 The panel chair, the panel's work is being conducted under the Office of the National Academy of Sciences in response to requests from the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District and the L.A. Department of Water and Power. Panels have asked to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative dust control measures to their degree of reducing the particulate matter emissions from the element like that and reducing the water and control of those emissions. Today, the panel will hear presentation that are relevant to this act. I'd like to emphasize to everyone that this is an information gathering session and the panel is not completed in its deliberations. Comments made by individuals, including members of the panel, should not be interpreted as positions of panels for the Academy. Once the panel's draft report is written, let's go through a registered review process before a draft is considered in the Academy's report. Therefore, observers who draw conclusions about the panel's work today in some discussion will be doing so prematurely. I want to note that this entire session is on the record and is being recorded. Each presenter will be asked to provide remarks and then panel members will have the opportunity for follow-up discussion. Because of time limitations, the panel and presenter should not be expected to entertain questions from members of the public. At 3.45, the staff community will be an opportunity for members of the public to make free comments to the panel. To make a comment, please sign up by 3 o'clock at the registration table. We'll get to that here. And each speaker will have an maximum time limit of 3 to 5 minutes depending on how many speakers we have. A reading comment from those listening in remotely is submitted to Rita Gaston. She has the Zoom chat function for by email. After the meeting, anyone who wishes to submit their comments or other materials if their relevance are charged, your contacts are also an unresponsible staff officer. So before we begin the presentation, I'd like to ask the panel members to make a couple of comments and then we'll start talking to her. Good afternoon, my name is Scott Tyler. I'm a faculty member at the University of Nevada, Reno. I'm a hydrologist. I am Greg Okin. I'm a faculty member at the University of California, Los Angeles Department of Geography. I'm Roya VanRenie. I'm a professor of science at the Faculty of the University of Riverside. Ted Russell, a faculty member at the University of the Institute of Technology. I'm Ted Allen. I'm on the faculty at the University of Texas Science for Teases in Air Quality. I'm the teacher of this class, Washington University in St. Louis. Thanks for speaking to me. I'm a solider today. I'm Valerie Esparza. I'm from University of California. I'm a professor of ecology. I'm Scott VanFell. I'm a USDA Agriculture Research Service. I'm working primarily in Aeolian science and also crop water. And we have a community member, particularly Venki, on the phone. Yeah. Thank you. Do you want to introduce yourself? Akula Venkatram from UC Riverside. Okay. Thank you. So let's proceed immediately to the speaker. And thanks. We've got a lot of people in the room. Okay. And rather than go through the entire room, we did a bunch of things. Okay. I'll add, we, which is a general task. And the game of our first speaker. So our first speaker is Patricia Moyer, California Department of Fish and Wildlife. She'll describe the department's role in Owen's lake drive, lake bed management. And we have a time slot of about 25 minutes. the 15th of a Tuesday-September presentation. So, please go ahead. Greetings, everyone. You can sit at the table if you'd like over here. Not my first room. I have no room. That will remind me of this piece up, hopefully. I'll be reading to you. I don't have a fancy presentation for you. So, if I'm reading too fast, or if you've got any questions, please drop me. So, greetings, members of the Owens Lake scientific advisory panel. Tribal members, I don't see any today. But this is being recorded, correct? Agency representatives and members of the public, thank you for giving me the opportunity to address the panel today. My name is Patricia Moyer. I work for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife as the Habitat Conservation Programs Manager. I'm a supervisor rather out of the Bishop's Field Office. I only recently came to the Department of Fish and Wildlife. And as such, I'm still trying to understand the complexities of Owens Lake and my department's role and responsibilities. And my briefing today is very basic and brief. And hopefully you won't have any questions. So, just a brief history about the department. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife, also known as Fish and Wildlife, was formerly known to most of you as the California Department of Fish and Game, or Fish and Game. Most of you may think of Fish and Wildlife as issuing fishing licenses and hunting licenses and enforcing state regulations. In fact, Fish and Wildlife beginnings date back to the Game Act that was passed in 1851. To regulate game hunting is the newly formed state of California. And in 1871, the state appointed the first game warden. So it's kind of the beginnings of the agency go to, you know, what the majority of people think of. Along these lines, something I found out in preparing for this presentation is that National Geographic, apparently, has a show called Wild Justice in 2010 and 2011 following Fish and Game Wardens. I don't know if any of you saw that. I haven't. I didn't know about it, so I definitely need to watch it. However, besides upholding the law to protect the state's natural resources and issuing fishing and hunting licenses and California Fish and Wildlife does many other things. Some of which I will talk about shortly as they pertain only to the management of the law today. Today, Fish and Wildlife is a state agency under the California Natural Resources Agency and is such manages and protects the state's fish, wildlife, plants, and native habitats and is responsible for related recreational, commercial, scientific, and educational uses of the state's resources. Fish and Wildlife basically has two roles in the management of the lake. One is as a responsible agency under SEAC-LA and CESA. One is as a trustee agency, and that's primarily what I'm going to be talking about. Much of the owens lake that is subject to Fish and Wildlife Code Section 1600, which regulates lakes and streams and their alterations. And responsible agency Fish and Wildlife, and specifically my program has authority to approve and issue permits for the alterations to the owens dry lake. Such as constructing and maintaining and or repairing infrastructure such as facilities, roads, water lines, berms, and converting one habitat type to another. Under these 1600 permits, Fish and Wildlife may require avoidance minimization and or mitigation measures such as known and lost requirements for bird nesting habitat, annual monitoring efforts, and annual reporting. Fish and Wildlife is California's trustee agency for Fish and Wildlife resources and holds those resources and trusts by statute for all the people of the state. Fish and Wildlife in its trustee capacity has jurisdiction over the conservation, protection, and management of all Fish and Wildlife native plants and habitats necessary for biologically sustainable populations of those species. Specifically, our program also reviews and comments on sepua documents and trustee agency will issue incidental take permits that don't really apply to the owens lake at this time. And the aforementioned 1600 lake and stream and alteration agreements as the responsible agency we also manage native fish and the habitat they depend on were involved in ensuring that there is no net loss of the state's wetlands and are now becoming involved in groundwater challenges, the state-of-the-state things, as groundwater can often support critical surface habitats for special-state species and non-alysis plants and animal species alike. Fish and Wildlife is also charged with protection of all migratory and nesting birds. Owens Lake is now the largest wildlife site in Inyo County with more than 100,000 shorebirds visiting Owens Lake under annual migration. Fish and Wildlife's role includes ensuring that all activities on the lake maintain habitat values supporting the continued use of the area by shorebirds, waterfowl, and other nesting and migrating birds species. So any type of changes to how the lake is managed in terms of dust control could trigger additional permitting, practitioner wildlife, avoidance minimization, mitigation measures, or could be a vibrant conflict with existing permits and existing measures. Specifically, changing the use of water for dust control or changing one habitat value to another could trigger fish and wildlife involvement and jurisdiction. So in conclusion, Fish and Wildlife's mission is to manage California's diverse fish and wildlife and plant resources and their habitats on which they depend for their ecological values and for their use and enjoyment by the public. Any questions from the panel? Yes. As far as the shallow flood areas here, you're going to be pretty protective of those? Yes. Absolutely. So I have a question recognizing that you're new to your position and don't know the answer, perhaps you could get back to it in due course. So when you talk about no net loss for wildlife in wetland, is that a an ongoing resetting of the baseline or do you refer back to some baseline year and say you don't want any net loss from conditions that existed in some prior year? Yes, exactly the latter. So the baseline does not exist. Okay. That's my understanding. Okay. Do you know what the baseline is for comparison? We have documents that we can provide that allow us to assess it. Thank you. Other questions? Thank you very much. Let's go on and proceed to the next presentation which will come from two speakers. I'm not sure who's going to go first. But our two speakers are Peter Humphrey, if I've gotten that right, and also Michael Crazer, representing Eastern Theater of Audubon. And we have both presenters, if there are no more than a total of 30 minutes for their combined presentation, and we'll have questions from the panel. So would you like me to be? Wherever you want to be. Not there. I can see that on a couch. I'll stand up here. I can see it. It's sitting this track. It seems like not too good. I hear it's gloomy, it's been a long time. You said you were significant. I can see it. I've never seen it. We'll either be led. Okay. Well, good to see that. I'm on the checklist. We use our word festival in the sense of the audience. Well, my name is Mike Crazer. I live alone and I've been a citizen activist for decades at Owens Lake. I started just as a simple burger around the part of Owens Lake that never went away. There were artisans and seats and other things that created postage habitat areas that we would bird and spring and fall especially. And we saw migratory birds stacking up pretty heavily in the hundreds at the most. And knew that when water was going to be spread by the square mile that we should anticipate significant numbers of birds returning hopefully. And that's exactly what occurred. I'd like to thank the committee for inviting Audemann. We feel we have an important role that Peter will talk about in the process of lead to the three-legged stool that he'll explain later. But I wanted to briefly just touch on the significance of Owens Lake. Now that there's square miles of habitat out there and we have the habitat through the building model and just probably get into that. In 2001, National Audemann Society designated Owens Lake as one of their important bird areas. This is an international program that came to the United States after it already started in Europe and the Middle East. It's a program that is advisory mainly is to inform managers, land managers and decision makers but the nature of it is that it's looking at what are the critical bird areas on the planet right now. And that's important to do with the image of turning climates and change that we're not sure which direction we're going sometimes. We just need to make sure that we're ready. So protecting refugia is one of the adaptive management that you can do with your climates. Owens Lake would certainly be a refuge. The Owens River will spread perian also. Last year, 2018, Owens Lake was accepted as a part of the Western Hemisphere Shover Reserve Network. Wisren, if you like, you can find WHSR and Wisren.org out of the management science center in Massachusetts that's where it's coordinated. It is hemisphere wide. It has very very clear criteria to be accepted into this network. Owens Lake was accepted as a part of Wisren at the International Importance. Not quite hemispheric, but international. It had to do with the numbers of American avocets, leaf sandpipers, and large nesting sites for snowy probes, the interior population. There are currently about 104 sites in the entire Western Hemisphere, from the Patagonia and Kera de Fuego to the far north along the Arctic Ocean. We were the 50th site in the United States. Other sites are places like San Francisco Bay, Mono Lake, Humboldt, Sacramento Valley, wetlands, and some of those kind of places. So I guess in closing, my message is that Owens Lake is