Fish & Floods & Trees

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Silty river water puts trout at risk
Calgary Herald
2005.06.24
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Silty floodwater churning in the swollen Bow River is choking fish and threatening the famed trout population. The mixture of hard rain and mountain spring runoff has muddied up the water, and only one in 10 river trout has a chance to survive, Ald. Barry Erskine estimates.

"A lot of people don't realize the environmental impact of this flood -- it has changed our river environment extensively." The murky water will suffocate the fish, said Erskine, a biologist. "This has been continuous for weeks. The silt plugs up their gills. "The Bow River south of the city is the No. 1 trout fishery in the world. Anglers come from all over the world to catch trophy trout," he said.

But biologists say local fish populations will thrive in the long run because the recent deluge has flushed out litter and weeds from riverbeds, creating ideal habitat for fish to lay eggs.

Trevor Rhodes, head of fisheries management in the southeast of the province for Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, said fish populations aren't expected to plummet. That's because fish "literally don't put all their eggs in one basket" and not all eggs and hatchlings have been washed away, he said.

Calgary biologist Brian Meagher said species that spawn in the spring, such as rainbow and cutthroat trout, will be affected by a loss of food and habitat in the short-term. But the bright side, he said, is the raging waters have scoured the riverbed and created pristine spawning conditions.

"It's just like a forest fire coming through the water. Forests need fires to regenerate; that's basically the equivalent," said Meagher, who works for the Calgary-based conservation organization Trout Unlimited Canada. "There will be a lot of new spawning habitat created."

Bow seen as sign of problems
By Quintin Winks
Tuesday June 21, 2005

Banff Crag & Canyon — Through decades of mismanagement, the health of the Bow River from the headwaters down is very poor, impacting the health of the whole river valley ecosystem.

That diagnosis was delivered by Dan Bell, a longtime Banff fisherman who warns that the health of the river could get worse. The worse it gets, the harder it is to recover, he said.

Bell blames the state of the river on a number of factors. The two biggest impacts on the river in the past century have been the introduction of non-native fish species, which either eat native fish or outcompete them for food, and the damming of the Spray and Cascade rivers. Water from the dams is released from the bottom and is very cold, too cold to support fish fry, said Bell.

Dams have also interrupted river flows. The one at Minnewanka eliminated the Cascade River and its fish habitat. Meanwhile, highways and railroads through the valley have created barriers to fish movement, said Bell.

The resulting drop in fish populations means less high-protein food for local bears and less fish roe -- a source of nutrients to birds and other fish. “What scientists found in Yellowstone (National Park, Wyoming) was that when they brought back the natural fish populations in the 1980s, for the first time grizzlies were feeding on cutthroat trout,” said Bell. “Now they have about 90 bears feeding on the cutthroat trout and a large proportion of the bears are lactating moms. That increases the survival rate of the cubs because the fish is a good source of protein and lipids.”

In contrast, Banff in the 1970s saw a severe reduction in fish-stocking operations and fisheries aquatic management, said Bell. “What we need is to get some attention paid to the river,” Bell continued. “I think Parks should increase funding for aquatics. I think there should be a lot more emphasis on funding research and restoration of the upper Bow River system. If we continue on this course I think we will end up with a non-native river population that’s not in tune with the environment."

Another longtime local, Ray Haimila, remembers a time as a boy when he watched his father fish in the Bow River. Though he’s not a fisherman, Haimila has noticed some big changes in the quality of fishing since those days.

“When we were young the river would get black with fish, especially in the spring and the fall with the migrations,” he said. “You could catch thousands of fish if you wanted to, there was just that many fish in the river.”

While the numerous factors of the past have likely had an effect on fish populations in the river, siltation is the latest culprit in stunting fish numbers and sizes.

Haimila and Bell agree that silt stirred up by highway and railway construction and mud slides, as well as ash in the water from forest fires, kills off a lot of the insect larvae -- a principal food source for fish.

Ian Syme, chief park warden of the Banff Field Unit, lays the blame elsewhere. Banff’s new wastewater treatment plant is more efficient, which means less nutrients are released into the river. Less nutrients means less food for the fish, said Syme, who had a “wide-ranging discussion about the state of the Bow River” with an aquatics advisory committee last spring. The committee included stakeholders from industry, fishing guides, local fishermen, local fisheries specialists and university professors from the University of Calgary, said Syme.

“Without doing a fairly significant study, saying why the fish below Banff aren’t there anymore, why the bugs aren’t there anymore is…probably everybody is doing some form of guesswork on why they’re not there,” said Syme. “A significant amount of research was done on water quality related to the new waste-water treatment facilities in Banff and Lake Louise and part of the environmental assessment for those indicated there would very likely be issues with bug populations downstream and thus fish populations.

