Water woes causing a lonely death for palm oasis

Corn Springs palm trees. (BLM)

Written by James Cornett
Special to The Desert Sun

In the middle of our own Colorado Desert exists a very lonely palm oasis. Known as Corn Spring, it is one of the most remote palm oases anywhere in the Southwest desert. It lies about 100 miles east of Palm Springs and about 10 miles south of Interstate 10, in the middle of the Chuckwalla Mountains.

I first visited Corn Springs and its small palm grove in the early 1970s. At that time it was a lush oasis dominated by desert fan palms, the same species of palm that lines Palm Canyon Drive in downtown Palm Springs.

The desert fan palm (Washingtonia filifera) is unique in that of the 2,500 or so species of palm on our planet, it is the only one whose dead fronds typically adhere to the trunk throughout the life of the tree. It is the second most widely planted palm in yards and parks in our region. Its close cousin, the tall and skinny Mexican fan palm (Washingtonia robusta) is now, unfortunately, the most widely planted palm in the Coachella Valley. It does not usually show the characteristic fronds on the trunk.

Few palms at Corn Spring have dead fronds adhering to their trunks. In fact, few palms have any fronds at all, living or dead. The reason for this is the oasis is dying, one of the few palm oases in our desert that is expiring. This is strange since most palm oases in California, Nevada and Arizona are thriving as never before with dramatic increases in palm numbers compared with a half-century ago.

What gives with Corn Spring? Why are the palms dying?

Desert fan palms require lots of water and so are only found where water is at or near the surface; such places as desert springs, seeps, streams or rivers like the Colorado. In the desert, dying palms are inevitably a sign that the source of water is being exhausted or changing where it comes to the surface. One or the other of these explanations is happening at Corn Spring.

The Bureau of Land Management manages Corn Spring and most of the lands around it. The BLM placed a well at the oasis decades ago. Could it be that too much groundwater is being removed by the well? Not likely. The campground at the oasis is rarely used; most people bring in most of their water, hand pumped to the surface.

Tamarisk trees have been growing at the oases since at least 1980. Might the tamarisk trees be intercepting the groundwater with their roots before the palms get it? This could account for some water loss but palms usually crowd out tamarisk trees, not the other way around. Besides the palms and tamarisk trees have been living together for quite a while and for most of the time the palms were doing fine.

Most desert springs, such as Corn Spring, receive their water from the damming of underground flows by earth faults. Finely crushed soil (fault gouge) can be impermeable to water flow and groundwater may rise all the way to the surface. A fault has created the canyon in which Corn Spring lies. The damming of groundwater results in water rising to the surface at just the one place. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years ago desert fan palms seeds were brought to the spring, most likely by the ancestors of Cahuilla Indians. The seeds germinated and the young palms thrived in the warm climate of the Colorado Desert and in the moist soil at the spring.

Some time in the last 20 years or so, an earthquake resulted in a shifting of rock and alluvium along fault. It seems to have altered the movement of groundwater to the surface. Although some water was still available to the palms, most was not. Perhaps the underground dam was breached allowing the water to sink deeper into the earth.

An alternate explanation is that the aquifer (groundwater) was finite, filled during the last ice age when rainfall was more plentiful. With the drying out of the Southwest over the past 10,000 years, the aquifer is no longer sufficiently recharged and has become exhausted. No water is left for the palms and oasis slowly expires.

Whichever explanation is correct, the oasis is dying. Cutting down the tamarisk trees might help but will probably not alter the long-term prospects of the oasis.

James Cornett is a desert ecologist living in Palm Springs.

Park battles desert invader

By Kurt Schauppner
Hi-Desert Star

JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK — With the annual wildflower season just beginning to blossom, officials from Joshua Tree National Park and the Morongo Basin Conservation Association are taking up arms against a desert invader, the Sahara mustard.

Volunteers are being sought to remove the plant from the Pinto Basin inside the national park.

Work teams will gather at 8 a.m. today and the next two Saturdays in March at the Joshua Tree National Park Visitor Center at 74485 National Park Drive in Twentynine Palms.

Participants are asked to bring water, gloves, snacks, hats, sunscreen, pruners and clippers.

According to the National Park Service, invasive plants like the fast-growing Sahara mustard suppress native wildflowers by taking all the soil moisture needed for spring germination.

They create a continuous fuel source by connecting desert habitats, worsening the size and intensity of wildland fires.