definitely on the map. It was a heritage wildlife location that was lost in the 1920s and it has returned. It wasn't necessarily planned that way, but it has returned. And that's all about a half. I'm very impressed with the list of people that you're looking at. Looking at our lake. I know it came through a salmon process, but it was a great experience. I'm very impressed. I'm very impressed. I'm very impressed with the list of people that you're looking at. I know it came through a salmon process, but it was a great idea and you were great people for that. It could be a little heavier on the biological side with the three-legged students. Peter can talk more about that. Any other questions? Good afternoon. I'm very happy to be with you. I'm Peter Pumper. I'm the past president of Eastern City Automotive Society from the conservation chair. I just wanted to have a few minutes to talk to you about some context of what you're doing and what's going on here in terms of the future of the lake. It should be viewed. Recognizing that all of the lake is developed into the avian habitat, described by Mr. Frailer here, Eastern Sierra Audubon and California Audubon joined together and convened a process which grew into what is now called the Owens Lake Master Plan, Master Project Process. We're going to take a look at what the future of the lake is in terms of operation, in terms of habitat, in terms of other things. The effort worked through more than 50 facilitated stakeholder meeting, workshops, and work groups. Among the outcomes was a unanimous agreement unlike all the parties, including Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, that maintenance and enhancement of natural habitat was one of three primary objectives to guide the future of Owens Lake. Those three primary objectives focused on dust control, the idea of collecting the water commitment on the lake used for dust control and habitat maintenance. No single goal was to be attained at the expense of either of the other two. Dust control and reduction in the amount of water used in the process were to be achieved with no met loss of habitat function. This three-winged school recognizes the significance of public trust values at the lake and serves those values as a path towards water-efficient dust control. It's navigated. What do we mean here when we're talking about habitat? Owens Lake habitat is not going to be cultural. A lake supports more than 100 species of birds plus mammals and civilians, reptiles, and numerous plant species. In addressing Owens Lake habitat, many of the African species were focused on partly because we're on a run, but also because they seem to be a good indicator of the health of the overall habitat at the lake. We went through many, many, I can't tell you. I tried to count them up in my head, driving down here this morning, the number of times I've been in this room and I want to tell you that it is way more than the number of times I ever thought I would be in this room when I didn't know it existed when we started and way more than I contemplated as we went through the process. Part of the reason there were so many trips to this facility is that this group of stakeholders worked really, really hard and they worked really, really hard over a period of six or seven years to formulate a comprehensive understanding of the lake and in terms of the habitat workgroup with which I worked closely, a comprehensive understanding of what the habitat here was about. So we took a look at those birds and we grouped them into gills. And the gills are species who are reliant basically on similar habitat characteristics. There are five of those gills, snowy clover and breeding shore birds, breeding waterfowl, migratory waterfowl, migrating shore birds and species that are reliant on alkaline matter. We then identified the habitat components whose presence or absence characterized suitable habitat for each of these gills. The characteristics were weighted to create a quantifiable tool for evaluating habitat for specific locations for each gill. This was called the habitat suitability index. The index can be applied spatially over specific locations in the lake to generate a calculation of lake-wide habitat value for each of the individual gills and the lake as a whole. These were characterized as quantifications as valuators. And I'm glad that Jeff Norton is here because I'm going to, as they say, and many hearings in Washington yield my time to answer questions about how this model was put together and how it works to him because he is better prepared and better equipped to answer them. The model has been peer reviewed on two occasions to establish, one, a baseline of habitat value to track changes and trends and habitat value for each gill to undertake adaptive management for existing dust control activities and provide guidance in the design and implementation of future projects. And it has actually functioned in each of those capacities during the last four or five years. It is that we have used it to see where we were to try to figure out what the trends are trying to get an understanding of how those trends are affected by factors that are perhaps outside the boundaries of the lake and also to help in design with a project proposed and implemented by DWP on specific locations in the lake. The model has been used in the development of facilities and the development of the individual spatially specific projects. I've already told you I'm not a science person by training. I am more of a policy person. And so questions about the habitat suitability model are probably better directed to Mr. Norton and I don't know if I can make him I can't make him do anything actually. I don't know if I can ask him to come up and respond to questions before he gives his thought but Mike and I thought it would be best to be brief so that when you had questions about the model and how it works and how it's measured habitat, you could ask them a tip. The point here is that a significant volume of work has been undertaken to fulfill the unanimous stakeholder commitment and directive to maintain vital habitat at Owens Lake. The lesson learned is that achieving that objective can take place in a way which is compatible with the goals of dust control and water efficiency. I would respectfully urge that as you move forward with your work here in this room that you bear in mind that Owens Lake is more than dust control and water use. Thank you. Questions from the panel? Questions. This might bridge both the biology that you brought up in the policy angle. We mentioned factors that side the boundary of the lake being important. We have a good sense of what the policies are on the lake and what factors that are important to the habitat value outside the lake. What are they and what's being done to control those factors? Well, I'd say the principle is probably climate effects. And by our work group, not much. We're not doing much to control that. We're doing whatever we're capable of. I think that the question is and the reason it becomes important is that we have a desire to hold people to no net loss of habitat value. You also have to factor a way that allows them to function and deal and go forward if there are circumstances beyond their control that affect what goes on at this particular location. And so we've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how do you do that? How do you say you are accountable for this but only to the extent that you're responsible for being able to maintain it? So I think that's really the principle. There could be, who knows how many other kinds of policy destruction were never certain that we would go over the long haul. So one of the things that we've tried to do is to institutionalize our work as much as we possibly can. The idea of an only great master plan, master project is a step toward that institutionalization as it proceeds through the secret process and hopefully is optioned by the city of Los Angeles. But I think that the most important thing that we have been able to achieve is creating a culture now of cooperation and collaboration where people have begun to recognize that they're not necessarily adversaries just because they have one different hat. That has been a bumpy road and has been a less bumpy road recently but I certainly won't sit here and tell you about factors like climate change, maybe tighten the news a little bit around what we're trying to do here. That's the primary one that comes to mind that I think I always at least try to bear in mind is going to make it mean that what we thought we were absolutely correct about when we sat here is going to turn out just to be not absolutely correct at all. Let's continue with that. We know that with the existing shoreward species in North America and South America because they belong to all of us. They belong to no one. That even the ones that have tremendously high population to millions aren't in decline in general. The impacts of climate change on the partner with the permafrost and nesting, the timing of flowering and bugs and all that kind of stuff possibly being scrambled or altered. Those are real concerns but Peter's right. We're not looking at building something that hasn't been certain numbers of birds out there because there's just so much. I mean, the wolves and the salarose that are on the lake right now they're going to head for Argentina. I'm not going to stop for the Altiplano of Bolivia and then fatten up and then drop down into Marquita and other places in Argentina. There's in route wetlands and questionable future and there's also the nesting areas. We're just trying to build the baseball field in the corner to build it. Yes, sir. I'm going to answer this too but since we're guys, this is obviously a legacy focusing on water birds but I'm sort of curious about the bird to use non-aquatic resources that are around or on the lake. Yes, yes. There's some boughs nested in the soft grass particularly. It's also used for there's some predators that hunt dead in northern Harriers and others and whatnot. It's also a winter area where someone looks past for American exhibits. It comes down thousands all over the lake. Horn marks that probably nest up on the Altiplano and down onto the lake as a wintering area to it. It's just this tremendous abundance of wildlife and there will be hatches at any month of the year even in winter. It's a rare inland lake that has some winter populations of shorebirds which is really unusual. I would like to add on to Trisha's which is we do have hundreds of thousands of birds through a season that will move through. I think our highest number on a single day was 115,000 birds. 62,000 of them were shorebirds of 15 to 20 different species. The difficult thing is to be able to tell how long those birds stay here on the path from true. There's been some work on Western sandpipers that show four to six days, but a sandpiper is not a fellow who's going to fly to Bolivia. They literally doubled the body in two weeks. They'll be so fat that they won't all age and some down here that they can barely walk. And then they just take off. They fly non-stop. I started with your question actually. I'm not going to answer that at all. Sorry about habitat value. I just wanted to make sure that I understood the central habitat value right. We've had migrations of the little lizard all the way out into the middle of the lake following the root rep. You know, just a beautiful rocky pathway out there. We've had coyotes out there years ago. Somebody had a toothless mountain lion out there. We've had big, orange sheep in that saltgrass meadow a long ago. I think a bear. Spiders, lizards and corn larchs and those are big number birds. And they use the areas that they can use the areas that have no water. Small animals. Yes, goats of course. There's no where a goat can't go. I've seen them be 12,000 feet on the ridges in Sierra. Rattles. Like I said, coyotes. Coyotes are one of the possible predators in snow. I think Jeff can speak to this. You make a good point in your question. The shallow flood areas are not the only areas of the lake that support natural life. And as the lake unfolds the managed vegetation areas, for example, they come into more stable states beginning to attract their own suite of birds and other animals. Part of the reason that we chose to talk about habitat at all was lake. On a lake-wide basis was the fact that you can't pin down spots and say into perpetuity, this is where these birds need to be. It was an attempt made to do that a while ago. And an area with designated as a plumber area. And then as the lake evolved and the projects evolved on the lake, the plumbers apparently lost track of the boundary line of their area and they all moved. And so that area was all longer rich in those particular birds. You wouldn't think it necessarily conceptually when you think about all this lake and I think of it as an industrial lake. But it's very dynamic and the habitat in the years that I've been involved in the process has changed significantly. And as that happens in turn the species go with it. We had to look at the lake as a whole and it took us a while to realize that because the birds vote on their own and I found this to be true here certainly but they just don't care what my opinion is about where they are being on this lake and they're not bound by it and talk about it and