I’m not going to say that’s the only reason, but we did have some science a few years ago that this was going to be an outcome.”

While Syme laid most of the blame on the new sewage treatment facility, Bell said that’s simplifying the problem. According to Bell, the insects are returning and if it were a sewage issue, the bugs would remain scarce.

“The sewage is a factor, but golden and brown stoneflies and green drake mayflies are coming back,” he said. “I’m happy they’re cleaning up sewage, but then the drop in bugs would be permanent. The bugs are rebounding now from the slides. The bottom line is in July we’ll see if the bugs are coming around. Siltation is affecting the insects. We haven’t been monitoring and taking care of the rivers."

While Dr. Bruce Leeson, senior environmental assessment scientist for the Western Canada Service Centre for Parks Canada, agrees that siltation is harmful, he questions whether highway and railway construction is entirely to blame.

“I agree that most of the tributaries to the Bow River have been impacted by the Trans-Canada Highway and the Bow Valley Parkway or the CPR line,” he said. “But it might be arguable whether that has increased or decreased siltation because in some cases, such as Firesite Creek, at a place we call Five-Mile, there are recurrent major outbursts every few years and the Trans-Canada Highway and CP Rail are significant in preventing that material from reaching the Bow River.”

While the highways and railways might restrict the amount of silt finding its way into the Bow River, they also can restrict fish from reaching their spawning grounds, said Sheena Majewski, a fish habitat biologist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

The good news is that’s changing. Soil underneath older culverts, which were installed to allow water to flow under berms and other man-made structures, would erode over time and leave the culverts hanging in air. That made it very difficult for fish to swim up river, said Majewski.

“We have found some of the impacts come from fish not being able to cross the roadways to their spawning tributaries,” she said. “That’s an issue that causes an impact on productivity and that’s being addressed with the TCH twinning. There’s been a couple of projects within the park to retrofit some of these hanging culverts with stone ramps to address the fish migration. In Jasper, bull trout went into spawning areas as soon as a culvert was fixed.

Though Bell said he has been complaining to Parks “for a long time,” it would appear as though he is finally being heard. Dave Evans, a fish habitat biologist for Department of Fisheries and Oceans, said the agency is waiting for the current high levels of river water to subside before it launches an investigation into the whether or not fish population in the park is up or down and the reasons for the changes.

“Most of the information is several years old now,” said Evans, who corroborated many of Bell’s concerns. “So we’re trying to get some updated information to get a sense for what’s actually going on up there. We’re actually trying to get some scientific background information on what is going up there as result of some of the concerns that have been raised.”

The DFO will investigate the impact of the nutrient reductions in the rivers, increased siltation and whether big rocks and cobbles from the mountains are being blocked from entering the rivers by roads and railways. The success of non-native species at the expense of native species will also be studied, said Evans.

“These are very complex systems and it’s very hard to put your finger on one issue, one problem,” he said. “It’s usually not just one problem, nor one particular point in time. A lot of these things accumulate over years.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clearcut practices linked to flooding
Red Deer Advocate
2005.06.23
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clearcut logging on the Eastern Slopes could have contributed to the deluge-like runoff that flooded rivers in Central Alberta this week, says an environmental scientist.

Dixon Thompson, professor of environmental science at the University of Calgary, said "scientific literature has pretty much established that forests help slow the flow of runoff from rain and snow melt.

"Removing vegetation certainly has impact," said Thompson. He referred to a controversial proposal in the Three Rivers Dam area to clearcut trees as a way of increasing water flow.

Thompson considers the loss of trees to be just one contributing factor. But he believes the province should review its logging policies in the light of more extreme weather events.

While Environment Minister Guy Boutilier called last weekend's flood a one-in-200-year occurrence, Thompson noted that a flood on the Oldman River in the mid-1990s was also given that description. "And 10 years later, there's another one? Clearly this is not a 200-year event."

Many scientists link the Earth's climate change to the thinning of the ozone. This means more of the sun's energy is captured in the atmosphere, said Thompson, "and this energy will do something."

Thompson is particularly concerned about clearcut logging close to the headwaters of rivers and tributaries. "Yes, there are jobs and economic benefits, but that might be offset by all the expenses incurred by this kind of event," he said.

But Alberta Sustainable Resources spokesman Michel Proulx said the province already takes water yields into account when looking at timber harvesting plans.

A Yale University study last year concluded that Alberta had some of the best forestry practices in the developed world, Proulx added.

"Our rules are pretty conservative... . We think we have a good forest management strategy the way it is."

As to climate change, Proulx said timber harvesting policies in Alberta are reviewed on a regular basis. "If things need to be changed, then they will get changed."

