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Colorado River Delta 25 Percent Greener
nsf.gov
Last spring government officials released the Colorado River from Morelos Dam into the delta to better inform decision makers how to manage the river.
A report released Wednesday shows an experimental release of water into the dry Colorado River Delta shows potential for how more regular flows could restore the environment.
Last spring’s pulse flow was the result of an unprecedented agreementamong the seven Colorado River basin states, the United States and Mexico called Minute 319. Less than 1 percent of the river’s flow, or 105,392 acre feet of water, was released from the Morelos Dam on the Arizona-Mexico border and reached the Gulf of California for the first time in more than a decade.
University of Arizona geoscience professor Karl Flessa is the co-chief scientist of the Minute 319 monitoring program. Flessa said remote sensing from satellite imagery shows about 25 percent more vegetation in the delta.
“A pretty small amount of water can have big effects,” Flessa said. “What we have to do is track not just the germination of native vegetation and non-native vegetation, but we have to track their survival.”
Scientists will continue to monitor the delta to see if the vegetation survives and birds come back. Flessa hopes this five-year experiment will lead to a commitment by the United States and Mexico to restore the Colorado River Delta.