look at the lake as a whole where it was going and make sure that it wasn't so important where a particular habitat resource was. It was important that it was there, it was on the lake at such and such a quantity at such and such a condition of health that it could move because they'll move with it. Obviously where there's not water how life falls off you're not going to see much. Jeff stop me if I'm stepping on your toes here I have no problem with that. The grand compromise, the grand bargain with Audubon and modern power because this was a just project for a while, now it's over. The bargain was, at least the way I read because I was there, was that Audubon realized this tremendous hit on the water resources to see what's happening you know, 4 million people have to be offered up obviously it's falling out here. So Audubon approached the DOT staff, city magazine managers that we were willing to help save significant water if they would commit to significantly protecting and enhancing habitat of the time for migrating trophies and others. So there were places out there where there's a lot of water and consistently we wouldn't see any wildlife use. I don't know if you've ever figured out why but that's a good question. Jeff, this is a good question. Just a quick one. We may not be addressed to you gentlemen or Jeff but we've heard a few times about this master plan, master project and we have that, there's documentation where that stands so the committee could have resources and access to it. We have, we did a presentation on the first one it was presented. What specifically are you looking for? Well, is there kind of a single document or a set of documents, it's a master project direction. This is Jeff, 2010 was a draft that came out in 2016. The year it was being developed a lot of work done by various working groups ground wire working groups, habitat working groups and they've developed recommendations and resource protection protocols that speak to everything that Mike and Pete have discussed here and there also have been several projects that have already been built under that framework since 2013. So as far as the future of those documents are still being developed. Well, it's on the website LAWP.com and you go to On-Play Birds and you can't, you drop the seats into the red site. There used to be a big download of like 50 megabytes download for like the draft and I know things have changed and whatnot. I mean there was a hard copy that everybody was getting at one time it's been a lot out but there's a download but is that separate, you know what's the solution out there? No, I don't know, you might need to talk about this content that's been around for like a decade. The first concept is like 2014 but it's kind of more of a concept. As far as what is available it might be referring to in our, the advisory committee recommendations to be a big compilation of all the habitat work, all the different work groups and what they recommend to be. So I mean presented on how we're putting all these pieces together, we're not done yet but how we're kind of trying to make the appropriate distance to get to that. I guess I feel like there's a mix of questions that everybody might be answering when the thing is finalized what power will it have besides the power to say maybe all five or nothing. So in other words if it is a document and a plan that will have any value in terms of actually making legally required decisions or is it more of a process to help people talk through things and all the kind of pre-emptive stuff but you know so any project we put out there has to go through CEQA and all of the necessary permits have to be obtained and all of the permits and the CEQA documentation and analysis whether all legally binding types of documents that's what I think that answers your question if we're going to present a plan or a project that's what we do. So that's the plan with the through CEQA and as a result there was no legal decisions here no settlement kind of thing but there wasn't a need for a lease from the state lands commission that owns the lake and so Audubon worked with the state land staff to try to get a lot of the bird type material and whatnot into that lease and as well as Fish and Wildlife much of the mechanisms went into that 1600 permit like that alteration kind of how it's codified and then CEQA. So the question is from the panel I have one, you mentioned and you've been painting it so I'd like to give you a follow up to the deal for migratory. Can you talk in general terms about the migration pathway for someone who doesn't know much about the migratory birds? I think you're going to talk more broadly. Yeah. It's enormous distances and have a changing hemisphere and jump a bit into that. It's an incredible contact for late people. Other questions? Alright Audubon, thank you very much and let's move on to Jeff. So Jeff Gordon from the LA Department of Wildlife will provide a quick presentation on the ecology of Audubon. Thank you David. Good afternoon everyone. Thanks to Keith and Mike. I'm going to dive into really the ecology of some of the data collected and then kind of wrap up on where the policy what we've implemented today. So I am a watershed research supervisor and I'm part of our land and watershed management group that helps manage not only the Jones Lake but LAX owns about 300,000 acres throughout the valley and has various biologists and conservation so that will help manage that 9-in-1 with the Jones Lake. I've been working on the Jones Lake for about 10 years and I always see the biological and environmental work. My background is quantitative ecology and community ecology. So some of you are from and give you a picture of Jones Lake and kind of talk about this geography. So we're looking at to the west of Sierra Nevada that there's more there. That's the most striking feature of the Sierra Nevada. It's some of the highest peaks in California, most of the 14,000 peaks are right here in the Sierra Nevada. So that is responsible for at least one of the very low rains all that we get. Big rain shadow. Six inches of official three years in the last one on the lake here. But it's also the other kind of extreme is you see the lowest part of California in that valley. It's also right in the Ocali. So there's a huge change in this area. It's also an intersection between the Great Basin Desert to the north. Basin and Basin Range and Mojave Desert down to the south which is a warmer desert it doesn't have frost very often whereas Great Basin is very cold. And Jones Lake you've got to experience some of the heat although today was actually a pretty nice morning. It became a really hot, dry conditions in the summer you got to see that but it's also cold and blisteringly windy in the wintertime. Full of extremes here. A couple of other landforms I'll put them up for you. Sierra Nevada Range another fairly tall mountain range 11,000 feet or so goes up to another 14,000 feet in the life outside of Bishop. So very deep valley to the south there is coastal range coastal range and then other landforms you see this is this is a picture of about 2,000 that's really sort of modern Jones Lake and then the features this is an easy constructed reservoir or maybe reservoir that's one of the the last impoundments of where it goes into a pipe to the down south and then the Jones River so in case you don't figure out where you are sitting right here on the island so it's hard you guys are out there so you saw the scale it's so hard to convey the scale of Jones Lake this is my slide, this is a picture I'm going to record by the blindfold open 110 square miles this is hard you can't appreciate until you're standing here so this is going to my effort to talk about the scale so I'm going to spend a little time talking about the current Jones Lake is dynamic it very much is across the lake but through time so I had a couple of those points here so Jones Lake we go back 120,000 years 180,000 years was once the first depending on if you count motor lake and Crowley the first of the series in the lake across the Mojave Desert so water from Jones there wasn't a basin there it wasn't it wasn't a basin back that far, water would flow down to China Lake serial padiment and then eventually over to Pleistocene Lake Manning huge inland settle lakes when the environment was much more music we commissioned as part of some of the interpretive panels we did with Pleistocene we commissioned Laura Cunningham who does Pleistocene paintings and so this is really trying to catch a lake level during the Pleistocene just to give people a look if you were standing here in a place it might look like and we just tried to be accurate this is the haystack we'll point it out tomorrow which is surrounded by water so we ran it out of property and then we found it also I mentioned so this is a really wet time period it didn't go back that far but Owen's Lake was also had very south very drought long sandy drought the shoreline disappeared at least six instances sometimes for thousands of years one that would be 12,000 years ago five to 6,000 years ago where Owen's Lake was essentially modern dry completely so another kind of crazy dynamic to do this a couple of notes on Owen's Lake and these coast basins but they're more variable than freshwater just not only salinity but lake elevation up and down salinity is very high in the sky which is mostly salt but they also vary when you talk in real life they're very annually in season depending on the current different chemicals and ephemeral and episodic you can have big dry big flood banks parts of the lake so they would have a bunch of how does that value have a bunch of birds but that's very short live and then the important part here is why Owen's Lake is so important ecologically is when you have this moderate high salinity you don't have too many of these invertebrates but you have an incredibly high above and that's what the birds why do you have hundreds of thousands of birds here they're coming to feed off of these very super above food source so here's some photos this is Owen's Lake if you think back before that control we had along the edge this is about 2000 outline meadow on the left there the so on the left and then during low time periods of low evapotranspiration water would spill out and would fly and that would still provide how does that value even know the lake is on the birds would key in on this but as soon as high evaporation time periods came that would usually fly back this is a snow clover right on they kind of were out in the middle of nowhere where not much else was they nest out there and pour it on this little this flow here on the lower right is kind of showing that you've got upwinds and then water seeping out onto the lake that occurred on kind of the lake for engineering so here's Owen's Lake just to kind of go through the dynamic portion of Owen's Lake during this time period before settling on Owen's Lake about 110 square miles and the European settlement is what I'm referring to after European settlements many many miles of canals were built and there were eight big diversions off of Owen's River they could divert over 1200 CFS and so between the time of settlement 1874 or so so the time L.A. Blockland Owen's Lake actually decreased by about 30 years so here's a picture of the wetlands that developed as the lake proceeded that those seats formed this alkaline meadow called Transmontane Alkaline Meadow and this polygon you see on the edge of Owen's Lake they were related about the time of 2000 of the images taken up here that's not groundwater that's not the pitch from the lake shore up here in the north that's when the Owen's River project was launched around 2006 but it was still well underrepresented and then just to complete the picture here 1913 L.A. Aqueduct was completed and that took most of the surface water so Owen's Lake 2017 2017 you see childhood there you also see Owen's Lake really filled with water because we had such a high runoff of that so big difference all of the shallow flood now we have a big change in ecology so I put here a picture of Brideship the last record I could find was early 1900s Brideship above it in the lake shore no records that I ever saw there was an evidence being Brideship in the shallow flood so now they're super abundant in our pond and are one of the main resources for the birds that come to feed for in a collage environment so with that Owen's Lake became an important migratory salt water for shorebirds and waterfowl again along with the Pacific flyway so the Pacific flyway is going to have the migratory patterns so the shorebirds and waterfowl are very they have to find water to feed on the lake their paths are very set so they can't be particularly the inland species can't be in the lake when we have Owen's Lake Lake Haber and when they often the springtime they just get warm late because it's very high elevation so time or productivity has to pick up in this time that they start not so much in spring but Owen's Lake lower elevation is a really important step forward for shorebirds and waterfowl as they migrate more another thing is shorebirds are smaller bodies so they need to stop more often to fill up their back reserves larger birds, waterfowl, deep greens they can take one stop from their wintering area to the breeding area and they don't need to stop to fill up and Mike