But he doesn't believe this is necessary now. He noted forestry cutblocks are always replanted so they are in various stages of regrowth.

Rocky Mountain House environmentalist Martha Kostuch still worries about a provincial proposal to log and controlled burn protected areas of Big Horn Country, which contain headwaters of some rivers and streams.

"They are calling it forest fire protection," said Kostuch, but she believes it will do more harm than good.

As to the weekend flooding, Kostuch believes many parts of Central Alberta would have inevitably been covered in water, since much rain fell on the Eastern Slopes, "but it probably wouldn't have been as severe if we hadn't allowed so much clearcutting," she added.

Dianne Pachal of the Sierra Club describes trees as natural sponges. Water is soaked up by their roots, as well as the surrounding soils and vegetation. "They release runoff slower... . Once you start clearcutting a forest wider than the height of the trees, you will be having an adverse affect on its ability to act like a sponge."

She urged concerned Albertans to speak up, since the government is now taking public comments on the fire protection plan.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alberta flooding wipes out trout and parkland, but riverbeds will rejuvenate
2005.06.22
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CALGARY (CP) _ Alberta's devastating spring floods have wiped out much of the trout in the world-renowned Bow River and biologists suggest the fishing outlook is probably crippled for this year.

But they also say flooding is nature's way of regenerating river habitat and that will be good news in the long run.

``The fish that spawned this year are likely washed out,'' said Brian Meagher, a biologist with Trout Unlimited, who surveyed the disaster from the air Wednesday.

``As well, all of the small fish that were born last year are probably either in severe trouble or they're done _ that's the problem for this year,'' said Meagher.

``But in the long-term, it's a good thing because it's going to clear up the river system. It will clear out a lot of the weeds in the river, clear out a lot of debris and expose new spawning grounds for the future.''

Two weeks of heavy rain and widespread flooding has left many parts of southern and central Alberta looking like disaster zones. Coursing water has washed out bridges and roads, cut new pathways for many rivers and creeks and left a new footprint for many properties.

There have been human casualties too _ a truck driver is presumed drowned after his truck smashed through guardrail on a bridge to avoid hitting slow traffic stopping to gawk at the rising Red Deer River near Drumheller.

Calgary police called off a search for a 15-year-old girl who has been missing since the weekend. She was last heard from when she made a call from her cellphone while walking home and said the water was up to her knees.

Extensive damage to Fish Creek Provincial Park, Canada's largest urban park, will take years for the vegetation to recover. But manager Jim Stomp says the park's landscape will never look the same, noting that 40 per cent of the 110 kilometres of pathways have been wiped out. Another 25 per cent require major repairs.

``A lot of the (pedestrian) bridges were totally removed, the abutments are gone and the banks they were sitting on are no longer there,'' said Stomp. ``And the banks, in some cases, are perhaps 40 feet wider than they were before.''

Each year, between 2.5 and 3 million people visit Fish Creek, a vast swath of forested area at Calgary's deep southern tip.

Prime Minister Paul Martin will be in the province Friday to view some of the devastation. Preliminary estimates suggest damage could soar above $200 million and the province will be seeking federal aid to help with those bills.

Although most of those forced to flee due to the raging waters have been able to return to their homes, some Calgary evacuees could be out three months. Electrical damage to one of the apartment buildings backing onto the Elbow River is so extensive that it will take at least that long to repair _ if the building can be salvaged at all.

Pools of standing water from the flooding and heavy rainfall could create another headache: a big increase in the nuisance mosquito population.

But it will take lots of hot, dry weather to form proper conditions for Culex tarsalis, the type of mosquito most likely to transmit West Nile virus, said Dr. Karen Grimsrud, an Alberta deputy provincial health officer.

``If we are left now with hot, dry weather and this water starts to collect in little pools as it evaporates, that would mean we would see more of the Culex mosquitoes that are responsible for West Nile,'' Grimsrud said.

Many Albertans have been basking under brilliant blue skies in recent days as temperatures soared into the high 20s for the beginning of summer.

There are some positive environmental aspects to the flooding.

Biologist Vivian Pharis of the Alberta Wilderness Association said the rush of water will help the riverbottom cottonwood forests in southern Alberta, which require flooding to promote growth.

``The cottonwood forests are going to be happier_ maybe we'll see some resprouting and new growth there,'' said Pharis.

In and around the Oldman River basin, near Lethbridge and Pincher Creek, the cottonwoods are the main forest in the riverbed and supply habitat for a variety of birds, snakes and a range of other wildlife.

Damming along the Oldman River has reduced flooding in recent years and the trees have been struggling for survival, says Pharis.