it's sad. This whole mess we are in now started many decades ago. Thanks for the link.

At least we have a happy tree today.

Thanks all.

Clicked for the day but no interesting articles to post.

clicked

Yea, we have at least a tree and a half saved today.

Hi everyone and especially ehBeth and sumac and thanks for the clicks.

A Forbidding Kingdom of Snow Leopards
By NATALIE ANGIER
Thomas McCarthy, director of the snow leopard program for the conservation group Panthera, has spent nearly two decades crisscrossing the absurdly rugged Himalayan plateau to study a magnificent, densely furred, rosette-stenciled cat that may well be the world’s most reliable no-show.

“I’m out here in snow leopard country for half of every year,” said Dr. McCarthy by balky telephone connection from Tajikistan, “and I can easily count on one hand the number of times I just happened to see a snow leopard.”

George Schaller, the renowned biologist and environmentalist and Panthera’s vice president, is vast in experience and reputation and normally raptor-eyed. “I put radio collars on a couple of snow leopards in Mongolia,” he said. “The radio tells me where they are, I go there, I look and look. I see nothing, unless the snow leopard chooses to move.

“If a snow leopard sits quietly and doesn’t want to be seen,” Dr. Schaller said, “you won’t see it.”

To study snow leopards, Dr. McCarthy said, “you have to be very dedicated, or part crazy, or both.”

Yet for all the challenges, the dedicated crazies have carried on, and now a raft of their research is casting light on the rare, mysterious, supremely winterized alpine feline aptly nicknamed “ghost of the mountains.”

Using cannily placed motion-sensitive camera traps, scientists have amassed a wealth of snow leopard images, allowing them to estimate population numbers, identify individuals and track migrations. They’ve also gained a glimpse of the cat’s daily schedule, which seems to involve frequent bouts of territorial marking: cheek rubs, spraying with tail raised, and the digging of little divots in the ground.

Admittedly, the trap method can enrich evidence of leopardian flag planting. “Our rangers know that if you place a camera in an area that funnels the snow leopards past a large rock, the animals will want to spray the rock, and you’ve got them,” said Peter Zahler, the deputy director for Asia programs at the Wildlife Conservation Society of the Bronx Zoo.

Scientists with the conservation society reported in the current issue of The International Journal of Environmental Studies the results of what they called said were the first camera trap records of snow leopards in Afghanistan.

Based on photographs taken at 16 different locations along the vast and frigid Wakhan Corridor of northeast Afghanistan, Anthony Simms and his colleagues suggested that the region they described as “one of the most remote and isolated mountain landscapes in the world and a place of immense beauty” could well be an impressive snow leopard stronghold. “We’ve been surprised at the number of snow leopard detections captured in our survey,” Dr. Simms said in an interview. “It’s a promising sign that we may have a healthier population here than expected.”

Working in southern Mongolia, Panthera researchers have outfitted 14 snow leopards with sophisticated GPS collars that transmit location and motion readings back to the scientists’ computers multiple times a day. “The data we’re getting is just incredible,” Dr. McCarthy said. “The cats are using immense home ranges,” 10 or 20 times bigger than previous estimates. More intimate cat tales emerged as well.

Collars told the scientists when a female snow leopard spent several days dallying with a male. Sure enough, about 14 weeks later, the female’s collar announced that she had entered a cave fit to be a natal den.

Electronic eavesdropping also cast doubt on the stereotype of snow leopard as antisocial hermit. Evidence of two cats sitting together to eat dinner “was quite a shock to us,” Dr. McCarthy said. Beyond mating and mother-cub relationships, he said, “snow leopards are supposed to be solitary.”

Even with the plethora of new findings, scientists still have only the roughest idea of how many snow leopards are out there, or how they are faring in an increasingly humanified world with scant tolerance for other large mammals that refuse to be tamed.

Sparsely distributed across the high mountains of a dozen countries in south and central Asia, snow leopards are considered an endangered species. Researchers estimate that the population has fallen by at least 20 percent in the last 16 years and now stands somewhere between 4,500 and 7,500 free-living cats, but Dr. Schaller said, “those figures are just wild guesses.”

Snow leopards have always been rare, and they have the modest advantage over cousin carnivores like tigers and lions of occupying harsh habitats largely above the tree line, arable soil and easy human grasp.

To Americans, snow leopards are perhaps the most beloved members of the great cat club, the exclusive group that includes tigers, lions, jaguars and leopards. Snow leopards retain the majesty and fluid, predatory elegance of the other big cats while incorporating touches of panda-esque cuteness, the incidental result of adaptations to the cold.