mentioned some of these birds they go they start down in South America and they go up to the Arctic to a degree but on the other shorebirds we're eating a prairie pop of region Canada so I'm going to talk a little bit about the bird numbers that we see so these are just, I put up a couple of graphs so we can all move them at the same time notice the scale is that we already talked about our deal either groups of birds that use in similar way, waterfowl we'll talk about what they use later shorter smaller way and diving water birds the scale, this is I just put up a survey month that we do a here we go, so these are just the survey months of when we do survey and then we've got number of birds on the Y, notice we're in the to access changes from the 10,000 birds, so waterfowl we'll start with waterfowl generally don't use the Inland, Owens Lake route to go North to Green and then in fall when they start coming back September, that's where they use this in the fall of the 18th year, so waterfowl by far most of them are not involved and this is driven by one species in particular, northern shorebirds so we move the shorebirds very different pattern during their migration April is the peak and the points are just meant to kind of give you a relative context if you were to really survey every week the birds are only here for a very short time we don't know exactly how long but it's probably measured in days so if you miss that peak count April, you can miss 30,000 birds on your peak count and by May is the time where you have the least amount of birds on Owens Lake it's a hot grass condition so you only have a few breeding birds I'll talk about some of those and then coming back I mentioned in July we don't do a count, we just start getting our first shorebirds starting to come through and then August, September the migration is more proactive coming back in fall so common species all of this is driven by a few of your common species that depend on these inland sites California Goldine 1 they don't really breed here but they use this when they come here get ready to stage and then right now I'll go somewhere out in the middle of the lake breeding so they're the gray bar and then they fall off in May and then we don't have very few in the fall so big by far the bulk of the birds you see in April American Abysses are another shorebird that breeds here but also some more come through they're the red that comes through in the spring and then come back in fall you can see that in the spring and then come back in fall you can really know from a little away They see the skip bones because they've got bigger birds. They can fatten up and make their littering flight all in one stop. But we still see a few, and this is for my habitat, but I just want to get your photos on, that's the view. Right now, there's a waterfowl. A significant portion of the population comes here. They also like bigger ponds. And then shovelers, over 50% can be our waterfowl, our noted shoveler. And the green fall is their time period. They do not come through in spring very much. And then we move over to snowy pulver. Notice the scale has changed here. We're talking hundreds of birds, as opposed to tens of thousands of birds. This is kind of a 500 on the dot, was an early survey that was done in 1978. This was a really wet year. We had pulvers that were in hot spots. But generally, before dust control, we were in hundreds of birds. With dust control, that increased the population into five or 600 birds. And then coming, this downtrend was probably mostly related to the drought. And we didn't sort of this year, but we're looking at an upward trend here as they respond to the drought. But if you're interested in pulvers, one note, because it is such a marching bird, we looked at wintering range in Los Angeles County. And you could significantly predict the count on only way by just looking at how many wintering birds on LA County. We don't ban birds. We don't do no wintering. But that's interesting that there's a lot of correlations. This is an inland nasty population. They are separate to skin populations from the endangered species here. Sorry to interrupt this. Are they considered threatened or endangered? They are. They are a key to this question, sir. They're not going to be counted for. They're not going to be counted for. They're not going to be counted for. So we'll talk a little bit about the only way dust control areas. We've already visited it to see how variable they are. One thing that we mapped, we used low-sensing and LiDAR information is to get how deep the palms are. Very important aspects of habitat. So darker areas are deeper, lighter areas are shallower. This is an older analysis prior to 2012. The other thing that's really important is salinity. So up here, I have salinity. The green is really fresh. Again, this is an older map. So it's dynamic. It's changed since then. And the red, I would say, is a really salty area. But the target, the best for the 50 for inverts is more the yellow. The yellow and green, the yellow, I have a little more strategy here. So these are important things that I'll talk about when we talk about habitat models. So a couple of things to note. I want to highlight, I think we hit all these points, but we persisted for the project was designed and built for dust control. Another thing is this was built really quickly for immediate regulatory deadline. The changes were built without kind of thinking about how integrated they were. Very important point was habitat creation, while evidence was entirely incidental, right? What happened, there's some good areas that were good. Habitat that inadvertently was graded. There's some areas with a lot of water and no birds that we change. Talked a lot about management and it's dynamic. So because of this, there's a pretty novel ecosystem with areas that a lot of the poor habitats that can already convert it, and we've left the good areas. But there was areas that put a lot of water out. Generally, it's really, really easy to get birdies. So all this is really important information when it's thought about habitat modeling. We've got cool inadvertently experiments that help us understand birdies. Most of the focus of the early Olympic dust mitigation program was just don't have impacts during construction. It wasn't about how you maintain and monitor habitat. So we talked about this, this is the during development of the master project we've had these other little phases. We've had some of that you guys saw on the habitat island. This is how they looked when they were first constructed. We have action through increased water so that's just kind of flattened them out. But we still have habitat next. And then a couple other notes. This is an opening. We'll visit this area where we talk about, we have to have recreation public access. There's key ops to encourage people where to go. And then the idea was to collaboratively develop the plan for Owens Lake. Have something that's flexible, sustainable, but integrate, as you've heard, not only what are those measures, but maintaining habitat value, try to build things that are technically as possible, protect cultural resources. And think about, this is a good economic opportunity for the county to have birdies come through. So how do we interface with that? All the while trying to reduce the amount of water. So I'm gonna, there's a question about habitat 2 to 1 mile. I figured so I put some slides together and kind of drilled down on that. So before we modeled habitat, the idea was first, well, we just got the birdies. Birds would tell us, right? Well, that's great. What if we don't show them? How, what does that mean, right? The other thing was the habitat was measured by amount of water that went out. And that's okay, water is quite related, but it's not the only thing. So what are some of the other factors that are important for habitat? That's what led into the habitat value. So we incorporated all of the important habitat parameters, salinity, I mentioned, water, that island for each of these fields that we mentioned. So the idea was to have a flexible framework to how do you create this habitat? We inadvertently created it, but if you were actually designing habitat, you've got a lot of natural experiments to tell you not only literature, but on all his legs to say, this is what they want. And so that was parameterized in the habitat model that it gives you ability to enhance areas if you so desire. And it's predictive, right? You ask the bird why it, you can't ask the bird why it likes an area, but you put this into the model and you can understand, you build something in a certain way, you can understand how birds respond to it. So it was predicted to be a very, a very important aspect of habitats in the building model. I'm sure you guys have all worked with biologists at one point or another. It is to be a fairly subjective science. So this is a tool that was collaboratively developed. I put this up here to emphasize this, because it's a very important measuring thing of habitat that's out there. I did a couple of other things. We developed a collaboratively with Eastern Sierra Audubon, Calvish and Wildlife, California State Lands Commission. We also had various experts in the field come out and I'll go through it for you to make sure are we getting all the pieces together? Make a plant society. Make a plant society to get all the non-aplottish habitat. And the other important point I want to make is it's meant to be intuitive. I'll tell you more later, but you don't have to have a background in multivariate statistics to understand how it works. So anyone who understands what shore we're going to go, yeah, that makes sense. So I'll give you some examples here and there. But I want to show you some photos of what is kind of enhanced habitat. The idea is you create islands. Do you nest origin habitats next to losing habitats? And so unless there are a bunch of northern shovelers using these old remnants of the islands that are great features. On the right there, another idea is shallow water. Shallow water is what most of our grids prefer. So if you can grade a pond to make more shallow water, you can increase the habitat value. But by the way, you do save water at the same time. And at the bottom, this is representing what we already talked about, dynamic water management. These shores that come through in fall, they come through in the non-vest season. So water's drying down and it's generally pretty dry time period. But if you can add a little bit of water to maintain some of those inverts that were there before you dried down, you can have a net habitat value by just keeping not only of the inverts still there, they're often, they're concentrated, thank you. Concentrated, so it's a great resource where you can put a little bit of water if you don't want to do it during the best season, target for the use of habitat. So the overall goal is to use this instead of another water slide or a number of birds, but to use this model to understand habitat and integrate that idea. So you can understand what you need to do to manage for habitat targets. Some of the habitat parameters you'll talk about, what you want to create an area for water depth. The only adjustable project, if you've done adaptive management plans, you're often going, I don't have enough leverage to control. Always like you can control virtually everything, right? So you have a lot of things you can do. There are always constraints and there are two. But you have way more than a lot of other projects. But it's a model, and so we have to have integrated monitoring and adaptive management to make sure it's coming forward. So our goal is to use the habitat model for creating habitat when you still go out of calipers and make sure that in terms of performance, is it to get working. I'd hit this in terms of predicted design. So what do you want to do if you want to enhance an area? The idea is you enhance an area, you increase the habitat value, you maintain the overall habitat value. You might have the same groups here, but a marginal area you could dry up and use some water was. That is maintaining overall habitat value. So I want to hit this last point, underscore it. This framework gives us that opportunity to do new waterless, water-efficient dust control measures. But we have to monitor them to understand how they impact habitat. And to make sure they're not just impacting habitat, but so many things might have additional impacts. So whatever this panel recommends and whatever you need for one of the important points while this collaboration can't be done in a vacuum, it has to be integrated to this overall framework. So that's kind of a big picture. I have a little time. I wanted to go and talk a little bit about the habitat model. So here's kind of on the right, the conceptual way the habitat model is put together. Water best humidity, water availability, habitat islands, geography, vegetation, those are kind of key things. Those are all evaluated for each of our fields. The goal is essentially between zero, not good at all, to one perfect. And so these are all mathematical in a great way. This is conceptual on the right. But you use this model into managed, run across various management areas. And so on the left there, those are our management areas. Those are our two-dimension CCA. So that's what the model is run