US Fish and Wildlife Service publishes climate change plan

Green-winged teal at Pahranagat National Wildlife Refuge, Lincoln County, Nevada. Source: US Fish and Wildlife Service. Click on the image to be taken to the refuge's website.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has released its plan for dealing with the effects of climate change on the country’s natural resources, including rising sea levels, the spread of invasive species and changing wildlife migration patterns reports the Riverside Press-Enterprise. The proposed strategy is up for public review and comment until Nov. 23.

To keep reading, click here.

To go to the Service’s draft plan, click here. Via Aquafornia.

For links to a Guardian guide to a draft global agreement on climate change, a Time Magazine article on our “long summer” and a Nature special report, click here.


Multi-Species Act needed for Bay-Delta

SOMETIMES the comments to a posting are as important, if not more important, than the posting itself. When this happens, they need highlighting. This response to the May 21 news that protections for the green sturgeon may cause yet more pumping stoppages in the Bay-Delta falls in that class. It comes from Adan Ortega, Jr., a former vice president at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and now a consultant on Western water for the Los Angeles firm Rose & Kindel:

The possibility that protections for green sturgeon will follow those for the Delta smelt points “to the precise reason why California needs a multi-species plan for the Delta,” writes Ortega.  “The idea that the Bay-Delta can be restored to a natural state is over 100 years too late. A species by species approach only helps a special niche of lawyers and lobbyists who represent cities, farmers and environmentalists …

Green Sturgeon New Smelt for Bay-Delta Pumps?

 

 

A federal biologist holds a green sturgeon caught and released in San Pablo Bay, Calif., in 2002. Photo: NOAA

THE SAME day that Central Valley farmers filed suit over pumping stoppages to protect the Delta smelt, the spectre of additional protections for another fish, this time the green sturgeon, rose from government scientists. Reports Thursday May 21 from AP and Fresno Bee followed today (May 22) by a better report in Aquafornia.

For the full story, go to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announcement as to why its  Fisheries Service “is seeking public comment on a proposed rule that generally prohibits acts that would kill or harm a distinct group of North American green sturgeon that spawn in the Sacramento River. 

Listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, this distinct segment of green sturgeon is found from Alaska to California but is only known to reproduce

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