Invasive plants are are considered a poor source of nutrition for native wildlife, including the desert tortoise.

“It’s become a pretty big problem for the last five years,” park science coordinator Victoria Chang said Monday of the Sahara mustard. “We’d like to contain it as much as possible.”

Chang said Sahara mustard tends to germinate before native species.

“They tend to get a head start, which is why we try to battle against it,” Chang said.

Sahara mustard is not the only invasive plant causing worry in the national park.

Chang said park officials also are worried about the tamarisk, a large desert tree that is an opportunistic non-native plant that establishes itself in riparian habitats and sucks up all the water.

“It comes out very easily and will crowd out native plants,” she said, noting that park officials use a cut stump method and federally approved herbicide to attack tamarisks.

“It is an ongoing battle,” she said.

Fountain grass is another invader being battled in the park, Chang said.

The grass is sold as an ornamental plant and spreads after being planted in people’s back yards.

Tree deal revives Southwest desert solar plan

Developer NextEra's proposal to cut down hundreds of thirsty tamarisk trees may provide a blueprint for resolving similar environmental disputes over solar farms in the desert.

A rendering shows where a solar power plant proposed by NextEra Energy would be installed near California City, a desert community east of Bakersfield. (California Energy Commission / February 11, 2010)

By Todd Woody
Los Angeles Times

A developer who proposes to cut down hundreds of trees to make way for a massive project could expect to provoke a fair amount of environmental outrage.

Not in California City. Officials in this sprawling desert community east of Bakersfield are thrilled at NextEra Energy's move to break out the chain saws.

The firm, a subsidiary of utility giant FPL Group, is seeking to build a solar power plant in the area that would consume a large amount of water. The trees are tamarisks, a water-hungry invasive species, and removing them could help recharge the aquifer in this arid region.

"The water that normally would go into the tamarisk will go down into the basin -- it's a big environmental win," said Michael Bevins, California City's public works director.

The tree deal is just one way that what threatened to become another intractable fight over the environmental effect of desert solar power plants is turning into a blueprint for the resolution of similar disputes.

Proposals to build dozens of solar farms on hundreds of thousands of acres in the desert Southwest have split the environmental movement and divided local communities. For solar developers and some green groups, the projects are desperately needed in the fight against climate change; others see them as a threat to unique and fragile ecosystems.

Water has become a particular flash point. Solar thermal power plants use mirrors to heat liquids to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine. The steam must be condensed and the hot water cooled for reuse. The cheapest and most efficient way to do that is wet cooling, which lets the heat evaporate but requires the constant replacement of water.

By last fall, NextEra's 250-megawatt Beacon Solar Energy Project was mired in a war over water. The company wanted to tap more than half a billion gallons a year from freshwater wells to cool the solar farm to be built on former farmland.

State policy prohibits the use of drinking water for power plant cooling, and local residents lined up at public hearings to express concern that the solar farm would drain their aquifer.

"Everybody else in the state of California is trying to conserve water and here all at once, boom, you guys are using it all up on us," said Ace Miller, an area resident, at one hearing.

With energy commission staffers and NextEra at loggerheads, executives warned last year that they might have to abandon the $1-billion project -- and the hundreds of construction jobs it would create -- because they claimed that Beacon wouldn't be sufficiently profitable unless they could use well water.

Energy commission staffers weren't about to budge.

"We clearly felt that this was a significant issue, not just in the context of this isolated project but also in the context that we are going to see a large number of solar power plants in the desert," said Terry O'Brien, a deputy director at the California Energy Commission, which licenses large-scale solar thermal power plants. "If we use water more efficiently, we can generate more megawatts."

But NextEra is now talking with two local municipalities, California City and Rosamond, about buying reclaimed water to cool the power plant. That would allow the company to sidestep a fight over water use while giving the cities a market for their treated wastewater.

Energy commission staffers filed documents two weeks ago that would let the Beacon project proceed as long as it used reclaimed water for cooling.

"We debated the reclaimed water issue for the last year or so, and we've come to a conclusion that unless we want to go round and round on this matter for months, if not years more, it was time to compromise," said Michael O'Sullivan, a senior vice president at NextEra.

The compromise offers other environmental benefits as well. Treated wastewater contains salt and nitrates, and by piping it to Beacon rather than returning it to the aquifer, the cities can improve the basin's water quality.