across as you can follow that. So here is the rule set of the model. I won't drill down into the many, many details, but I'll mention the parameters. So the first one, water depth, these are all, this is why this is intuitive. If you know that snow clover is like shallow water and zero to 10 centimeters, you can understand that this is telling you, zero is not very worthwhile. One is as good as it gets. So, hey, the model says shallow water is what water is like. Salinity. In monitoring, we know what salinity, in-birth humidity that folders like. So this is kind of a modern telling. We don't like fresh, we don't like super staining water. Using water availability, they breathe here, they generally leave in the fall, the open winter elsewhere. Water in the fall, they can care less. Water in the spring when they're reading is very important. Dry area, that's important for nesting. Microchipographic release, they like release that is about the same size as them, kind of camouflages. So that is a important parameter in microchipography. In vegetative extent, they like, they obviously don't like vegetation. Too much vegetation, they leave the area. So that's an intuitive part. You've done a lot of running the model since 2010, and you have a lot of bird data. So using that, the first model was very expert-based. We've done two, now three iterations now. And so a lot of the metadata modeling is to, how do you combine all these variables? What is the most important? And so this is the equation currently for the snowy slope of how does that model. And using the geometric mean, the dry area and water depth, they're not really averaging, they don't make up for each other. The geometric mean helps balance that out. So salinity, water depth and water availability are kind of combined. Salinity is the most important part of this. And then the other one, the microchipographic release that you stand in dry area, those are all more nesting variables in the necromon. So this model can be run at various time points, understanding what it is doing, and it can be run on all of these different areas when you have a monogram all down. So when you do that, you can understand the habitat value and then on the left there that's showing the habitat value of each of these polygons during like an average of between 2012 and 2014. And so it's an older map, so some of these areas didn't exist that even are good, but yellow areas, no marginal habitat, darker is better, and then the really brown is kind of awesome. So you can show, hey, these are good. These are areas that are good for clovers. And then we want to check, the clovers, this doesn't make sense, the clovers seen along the way we see it. And so this is one of the last validation, predicting about 45% of the clover abundance based on this model. Visual size, maybe not the best, but it's pretty amazing to think five variables out of the almost infinite things that clovers could cannot, you're predicting a substantial amount of why a clovers is a generic. You have all the guilt, so just we'll put the validation here on the other guilt, migraine and chauvers, all those chauvers you mentioned. If the model performed even better for those guilt. So on the left, migraine and chauvers, 69% of the variation is predicted, again, an image. So this is from the X-axis, natural log, this is log transform, habitat value, and then the abundance on the Y. So 69% for migraine and chauvers, and then migraine, waterfowl, about 75%. So how does that model predict their abundance based on pack cell elevation of 75%. So I just wanna leave with a couple photos of wildlife. We talk about the common birds, but people always it's in the rarities, for a couple of rarities out there. Everything from flamingos to pressed car cars, to the Owens Lake, Owens Lake is a bit of a, in your county known for getting the oddball bird right back into Death Valley, it's just particular water birds is lost somewhere and end up in Owens Lake. So, yeah, and we have other, I put other non-birds in here, and birds are the reason Owens Lake is well known, but bats, they're used in the areas and the hills around them. Undoubtedly forage, over Owens Lake. We have birds that, like, perigate falcons on the left there that take advantage of all of the great species of small, unsual birds. Here's an inverse that is kind of interesting, how do you know if there's a common here? That's our pressed car car, normally doesn't make it up to any of the county. I think this is the county record, few career in Texas. In the Siegeman's frames, we have amphibians. They're not salt-tallers, but the Siegeman's frames are pretty fresh. And then, I think Mike mentioned lizards. This is not a red-bots lizard, it's actually a desert moira. I found it, if someone were to tell me my back kinds of biology, there's a desert moira on the lake, I would be crazy, but it's the only thing I can tell is it was brought in in a pile of wood crap and paws as deposit are on the lake. And then, here's our sparrow flamingo that's kind of at, it's the region of Africa. So if you didn't get here, I'm telling you how I was going to escape that. But I hung out for a few, hang out with the dolls. It was kind of, it was interesting and that we didn't, the first time we saw it, it was like, I saw a flamingo, like, stop. Yeah, so we didn't believe him, but sure enough, it was an electric flamingo. So yeah, he's kind of paying us around, and what's that? Thank you. Questions from the panel? Yeah, so when you implement this model, how do you weigh the different fields of birds, determine a mix of habitats? So, the sequel house is out there and when you start a project, there's a sequel baseline of what is there at the time of the NLP, right? So what, so the way we use them all now is what was there at the time of the start of the project. And so it's maintaining how does that value get there at the start of the project. And so to have that model of the tool, how much is there? There's just much value. We're going to recreate it in whatever way. And so we used it in many different ways. I think the only one we do around, drill down on in the field with the tools back and back of the project, where we do create that habitat in different ways, and enhance certain areas to maintain how does that value get there. So you want to adjust this? Because when you first started the project, I've used a habitat value all the way. Yeah, all the way, very little. The season springs are what has that value. So the, we call it the reference period. Right before the NLP master project, that kind of sets where we're at base body, but that's kind of a policy thing. Where should the baseline be? I guess it was a bit of an open question, but the idea is you can maintain how does that value do this reference period using that tool of the how does that model? What's the time you've been reflecting that? The reference period we've been using is 12 to 14. And that's the time where we've had a lot of data to really understand how does that value do that. Another question? I know this is just a very far end point, but another thing I've usually usually used is a reference point in the test system. So it seems like based on this model, the shallow water is really important. So is that suggesting that the lake pre-throwning down water wouldn't have been very important but how are these scales that way? Well, pre-only lake historical dive is only lake, I don't know, I mean, yeah, I can't answer that. All we're doing is looking at what's out there with us, people. We have the, you do know what's you pronounce, but they're anecdotal, they're not really quantitative. They're beautiful, they're very short, about five lines. I guess some of the ones you included in the tactic gave a very good sense of context. On it, maybe I wasn't reading it with that in mind, we're doing different scales that were important than the scales that we're doing now. We're about to check those same species separately. I would say, and I don't know what you just said, but there may be more habits out there now with the test project. There was historically on the lake, other than the deep water type things should be based on a lot of time. Yes, that's what I was just trying to get a sense of. A lot of us are suggesting that to me, but I just wanted to make sure. And we have 1% of the world's assets here. 1% of the world's lease assets have to be here. Huge populations, so that's what we're into here. Sorry. So I'm very much encouraged. I mean, how are those, how are those also very important for you essentially trying to make the best progression through that line that you showed the world? So that was just the validation. How they were, a lot of car trees from multiple regressions trying to hold this area into variable content, but there's always interaction and it's a process. We will help a little bit. They're conservation science, they're a short-term person, they report out therapy. You wanna look at that? Yeah. Good. Yeah. All right, but now the other, I mean, so obviously the third fix are these part of this, too. So I guess they're mostly lies, right? So you don't have to worry about how they have connectivity between pools. So do you do a monitoring of those and it's sort of a failure to have birds there because for some reason there's no food there? There's been a lot of work on what environmental parameters do invertebrates respond to. And so those are part of the model, salinity and this water railway and these capability things. The idea is we understand what the invertebrates are responding to and so the parameters, we're not out there measuring invertebrates, we're measuring how does that harm race's interest respond to as well. Not by surprise. Jeff provided the Goldilocks water for them and not too fresh, not too salty. Made this. Yeah. But they're sure friends would be like, they can't jump from one place to another. No, they can't, but it's a lot of, I don't know, I totally understand it either. They're in all the pond. They do not breed enough on them. They are, they insist, they insist, they're very tolerant to keep drying out. This is slow, so they're kind of adapted to getting up in feathers, so they go around. So once you have them in the pond and they, they call it out of a, yeah. We've recently shown that Brian can be transported AOA. Yeah. See, the work that was done on the tower was kept mono by Margaret Peggay. Well, it's just the University of Connecticut. Long time ago, she found that Brian flies were the primary team to them, so they're certainly a third-in star of the community. And then the Brian shrimp, they would literally starve to death if they had actually fed some of the tower of Brian shrimp and where they just ate and ate and ate and still first-in-dive starvation. So the tremendous risk of the Brian flying is a pretty particular tip to them. It was critical. I do agree it might go for Brian shrimp. They can also have a, they can, it's just, they can extend them, they're intensive, they can go longer tests, deal with trying to get maximum of nutrition out of marginal food sources. So then I guess it was my other, so there's, if there is, I'm not wrong with you thinking there is a sign that it's matched between what's considered the dust season and when you have to have the birds would like to use water particularly in late summer. It's pretty close, right? There's dust season where I need to draw out August and September. Waterfowl works out well. They start really coming in to come back over. But the early shore migration is where it is. And that's where we do this, the NMR management project. We've been trying to pull water off areas that aren't limited during the fall. And then we can use some of that water to make up how that value. And why it's super important is it's very dry. So you can maintain it by applying that water to target the data that's dry. That wouldn't be a challenge. So you use no water. So there's some efforts to fill that hole. So we have, that was the first, you know, water coming in beyond dust. So the question earlier about habitat, gold warming and I think they were doing a comment about declines in habitat species and birds. How does the model account for that? I don't know, I want to know a lot of them. Well, so the way this, I guess two bars to answer. In short, it doesn't need you. All you can control is the how the value moves. Whether the bird, there's 100 birds or 1,000 birds. That's dependent on so many other parts. So when you validate, you have to understand that. But the only thing you have to control is the habitat of a little bird. So the bigger picture is the model can be used in whatever way. If we, when we sort of want to target other things that are more, that are more threatened elsewhere, we can use that model to understand, okay, we need to produce more of that habitat. That is the goal. So that's sort of how it's used is a larger question. But it's an opportunity if we need to sort of think about how we might end the minute. But in essence, we're not worried about bird counts, right? We're just worried about what we control and how is that done. The question is for the family. So just a follow-up with that. But from that perspective, it can be used as an area of planning for, we've got another five years out period, and you can't fit much area shallow flooded. They can tell you maybe where the priority area is plus