They have wide, furry paws to help them move easily and silently over the snow, and an unusually long, broad tail that serves as both a balance pole for leaping and a wrap-around face muff for sleeping. Despite their name, they are not leopards or, according to a recent genetic analysis, particularly close relatives of leopards.

As William Murphy and Brian Davis of Texas A&M University reported last year in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics & Evolution, the snow leopard’s closest sister species is the tiger. But that kinship ends at the bathroom scale. Whereas an adult male tiger might weigh 550 pounds, said Patrick Thomas, curator of mammals at the Bronx Zoo, a male snow leopard rarely exceeds 100-120 pounds — hardly more than abig pet dog.

Snow leopards neither roar nor purr, and their vocalizations can sound remarkably similar to the yowl of a Siamese cat. As a rule, snow leopards are temperamentally calm and low-key. In contrast to many of the other great cats, Dr. Schaller said, “I don’t know of a single case of a snow leopard that would attack and kill people.”

The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of people’s livestock. One of the major threats to snow leopards is thought to be the growing number of sheep and goat herders who share the cats’ terrain, barely scratch out a living and may react to a poaching cat by shooting or beating it to death.

Applying DNA fingerprinting to snow leopard scat to reconstruct the local cat menu, researchers have seen wide variability in the incidence of livestock poaching. Among the Wakhan population in Afghanistan, snow leopards overwhelmingly stick to a diet of ibex, Marco Polo sheep and other natural prey.

In Mongolia, by contrast, about 22 percent of the resident snow leopard intake consists of domestic sheep and goats. Conservationists are working mightily to confront the problem — by helping villagers build predator-resistant corrals, organizing insurance programs to compensate herders for their losses, or to seek fresh revenue streams by, say, luring wealthy adventure tourists their way. The tourists may never see a snow leopard, but at least their dollars would help ensure that the cats were out there, quietly watching them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26angier.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210

A lethal bat-borne horse virus has been detected in a dog for the first time, authorities in Australia said on Tuesday, prompting fears it has jumped species.
"This is the first time outside of a laboratory that an animal other than a flying fox or a horse, or a human, has been confirmed with Hendra virus infection," Queensland state Chief Veterinary Officer Rick Symons said.
So far, 14 horses have died or been put down in Australia since June as a result of the Hendra virus, which was only discovered in 1994.
No humans have yet been infected in the current outbreak, which has affected farms in New South Wales and Queensland, but four of the seven people ever to have contracted the disease have died.
Symons said the dog, which tested positive for antibodies for the disease but appeared healthy, was on a property where Hendra had been confirmed and was currently under quarantine.
He added that the case raised many questions for biosecurity and health officials and researchers.
"We don?t know how the dog contracted the virus or when it happened," he said.
"Based on our knowledge to date, it is most likely that the dog caught the virus from an infected horse."
The virus is thought to be spread to horses via half-chewed fruit, or water and food contaminated by bats' droppings.
Malaysia has imposed a ban on the import of horses from Australia as a precautionary measure following the outbreak.

That sounds bad sumac......... All we need are viruses being hatched that never existed before.............

Thanks for the clicks all.

clicked


<dance class is kicking my behind these days - I'm trying to work up some thread creation mojo, but I'm truly falling down on the job>

Hi ehBeth --- is that a cig in your mouth or a lollypop?

Climate Change and the Plight of the Whitebark Pine
For centuries, the whitebark pine, Pinus albicaulis, has grown on hundreds of thousands of acres across the West. It is a keystone species of an entire ecosystem — one now seriously at risk. Most of the whitebark pines in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks are dead. It has been declared an endangered species in Canada. And, last week, the Fish and Wildlife Service stated that the whitebark pine “warranted” listing as threatened or endangered, making it one of the very few species officially acknowledged as threatened by climate change.

Canada’s grim conclusion is that “none of the causes of decline can be reversed.” These include an invasive, foreign fungus and the suppression of forest fires, which are important in establishing pure stands of whitebark pine. But the most important threat is the spread of the native mountain pine beetle, which tunnels into the tree and lays its eggs under the bark. Historically, the pine’s defense against the beetle is living where conditions are too cold for it — at high altitude or at high latitudes. But as the climate warms, that defense has failed catastrophically.

The cascading effects of the white bark’s decline are already apparent. Grizzly bears, which feed heavily on pine seeds, have begun to disperse from their core habitat. When the pines were healthy, they also slowed snowmelt and reduced erosion. The tragedy is the ongoing demise of an ecosystem, one for which humans are culpable. What looks, from the air, like a plagued forest has been plagued by the choices we have made over the past century.