Since the solar farm will still draw freshwater until enough reclaimed water can be provided, NextEra proposed to remove thirsty tamarisk trees to help recharge the aquifer. A native of the Mediterranean, the tamarisk was brought to the American West in the 19th century for use as a windbreak. The developer of California City planted hundreds of the trees in the area, Bevins said.

An acre of tamarisks can consume 1 million gallons of water annually, said Tim Carlson, research and policy director for the Tamarisk Coalition, a Grand Junction, Colo., nonprofit group working to eradicate the trees.

Regulators welcomed NextEra's proposal to remove tamarisks, which have taken over 1 million acres in the West.

"If we could eliminate tamarisk from large areas of the West, it would have a benefit to wildlife, native vegetation and would reduce water usage," O'Brien said.

The proposal is still in the planning stages, and it's unclear how many trees would be removed and just how much water would be saved.

Carlson, who has discussed NextEra's plan with the company's consultants, said tamarisks must be replaced with low-water-use native plants. "It's not a simple calculation," he said. "You just can't say that if I do so many acres I'll save so many acre-feet of water."

For O'Brien, ending the Beacon water war could help persuade other solar companies to adopt water-efficient technology and approaches. "It sends a signal to other developers that clearly that NextEra believes that their project is still viable," he said.

Camels enlisted to battle an invasive species

They may be known for their surly dispositions, but camels are more than happy to eat tamarisk, one the West's most destructive and invasive plants.

CAMELSCAPING: It's estimated that 10 camels could destroy half an acre of tamarisk in two days. (Photo: Victoria Reay/Flickr)

By Bryan Nelson
Mother Nature Network

Tamarisk is one hard-to-kill invasive plant. Since it was first introduced from Eurasia to the United States in the 1800s, it has spread through the West like wildfire — actually, faster than wildfire. Efforts to eradicate it by burning it, cutting it, or dowsing it in herbicides have all failed. But tamarisk does have one formidable foe: hungry camels.

Known for their stubborn personalities, humpy postures and ability to survive for weeks without water, camels and dromedaries also have a keen appetite for salty fare — and tamarisk is as salty as they come. That's why ranchers in Colorado have enlisted the inglorious beasts to eat their way through this invasive species, eradicating it once and for all, according to High Country News.

"They will eat all day if given the opportunity," says Maggie Repp, a camel rancher in Loma, Colo. "My camels have killed every tamarisk on our place, so why not give it a whirl?"

A drooling dromedary may not strike you as a potential landscaper, but they do a good job. Repp says 10 camels can destroy half an acre of tamarisk in two days. That's not necessarily a solution for clearing the pesky shrub from the whole expanse of the Great Plains, but it's the perfect remedy for removing the odd tamarisk patch from your pasture.

One of the reasons tamarisk is so dangerous is its high salt content. Wherever tamarisk grows, the surrounding soil gets laced with a salty layer, making it tougher for native flora to grow. And that's not all. Discover Moab (via BigGreenBoulder) points out a litany of negative effects the invasive species has on local environments:

• narrowing and channelizing streams and rivers;
• displacing native vegetation such as cottonwoods, willows and adjacent dryland plant communities;
• providing poor habitat for livestock, wild animals and birds: the foliage and flowers of tamarisk provide little food value for native wildlife species that depend on nutrient-rich native plant resources;
• increasing wildfire hazards;
• limiting human and animal use of the waterways

But tamarisk is basically comfort food for salt-loving camelids. Currently the only other solution to tamarisk is another hungry species: leaf-eating beetles. Swarms of the creepy-crawlies have been released to battle the invasive species across the West.

For the bug-a-phobic smallscale farmer, though, renting a few camels may be more practical solution.

Environmentally minded cowboys run a green ranch in Arizona

At two ranches near the Grand Canyon, they try to raise cattle in a way that doesn’t sully the sensitive southwestern landscape.

New horizons: Ethan Aumack, who oversees conservation science at the Kane and Two Mile ranches, looks out over the Vermilion Cliffs that act as a natural fence on part of the land. (Jina Moore)

By Jina Moore
The Christian Science Monitor

John Heyneman has a problem. It’s late January, and some of his cows are missing. They’re stuck on the Kaibab Plateau, a 9,000-foot high Ponderosa pine forest just north of the Grand Canyon. Most of his 400 cattle made it safely from the forest, their summer home, to the valley below, where they winter. But the stragglers wandered off on land that lacks a cowboy’s most important tool – fences – and now they’re lost, stranded knee-deep in snow.