for habitat would be here. Is that? Yeah, it can be used in any number of ways on what is the rest area. If you really, and so the question I think still going on, you have to keep everything in control so that that might not be an option, but there's different ways to think about how to prioritize if you need to. Well, we have Stephanie's card up. Oh, okay. Well, I'm trying to understand how the supplies on an aerial basis. So if they have that capability index, tells you to have that quality per acre, and then in a planning, do you walk into a scenario, like say they decide you want to go to challenge, which is a very low habitat, then do you back calculate out how to maximize that to somewhere else to get a base habitat index across the total acreage? And for bird habitat, do we know that you need to have certain amount of acreage or is it really high quality, small areas versus moderate quality, large areas? I'm trying to understand that. So we've got, I think there's two kind of questions there. One is how is that acreage and one is, I think I heard a lot of people squeeze in and how does that value add to the right access. So the acreage is like the index value of an acreage. So you kind of use your camera value acreage, right? It's quality times quality, right? So you can get how much value in an area. But you're doing it by polygon. So you can, we'll have our, I showed you all the polygons. So the polygons are the PTMs that are some management units. And so we do it within those. You can still divide them. So generally a project is four PTMs or something and we want to save as much water as possible. And so we use that model to say, well, given, you know how much is there, how do you recreate that with less area? I mean, you integrate with the model and maximize the habitat value. And remember the model is empirically derived. So it's kind of set on what you've observed. So you generally don't have the option of kind of like over like this thing. This is, oh yeah, I'm totally going to get a thousand birds in this square inch. It's empirically derived. So if you were to really maximize the value, like you're set on a, what is measured in the past, right? And so if you maximize everything to one, like the conceptual, that's kind of small. If you do that and you have point three, you maximize everything to one, that's a small area and still maintaining the habitat value. Generally, one is completely conceptual. This dream is not feasible to create. But that's how to, just to second part of your question, kind of what is enough or what is, you know, how much you can do. You do this by project scale, like what? So, so in the past, well, so I'm in the, all I have is kind of in the past. The project is going forward and fully developed. So I'm answering this in the past, is we have kind of a project area. These are the goals. This is what we can do. And we use that to find, we talk a little about how we do that phase seven area. It's very, what TWA squared kind of looks like. So you have all these backing of your project and can use it as that framework. The idea is to do that in some way, like why? Like doing these little smaller projects kind of in a lake-like hot spring. Is that it? Yeah. Other questions from the chairman? Well, so I guess that was really the question I would, I expand on that a little bit. You could use this concept to look at significant changes across the entire lake as far as water management. And you use this. But you haven't done that yet. You've been using it on kind of a plot scale or project scale so far. There has been planning efforts to look at how, what is feasible, how this might be explained. I need to present someone who's involved with these. I don't remember, I saw this presentation, I've seen things in the past that kind of show, you know, some options. So we've been looking at how that might be done. I want to add to that. Okay. There is one of the things we notice in our analysis that when I was first introduced to this concept on a lake-wide scale, it almost sounds like I can do anything anywhere as long as I meet through physical parameters. So the number of options I have for dust and fire areas are pretty high at 30, depending on how you want to do your mosaics. But that's not the reality. There's certain DCA dust and fire areas that have, are better suited for as far as there are already there. And not good to change that to tillage and then change or put their home somewhere else. But that, so it limits my options. You're doing, you're trying to do, look at all your options, a DCL all of a sudden, DCA that has good polar, it's often the limit to polar types of change. Well, I think that there's less risk if you're just trying to enhance what's already good than if you're trying to, you're going to be recreated over here. There's a lot more good, because you know a lot, but we never know. So do you have, or it's probably mostly in your head because we all do that, but do you have some more of notes on sort of that decision tree in your head of the first thing to look at at a site to figure out what you're asking for? Well, we have notes to look at in fact operation. They know what works well, where. So they give us their highest, but you absolutely should do their recommendation to what you should never do in that area. They know that some of the areas are not the candidates for tillage. Then we talked to Jess, what do you see? We call it DCA by DCA, what do you think should happen here? Then we look at the aging infrastructure, then we look at COS, and we actually use the habitability model to predict where we're gonna end up with the project. And we're able to estimate water conservation, the three legs of the stool, you know, make sure they're all there. And we ran hundreds of iterations to be able to develop the project. So that's the best answer I can give you. Great answer. How often is that process done? We ran two iterations last week, you know, actually. So I mean, it's not going to cross it. It is. Can you use this again to think about impacts of waterless control measures? Water is a big factor in your appetite. I just wonder how far, I know you're thinking about doing it, but I mean, how? Yeah, no, I skewed with the TV2 project that was designed to save water over roughly 2,000 acres and make it waterless. And so, can you talk to us about that? Yeah, yeah, so you mentioned how much that habitability was out there. I remember we talked about one of the ideas of what you see as your chosen. Is there relatives that go habitability, less habitability than that? More potential water saving. So those were the areas that were targeted and then you understand what's there and you can iteratively find out how much water-based dust control you need to make up for the habitat value that was very interesting there. And how did you think of that? With 2DTAs, there's about 400 or so acres of the four square miles that was redesigned and maximized to enhance the habitat value. So that is a question you had in the minutes we get. So, what do you know about the suitability if you have vegetation or the habitat weight? So, as you looked at putting in different types of vegetation, what do you know about what would be best for actually finding the suitability? Yeah, so I didn't talk about how to find out how it's not modeled, but we had the influence idea of putting that. There's a branch of Santa Ana, the town of Brigham, that's where you put it in. So the four components cover is obviously an important one to the structure, the height, and important for nest invertebrates and different types of levels, or types of levels that can be more species, that we rank based on the number of species in there. As you get more species, you get flowering plants, you get a connector for alkali keeper, and then the fourth one is, the one that is pretty flat, and so this is based on California rapid assessment tool was a measure of topographic diversity, but instead of being flat, more topographic diversity, the more opportunity for the bird and animals, and like that. So those are all the ingredients. The one I think you were putting, I guess there's two, in speaking diversity and structure. And so those are incorporated, the more diverse and more structured, those are raised based on kind of how much you can do. So that isn't the, how is that modeling? Do you see me in here in the conflicts, let me just draw one, potentially for you, the things you said earlier was, I believe, because a flow where those particular like, plants a lot taller than it is, is not something about some size. Yeah, if we think about those control, one of the objectives is, if it's a plant taller, maybe with a wind shadow and better dust control or a plant cover or those types of conflicts, common or rare? Well, I mean, you can't make every yield happy at the same time, so there's that kind of balance. If you're going for outdoor meadows, I guess we've got, in the framework we have, we're trying to maintain what's out there, we have significantly more of the alkaline meadow vegetation out there. So the framework we're working on, we don't need any more to sort of maintain what's out there. So the vegetation is really, and it was used this way in kind of phase seven A, a water conservation dust control. Always like kind of the landing factor of what you need to maintain are water-based dust control for children to walk out. We have a lot more vegetation than was out there. So it would be a great, great, great dust control, but to yield that are kind of limiting, they don't use it there. Thank you. The other thing that I just wanted to clear on was the issue of adjacency of different types of habitat. So not just the continuity of habitat over large, but the adjacency of different types of habitat. Is that probably the planning goal or do you see that in the future? We played with kind of how we might do that. It never came out in something as small as, so it's kind of an extra model for under. But the idea is, you do want to put, you don't want to put habitat in the desert is like nothing much, right? So you do want to try to think about pumping those things together. And that very much ties into that. Other questions from the panel? Yeah, and I'm probably reminding you of this, because it's something I'm seeing governor out there. You see some of the vegetation in the area, as the water setting that is controlled with dust is sort of managing it too actively. But I mean, it's also sort of a monocultural sort of, I mean, you're wondering if they're sending to God actually creating that value of vegetation there. We're going to, sorry, we're going to visit an area where you really did that, try to increase not just the model of what the forest is being structured, but try to integrate it into, thanks to ponds, wherever possible. You can even use gravel in ways that, if it's not a monocultural gravel, you can integrate gravel as kind of an area that the vegetation of origin you have has to be a research area. So trying to integrate the dust control measures that can be difficult to manage, but with an effort to try to put all these pieces together to increase diversity, while still having the function of those dust control. Questions from the panel members in the room? Anything from Vicky on the phone? No? Do you want to, do you mind the question earlier? The question was how does Audubon Society use dust control measures to avoid the use of water? And I think actually, Mr. Norton sort of gave the answer and the answer is that we're not opposed to that in any way. Water doesn't necessarily equate with habitat. And I think it was pointed out earlier, there are areas of the lake that have a lot of water that don't have a lot of suitable habitat, but we have absolutely no problem removing water from those areas because they don't impact habitat. The point is that the initial development of habitat as the dust control project rolled out was purely incidental. It was just the side effect from the use of water to control nuts. There's a big difference between that kind of incidental side effect and a more managed effect or a consequence of using water. We think that if you're more mindful in the way that you use water to sustain an habitat that you can realize some significant water savings without having to do damage to the habitat just that it never happened before. It wasn't thought of initially until it was kind of a new concept to apply to the lake. But we are not of the opinion that because there was water put here once and it had to be put here forever or in the same quantity or at the same time. It's an unfolding kind of story that used to make me crazy when we talked about this to begin with that I wanted this to be talked about in terms of a natural place. And it took me a long time to recognize that the fact that it was the very opposite of that was the biggest lever that we had in terms of figuring out the answer to a future for the lake. There were so many things that were managed that instead of worrying about the fact that they were managed, the idea was to worry about how they were managed for what purpose and to do that in the most mindful way we could. I think there's a huge amount of promise to that that we're just barely beginning to track the surface. Thank you. Final thoughts on the panel. Right? Well, we aren't right on time. And so we're scheduled for 15 minutes right? And then we'll come back for presentation at the poppy hours three o'clock. So let's read to me next. And thank you, Joel. What's going on there right now? Yes. Okay. So I'll read to me and then begin with our final speaker today. We'll hear about potential climate impacts from Theresa Kim of L.A. Department of Water and Power. So Kim, the floor is yours. And we can't hear any audio. Hi, this is Theresa Kim from Water Resources Development. Great, we can't hear anything now. Okay. So is the PowerPoint loaded on everyone's end? And we can see your title slot. Okay, great. So I'm gonna provide you a brief overview of strictly the climate change studies that we've done at DWP and other studies that's related to the Eastern Sierra that we're studying in order to, with our objective is to help plan for water resource development for the city. So just some quick background to start off. Our area of interest that we're looking at is not the whole Sierra Nevada watershed. It's strictly on only the Eastern Sierra because this watershed is what feeds water to our LA Aqueduct and that provides water over to the city of Los Angeles. A few studies that I'm gonna be speaking about today is back in 2011, DWP completed a climate change study on the whole Eastern Sierra with our consultant Tetra Tech. They spent two years looking at data from the later half of the 20th century. So basically from 1950 to 2009, they collected historical data and applied that to the global climate models and greenhouse emissions that were available back then in order to determine the projections in precipitation and temperature that would affect over the next, this century, the 21st century. I'm also gonna look at the latest UCLA study that was conducted in 2018. And that one's a little different because it looks at the whole Sierra Nevada area. And then also I'll give you guys a quick update or in the process of working with UCLA again to update that 2011 study we did with Tetra Tech because of all the changes that has occurred over the last 10 years, we need to see if modeling, current modeling and the latest science that's available today would confirm those predictions and projections that I'll be talking about today or it's gonna show us what the changes are and how we have to alter our planning processes. So this is the data that Tetra Tech was looking at. So over the course of 50 years, temperature was taken at different locations in the Sierra Nevada watershed area. And so if you look at the area that's circled, that's the average taken over 1,000 meters to 3,500 meters. And temperatures range from about, let's see, temperatures range from about zero degrees Celsius to about 16 degrees Celsius. So this is the baseline I'm gonna use when I talk about the projections that we see over the 21st century after modeling was conducted. And also this is the precipitation that they use in their modeling as well from the same elevation range, the precipitation range from about zero centimeters to about approximately 100 centimeters. And this is also the baseline that we use in our projections as well. And so one more quick overview that I provide right here is with those temperature and precipitation in a historical period, this is a representation of the amount of runoff that was seen over in Owens Valley. So we have here the pattern of basically a couple of years of wet years. So the average you see is 100%. Anything above that is extreme wet and anything below that is dry to drought years. So our extreme wet was back in 1969, that's about 800 to 900,000 acre feet per year. And our extreme dry was about 210. And also we see here that when we have dry, we have it for consisting years about four to five years. And it shows us in our latest dry years from about 2012 to 2015, we only got about 200 acre feet of runoff through the Owens Valley. So with that information, we were able to apply that data into the Tetra Tech 2011 study. So the study period that our objective, like I said, was we wanted to see what the temperature for precipitation runoff was gonna occur over the 21st century. So from 2010 to 2099, we used 16 global climate models that was available back then, applied the two extreme greenhouse gas emission, which was the A2 carbon equivalent and the B1. So B1 is the lower end and A2 was extreme end. That available model was used into the variable infiltration capacity model, and then applied it integrated into the LASM, which is the DWP Aqueduct model in order to see how much runoff was gonna be flowing through the Aqueduct. So with that information, here again, I'm showing you the different emissions that were available to us. And we only picked the A2 model. So A2 is about 830 parts a million per volume of carbon dioxide. And B1, as you can see, is the green one all the way at the bottom. So we're applying two measures to the global climate models. So there's 16 global climate models to see what the extreme conditions we would get. And so this is the result that we'd get. So we break it down into three segments over the 21st century. So the first segment is from 2010 to 2039. The middle is 2040 to 2069. And then the end range of the 21st century is 2070 to 2099. So I'm showing you the extreme temperature, which is the A2 greenhouse gas emission model. And the temperature basically increases up to 4.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century. So that basically correlates to, for every two degrees we see an increase of temperature, we're getting snowpacked decreases in about 20% to up to 50%. So in the first century, we're not seeing much temperature increase. But as you hit the middle from 2040 to 2069, you're gonna get about two degrees of temperature increase and four degrees as we head towards the later half of the 21st century. And so when you get towards the later half, you're gonna see up to about 33% to, up to 33 to 50% of snowpack reduction by the end of the 21st century. What that also correlates to is precipitation. So we took that data and you can see the range of the precipitation which is about 600 millimeters. But over time, we're graphing all the global climate models as seen here. Over time, by the end of the 21st century, we get a decrease of up to 10% in precipitation. So in the beginning of the 21st century, we're not gonna see much going on. But by 2040, we're gonna see about 5% decrease in precipitation. And by the end from 2070 to 2099, we're gonna get to see about to 10% in precipitation. And in terms of precipitation, I think what we're gonna see more is because of the warming and temperature increases, we're gonna see more rain than snow at higher elevations. And that would definitely affect our runoff. So here it is, what I'm talking about is the rain to snow ratio. So the rain to snow ratio we see is gonna tremendously increase because like I said, we're gonna see higher amount of rainfall than snow due to the temperature and earlier runoff as well. So for taking as we're staying upon the A2 greenhouse gas emission scenario, if you take a look at the time graph from 1950 to 2010, that's our average runoff that's shown in the red line, which is the historical Owens Valley runoff. And our projections from 2010 to 2099, runoff has tremendously decreased because you're seeing more rain and it gets, and it's being stored less. And then we also see losses due to evaporation as well. Okay, so this is a summary of what I explained to you among the three graphs so far. So the historical baseline that we looked at was from 1950 to 2019 from 2009, we've seen about 620 acre feet of water a year. And as we progress as the temperature increases, you see how much the runoff has tremendously decreased over time because of the snow and runoff ratio. So precipitation is being decreased from zero to up to 10% by the end of the 21st century. And the temperature, again, goes from zero degrees to up to five degrees increased by the end of the 21st century, okay? So overall to summarize that again, so we're seeing up to, I was speaking in Celsius, so in comparison, that's about four degrees Celsius, translates to about almost eight degrees Fahrenheit, warming by the end of the 21st century. We're seeing about 50% up to 50% loss in snow path, but that doesn't occur right now. That doesn't occur until about the later half of the 21st century. And then due to the higher warming levels that we see, we're gonna get more rain and less snow. So there's a less opportunity for us to actually take that water and use it. And then we also beginning to see that the snow is melting much earlier. We see shifting in about up to 25 days for a month, compared to before where it would melt about, I would say about in March or April, we're seeing snow begin to melt around February. So what challenges that happens to us is now we also have to deal with trying to store the water, where do we place the water? That also affects the water quality as there's more water that's being conveyed down and flowing capacities of the aqueduct. And it also affects the power system that's part of us because there's 12 small hydro systems that's along the aqueduct and it generates about 4,700 kilowatt per hour. So as we see less runoff that's gonna be occurring, the power system will also be losing power as well. So there's many challenges that comes with all these major changes as we can see with different greenhouse gas emissions that we're applying in the modeling. So like I was speaking about before, we have many operational challenges. Again, we have higher runoff like last in the latest wet year of 2017. We had about 800,000 acre feet of water that was being conveyed down for us and we didn't know where to store that water. And then we're also dealing with extreme dry years where we only get about a quarter of that amount. And it only is about 200 acre feet of water. And when we have dry years, we have it from a consecutive two to four years of dry year. And when we have wet years, we see it in patterns of only about two years for every decade that we have on hand. So another study that we've been looking at was this latest study that was completed by UCLA and it was published in 2018. They didn't specifically look at the eastern Sierra like that was our interest. They looked at the whole Sierra Nevada region and their purpose and their study was to see what the latest greenhouse gas emissions were and what their impact was, similar to us on temperature, no pack and the runoff. Their studies and their findings basically conclude that if there wasn't gonna be any greenhouse emission mitigations like what we have with the Paris climate or trying to meet current regulations like AB 32, and what the city is trying to do is reduce our greenhouse emissions is if we don't reduce that at all, we're gonna see increase of temperatures of up to seven degrees Fahrenheit. And we're gonna see snowpack reductions of 64% and a shift in snowpack about 50 days. So this study that UCLA conducted sort of clearly fits with our 2011 climate study. So our climate study determined that it was gonna be about eight degrees Fahrenheit and their studies determined seven degrees. So it's pretty close in temperature increase. And then as far as the 64% reduction in snowpack, we, our studies show about 50% reduction. So the numbers are pretty close in saying that snowpack reduction is gonna decrease up to at minimum 50% by the end of the 21st century. And as far as the shift in snow melt, this one for UCLA shows 50 days, for our study it shows 25 days. So there's double the amount at least. So there's a saying that snow melt's gonna occur at least two months ahead, where ours is about one month ahead. And their study is also looking at higher elevations. Our study capped our height at East in Sierra about 3,500. They're looking at all the way up to the Tahoe region, which reaches about 8,000 feet. So with both of these studies that we have already in our pocket, what you feel, what DWP is doing so far is we've contracted and we're working with UCLA to basically, they'll take their Sierra Nevada study and they're gonna zoom in on the regional section of East in Sierra and see what they can find out for us to see if they can apply the latest greenhouse emissions and the latest global climate models and see what predictions they have to either confirm our 2011 climate change study or to update it and show us what the trend is. Is there gonna be higher levels of temperature and higher precipitation? Are we gonna see the same results that we see in 2011? So overall, we can tell from all the studies that's been going on that with greenhouse gas emissions and that we're gonna get a decrease in snowpack in extreme years, we're gonna get more rain and less snow and near the end of the 21st century, we might see longer periods of drought. So that would be about four to five years of extreme drought and on Owens Lake, when we saw extreme drought, we saw about 200 acre feet of water that was run off through that region. So we're gonna see that again or we're gonna have a lower amount of runoff over those years. So overall than that, I think most studies have confirmed that the climate conditions are impacted by the greenhouse gas and it's only with the latest science that we can hone down and see what exactly that temperature is and what that runoff is that's gonna affect us in planning for the future of our water resources. Okay, so that concludes