Mr. Heyneman is the ranch manager at the Kane and Two Miles Ranches, which cover 850,000 acres of mostly public land on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. That’s a lot of land across which to lose a cow. The aging fences have gaps in them, and passers-by often leave gates ajar. Up here, where the land rolls from rocky desert to lush forest to sandy cliffs, the most reliable resource in Heyneman’s work is the land. As an example, he gestures out the window of his white Dodge truck.

“Those rocks,” he says, pointing to the Vermilion Cliffs, one of the most famous landmarks in the Southwest, “are one of the few really effective fences we have.”

The ranches are a partnership between the Grand Canyon Trust and the Conservation Fund, which together spent $4.5 million for the land as an investment in conservation. But the parcels came with a controversial catch: cows. Yet here, the cattle have gone green. Or, if you prefer, the conservationists have gone cowboy. It’s an unlikely partnership between ranchers and environmentalists, two groups usually on opposite sides of the fence. Then again, those fences don’t usually come in 3,000-foot-high red rock.

•••

For decades, conservation groups have decried cattle grazing as an act of environmental destruction. Cows trample native plants and insects, leech scarce water, and aggravate soil erosion, environmentalists say. Heyneman has heard it all before, and he even agrees – to a certain extent.

“They are certainly people in the Southwest who really believe that cows are the great demise of the American West, and I’m not sure I’m willing to put that on their shoulders,” he says. “I don’t love cows. I don’t find them sacred. But I don’t find them diabolic either.”

Heyneman grew up in a Montana ranching family but never yearned to be a rancher himself. He went to college “back East in Minnesota,” where he studied science just long enough “to figure out that you could get whatever answer you wanted by changing what question you asked.” Itching with wanderlust after college, he worked for two years in Brazil, and later got a master’s degree in soil sciences.

He lives in Flagstaff, Ariz., and works in the Trust’s offices three days a week, then pulls out his Kevlar pants and pops in an audiobook for the two-hour commute to the ranches, where he spends the rest of his work week. His cowboys live up here.

Sometimes, they even stay at the ranch headquarters, a small stone building that once housed “Buffalo Bill” and a group of English aristocrats William Frederick Cody courted as investors for the hunting lodge he hoped to build here. Today, the stone house still lacks plumbing and power, and except for one week a month, Heyneman sleeps at his home in Flagstaff.

“I’m still a little more Alpine, I’m afraid,” he says. “I’ve got this affinity to running water that has not completely diminished.”

His counterpart in this operation is Ethan Aumack, a tall redhead in a fleece vest who oversees conservation science at the ranches. Mr. Aumack is a fifth-generation vegetarian who grew up in Flagstaff ditching school to go hiking in the Grand Canyon. In his office, he keeps a button that says “HELP PEOPLE.”

It’s from his grandmother, the third in a genealogical line of Norwegian immigrants who wouldn’t wear leather out of concern for cows. “There’s a lot of humor to be had about the vegetarian and the red meat rancher coming together on this project,” admits Aumack (who also confesses to eating beef from both ranches).

The project isn’t about nourishing cattle with ecofriendly feed or building wooden instead of barbed-wire fences. These cowboy-conservationists aren’t that kind of green. What they are doing, instead, is asking whether cattle ranching can be successful and environmental.

Actually, this may be the more revolutionary question. Environmental groups have been buying up land in the West to control the 80-year-old grazing permits it comes with. The idea is to retire the permits, and with them, the cows. That, eco-activists hope, will save the land.

The Trust didn’t have that option. If it retired its permits, Heyneman says, the government would just reallocate them. So if it wanted to preserve a quintessential American vista, it had to get in the cattle business. What began as an environmental initiative therefore became a ranching operation that defies the conventions of two sciences: ecology and economics.

Not many people who want to make money get into small-scale ranching in the Southwest. The businesses that have been turning a profit tend to be the big operations that own the land on which they graze their cows. Family-owned ranches often run their cattle on public lands and represent more of a hobby than a livelihood: One of Heyneman’s cowboys says his family and their neighbors all have day jobs and ranch on weekends, mostly as a way of spending time with each other and enjoying the landscape.

If the economics of small-scale ranching is dismal, the ecology is murky. Almost every aspect of ranching can inspire an ecological debate, and, sometimes, concessions. Heyneman was quick to prohibit his cowboys from a time-honored way of protecting cows – shooting coyotes or rattlesnakes. And, occasionally, his cows get a little cramped: The Trust sealed 10,000 acres off from the ranches to protect federal restoration activities, and it built fences of rough-hewn wood around a series of lakes that date back to a time the ocean covered the desert.

Other things are not as easy. If you let cattle drink from streams, for example, they might despoil riverbank habitat. Every source of water, then, is a potential source of tension. And not just between the cowboy and the conservationist. Earlier this year, one cowboy here said, ranch staff went to fix a spring and “near got in a fist fight” with neighbors who thought the water was theirs.

•••

Ultimately, the goal here is not to turn a profit from beef, but to preserve a unique American landscape. Through Aumack’s eyes, it is a wearied landscape, lurched out of its natural balance by a hundred years of human use. He’s trying to turn that around.

Aumack has led 550 volunteers in 47,000 hours of labor on the land since 2005. They’ve cleared tumbleweed from the fences, pulled water-sucking tamarisk from riverbeds, and counted the number of non-native plants across the ranches. The data they’ve gathered will help predict future brush fires, prioritize areas for protection, and offer guidance on better ways to graze cattle.

But there are things even science can’t prove, including the question at the heart of the operation: Are cows bad for the land? “The science doesn’t give us clear answers,” Aumack says. “It gives us some additional information to clarify the consequences of making different decisions, but it doesn’t necessarily decide what’s right or wrong.” Whether cows should graze on arid land in the American West is ultimately a matter of judgment – and politics.

Heyenman, on the other hand, knows one thing for sure: In the dead of winter, cows don’t belong in three feet of snow, and those stranded cattle on the Kaibab Plateau are in need of a rescue. Fortunately, the professional cowboy is also an amateur pilot. Heyneman will circle the pines in his plane until he finds the cows, and then lead them, one by one, back to the valley.

Volunteers Sought to Help Restore Bonanza Springs

News Release

BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT
California Desert District

Volunteers willing to roll up their sleeves for a day are needed to help restore Bonanza Springs. As part of the 15th annual National Public Lands Day, Saturday, Nov. 8, 2008, volunteers will help eradicate tamarisk and arundo, which have endangered the spring’s vitality, as well as install a pedestrian pass-through gate, maintain and reclaim trails, and install natural stones from the wash as stepping stones.

Lunch will be provided to the first 50 registered volunteers. All volunteers will receive a free NPLD t-shirt and a pass good for one free entry, any day during the next year, at public land sites managed by the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the BLM, or the US Army Corp of Engineers.

"Last year we reached a monumental participation of 110,000 volunteers on National Public Lands Day, and we are expecting to increase this by an additional 10,000 this year," said Robb Hampton, director of National Public Lands Day. This year, National Public Lands Day commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Civilian Conservation Corps and is sponsored for the ninth consecutive year by Toyota Motor Sales, USA.

Bonanza Springs is a small oasis 45 miles west of Needles, just north of Route 66 between Essex and Chambless, Calif. This small spring in the desert makes surrounding uplands inhabitable by wildlife for up to several miles.

Nearly a decade ago, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) began clearing Bonanza Springs of noxious weeds, which were choking the life out of the springs. Tamarisk, often called salt cedar, is an evergreen shrub or tree growing to 50 feet in height and forming dense thickets. It can spread both by submerged stems and by seeds. Each flower can produce thousands of tiny seeds that are contained in a small capsule, usually adorned with a tuft of hair that aids in wind dispersal. Seeds can also be dispersed by water. Tamarisk species are fire-adapted and have long tap roots that allow them to intercept deep water tables and exploit natural water resources. They are able to limit competition from other plants by taking up salt from deep ground water, accumulating it in their foliage and depositing it in the surface soil. The salt build ups can be detrimental to other plants.

Arundo is a tall, perennial reed, growing in fresh and moderately saline water. It can grow to 30 feet in ideal conditions. This vegetative growth appears to be well adapted to floods, breaking up into individual clumps, spreading the pieces, then sprouting and colonizing further downstream. In 2007, BLM employees, with the help of volunteers, placed thick, black tarpaulins over the arundo to prevent light from reaching the plant, reducing its ability to photosynthesize. The lack of light eventually depletes the plants energy reserves, causing it to die back. Since the tarps have been in place for more than a year, they will be picked up and moved to other spots within the Bonanza Springs area.

To find out more about the project, including what to bring, directions, or to register as a volunteer, please contact Elaine Downing at edowning@ca.blm.gov or (760) 326-7003, or visit the website, Needles Field Office - Volunteer Program.