my presentation. I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you, let's turn this up for the first question. So it could be a question for you or other people in the room. So you've got to result in these studies. How are you integrating them in terms of your dust control planning and just the long-term resources here and how they're gonna integrate this in general management of the resources up here? I can answer that, Teresa, if you want to design it or something. So the way it's tied to all dust control is the fact that we, overall, hope for the department is to have a sustainable water future. Currently, a large percentage of the water that water demands or water management is meant by procurement of water from a metropolitan water district and that water comes from the Northern Delta, the Big Water Project or Colorado River. So we need to reduce, we're in the process of reducing our dependency and that kind of enhance our local water resource supply. Now, part of that, expanding our portfolio is here at Owens-Lake Monument Center, water here at Owens-Lake. And that's roughly how it's tied into that. There's obviously a big effort in downtown that has already been undertaken to conserve water as part of the portfolio and to expand our resources with the Sunwater Capture and Groundwater Pumping. But it's still, to meet our goals or our state department and our local department conserve water, we have to continue trying to conserve water here at Owens-Lake. So the timing issues don't present any other management concerns or possibilities. Timing of runoff and smell melt and the right. Yes, so it does. So if you're very specific to that, we are seeing, we've gotten lucky in 2017 and this year, we're seeing our winter's kind of shortening and shrink. The best thing for the department would be to have a prolonged winter where the snowpack can melt gradually and can be conveyed in the aqueduct, the aqueduct has a certain capacity. If all of a sudden we get high temperatures and more rain on the snowpack we have, then we'll have a tremendous peak flow that cannot be handled by our aqueduct. And what we've done and learned in 2017 and even this winter was that we have to maximize, because we pretty much fill up all of our reservoirs in anticipation of this early. And then we maximize the delivery down the aqueduct. The very next thing is to spread as much water in the Owens Valley to replenish our groundwater aquifers. And whatever's left over, and luckily in both years there was not much left over, the rest would come down to the lake. In 2017 our projections were, without anticipating what we could spread in the valley, we were anticipating up to 200,000 acre feet of potential snowmelt runoff coming down to the river and a peak of about 1,200 TFS to 1,500 TFS coming at the lake at once, which put a lot of the infrastructure in jeopardy. We did a lot of modeling with the help of C.H. Plum Hill to show what parts of the lake would be inundated and underwater. So in response to that, we protected key infrastructure, put riprap and some of the bottlenecks, reinforced berms, protected our pump station. We made a massive effort, we learned a lot from 2017 from 2018, they had a better understanding of how much we could actually spread. And we know that the severity of what we thought was once a 30 or 50 year storm event could be managed more easily because we knew we could spread about 150,000 acre feet to 200,000 in the actual valley, which leaves very little to come to the lake impact. As you may know, I might have mentioned this in earlier presentation, the landowners of the state and we indemnified a mining company that is right next to the brine pool, meaning we cannot flood their operations and we cannot flood the brine pool. So we're really not allowed to allow the, and we have to maintain our destination application. Anything that puts those things at risk, at risk is something that you just can't do. What are some of the key points there? Let's go to John Tyler and then Valerie and Rick. Okay, thank you for the presentation. Sorry, Dorita. So I guess I just want to keep falling up on the high end of the news with saying, our high name, sorry. This idea that sort of a 10% reduction in precipitation is unexpected for the end of the century that's pretty common and what I've seen from Northern California as well. The whole Sacramento River Delta system is that as well. It's not a huge number and 10% reduction is not enormous, but it's pretty specific. But this whole thing about timing, I think is the drama that the department has to deal with. So you're able to spread this year and previous two years ago. What's the mechanism to get that spread water back into the canal, to the aqueduct later in the season when you'll need the water? Is there planning or both, I'm looking at, I mean, also to reset? Is there a long-term strategy for managing earlier runoff in the valley and storage in the valley? I don't have a good answer to that, to be honest. If you made it, Jeff, you deal more with watershed issues on your valley. Do you know more about it? I can't think of a long-term strategy, but when you spray it, that comes back to the water to the river and then also grab water and then pump it. We'll try to do that. I think that Dr. Dorad, I think probably after this year, your question is more thoroughly than I could ever. It would seem like using the valley as the new reservoir, but including then pumping a groundwater back out or pulling it out and getting it into the river and probably pumping groundwater as much and you can control when you get it back and it's the aqueduct later on. Yeah, that's mentioned in the book right now. It's as far as longer, how that might change. I think that's important to respect the managing the dust control here, significantly, is how that early runoff is handled. So just on that, I mentioned some of the canals of the Bill 3WPWP, those are put in the service to rent. So we have the balance of where the bishops that's rents way out across the river and then to on the east side of the, they need to get a service on the east side to broaden the service. I think it's first time. So if we take it out of service, just grab water on the east side of the valley. Jason, are you aware of some of the water we spread? Are we just going to pump some of that out here? I think we are, but I'm not really familiar with anything else with a pumping plant. So I don't want to go to comment on exactly how that works, but we do have a volume that we can pump from now on. We have the infrastructure to pump as well as place. And the last, you know, this year and the point that we see is that there's a lot more water in the water here. Like Jeff mentioned from the river, the alluvial fans, all the creeks. So there's the water that we're going to recharge substantially for the best. I just want to follow up a question on that and maybe not be the right audience for the question, but with respect to the new groundwater, groundwater law for the basin, are there impediments or are there showstoppers in that, if you guys know of, that impact, impact the ability to pump water back out? I'm not sure I'm going to do that. That's the thing. That's good. Well, yeah, the long-term water drainage, which is what manages pumping up in Owens Valley, is considered adjudicated. So we don't have management in place for Owens Valley groundwater. My question is somewhat close. I'm going to just do a quick add-on. Excuse me, I said there is still the question of what will use the groundwater under the Owens Lakes Offset, and where is this Grand Canyon County and city about the water we move bodies to Owens Lake? The party put that aside to go study the groundwater, but that's still an outstanding, something in the future that we'll have to look at. Sorry. Don't worry. If my question is building on the other questions here, for a lot of management, the key is not for average progression of climate change in the spring here. So I feel like you've done a really nice job in terms of the really wet years and how you guys might handle it. One question with that is, is there concern about the groundwater rising and killing the vegetation? Because you talked right about that level being run in. I think we, Gary, correct me if I'm wrong, but we got to rely on our drainage systems and our drainage management units. You're going to say DMU a lot today to kind of keep the water levels down within those kind of vegetation. That potential does exist, definitely. And that's something we protected that some of the managed areas that we might see tomorrow in T-36. We've done some aversion ditches for some of the run-ups that just come down. And then it's now flipping to the other side of the extreme on the ground here. What type of planning might you have in place for when there are even more severe droughts? I think the districts and TWP have already done a lot of work to that end. I think TWP Village, TWP Square, and some of the other water fishing bus controls that were out there and the state allowing us to do additional gravel and then giving us more flexibility for the results of them understanding the shortages. In 2015, I believe a lot. And Dr. Dharadmi just pointed in his presentation that the regulatory requirements, the water demands for the valley came first and the delivery to LA came second. The aqueduct was blocked off and there wasn't no delivery to LA. So the districts allowing us flexibility from intelligence, that might have to happen on a more grander scale if there is a shortage to the point where there's just not enough water to put on the lake or anywhere else. Duff control can happen with the water on this method. And that's just the fact that will have to be impacted right here. Yeah, but will we pull back if things improve? Yeah, so they have to be flexibility built in. And with that, you know, with the potential groundwater pumping for under the lake, was that caused even more rapid lots of water so that you can't shallow flood? That is still being analyzed. There's a groundwater work group that's developing resource protection protocols for all of the concerned types of resources that might be impacted everything from water quality, ground, the settlement of the ground to impact to, you know, groundwater dependent vegetative dunes. And there's a lot of triggers and thresholds being developed that show that that DWP does not pump more than it should. But there's no set minimum on those conversations. Great, then, Scott. Up to now, there's a discussion all over the supply. But if the temperature's going to go to a full degree, we've got the transpiration off the lake. It's going to go up a lot. And there's hydrologists hesitate because we know a lot more about how much that's going to be. But I'm wondering what consideration has been made for that going into the future. Because if you're going to have less water, you're also going to have higher amount of transpiration. It's an agreement that's been considered. I would say, no, we have not projected future needs to be on increased temperatures like that. We haven't put plan in place for that. Definitely a concern. My question is pretty simple. I know that you already have a few reservoirs up the O-1 trip. Let's see how can you build more reservoirs and dedicate some of those for control on the lake? Anybody got an answer to that? Very difficult. The reservoirs are pretty simple. You can see the amount of water on your balcony and the amount of water on the lake. There is a lot of water on the lake. So when you spray that water, it goes through the soil. It's going to leave salts from the soil. And the water quality is going to be great. You can store that on the surface. It might be a little bit better from the standpoint of water quality. What would be the impediment? You said it would be very difficult to do. Is it a matter of giving the land from private owners to building additional reservoirs, especially in the state of California, and getting permits? I think it would be really hard to do that. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I think it would be an uphill battle to try and do that. You're obviously wins again. Yes. Let's focus on the questions from the panel, from the panel where I have been externally. Any other questions from the panel? Anything from Venki on the phone? Okay, I'm not hearing anything. Do we have any public requests for public comment? No. I'm a local resident. I was born here. I devoted nearly 30 years by life. I'm a local resident. I was born here. I've lived here for 20 years by life. I've been a project that keeps the rest of this world involved with about 10 years of the story. I didn't come to this. I haven't involved. I just wanted to see how this was going. I'm impressed. Please do like your heart tells you to do, but your brain tells you. Thank you. We don't have any other requests for public comment. And so with that, we've reached the end of the agenda for the open session for today. So I'll formally adjourn the meeting. And then we'll make registral plans for tonight. I know that tomorrow morning we will also have four states of the north portion of the way. And do you think we can start you from here instead of the same schedule as today? And we'll look at the number we just left. So thanks to all the speakers throughout the afternoon session. And we stand adjourned.