Posts tagged western
More Boulder Creek Reopened
May 3rd
At 5 p.m. today, May 2, the City of Boulder and Boulder County Sheriff’s Office will open an additional section of Boulder Creek from Broadway to the bridge at Arapahoe Avenue near 38th Street (just west of Foothills Parkway).
This means the creek will be open from the western edge of the city to Arapahoe Avenue just east of 38th Street.
Contractors have completed the debris removal in this area allowing the creek to open to kayakers, swimmers and tubers.
As flood recovery work progresses, other sections of Boulder Creek will be reopened when the city and county deem that it is safe for public use.
With higher flows anticipated due to spring runoff, the city will continue to monitor Boulder Creek for public safety concerns.
In past years, Boulder Creek has been closed to tubing and swimming if flows exceed 800 cubic feet per second. This threshold will continue to be used to trigger these recreational closures during spring/summer 2014.
Source: City of Boulder
CU: Rare western bumblebees netted on Colorado’s Front Range
Sep 3rd
A survey of bumblebee populations carried out largely by University of Colorado Boulder undergraduates in undisturbed patches of prairieland and in mountain meadows above campus has turned up more than 20 rare western bumblebees, known scientifically as Bombus occidentalis.
This is the fourth summer of a planned five-year survey in Boulder County, led by biologists Carol Kearns and Diana Oliveras, both of whom teach in CU-Boulder’s Baker Residential Academic Program. The survey team, which this summer included five undergraduates along with Oliveras and Kearns, has been hunting bumblebees at nine different locations spanning low, middle and high elevations.
The first western bumblebee was netted last year at one of the low-elevation plots, located at around 5,000 feet. The same plot also was visited frequently by Kearns and Oliveras during a more general survey of all pollinators between 2001 and 2005.
“For five years we sampled fairly intensely at this one site and never found anything,” Oliveras said. “Then all of a sudden, last year, we found several bees at that one site.”
The surveyors also found western bumblebees last year at a mid-elevation site of around 8,000 feet. In all, the team found nine western bumblebees in 2012: three queens and six workers.
Because insect populations are notoriously variable from year to year, Kearns and Oliveras wanted to find the bumblebees for a second year before announcing that the western bumblebee appeared to be returning to the Front Range. This year, the team has netted more than a dozen western bumblebees at four different locations, including the same low-elevation prairie plot and all three mid-elevation meadows. The distance between the sites means that the bumblebees are likely from separate colonies.
“These are sites that are fairly far away from each other, even as the crow flies,” Oliveras said. “Within a plot, if you’re going to be conservative, you can say that all the Bombus occidentalis arose from a single colony. But between plots, that’s quite a distance for them. They wouldn’t normally be traveling that far.”
The western bumblebee was once ubiquitous across the western portion of the United States and Canada, Oliveras and Kearns said. Its northern range encompassed all of Alaska, the Yukon Territory, British Columbia and western Alberta. Its southern boundaries extended as far south as Arizona and New Mexico. The bumblebee’s range also stretched from the Pacific Ocean eastward through North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Colorado. But beginning in the late 1990s, the western bumblebee became harder and harder to find.
“They have been disappearing rapidly across the West Coast, and there have been only occasional sightings in the Rocky Mountains,” Kearns said. “People have found a few bumblebees on the Western Slope of Colorado, but we were looking for them here and we weren’t finding any.”
Several factors have been implicated in the decline of the western bumblebee, according to Kearns and Oliveras. The biggest suspect is a non-native gut parasite that may have been transmitted from commercially raised bumblebee colonies. While parasites and other diseases can kill bees outright, anything that affects the bumblebees’ food supply or nesting sites also will affect their ability to survive. That means that habitat loss, pesticides, climate change and invasive plants and animals may be contributing to the losses in western bumblebee populations.
Earlier this summer, reports that the western bumblebee had been spotted in the Seattle area were confirmed by local biologists, indicating that the bumblebees could be making a broader comeback.
The wider goal of the ongoing bumblebee survey in Boulder County is to catalog all the types of bumblebees buzzing around the area and their population size. The team has catalogued a number of different species during the last four summers, including the mountain bumblebee, the Nevada bumblebee, the two-form bumblebee and the central bumblebee, among others.
“Our whole interest in bumblebees relates to the fact that pollinators are declining, but there is no abundance data for bumblebees in this area from the past,” Kearns said. “How do you tell if something is declining if there are no abundance data? So we decided we’d get out there and we’d find out what bumblebees are here and how many.”
Each year, Kearns and Oliveras have recruited undergraduate students to help them. This summer, the undergraduate researchers were Benjamin Bruffey, Sam Canter, Sarah Niemeyer, Zoe Praggastis and Cole Steinmetz.
To see a video about CU-Boulder’s bumblebee survey visit http://youtu.be/sKryBKX-nbU. For more information on the Baker Residential Academic Program visit http://bakerrap.colorado.edu/.
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The heat is on, Jack.
Jun 13th
In response to an increased wild land fire risk related to current weather conditions, Boulder Fire-Rescue will conduct daily “severity patrols” in Boulder’s urban interface areas and surrounding open space. This is being done in order to closely monitor conditions and to provide a quick response should a fire be spotted or reported.
This proactive approach was also used last summer, when a crew on routine patrol was the first to respond at the scene of the Flagstaff fire. That quick response, coupled with extensive mutual aid and timely aerial support, proved beneficial in limiting the fire to 300 acres.
The severity patrols are scheduled to begin on Thursday, June 13, 2013 and will continue indefinitely. Crews will patrol areas both inside of and adjacent to the city of Boulder, concentrating on the western edges of town, from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. The patrols will take place seven days a week.
Three-person wild land crews will staff a Type 6 brush truck. The size of the brush truck allows it to access areas which would be difficult for larger equipment to navigate. The truck carries approximately 300 gallons of water, hoses and tools.
Wild land firefighting techniques are different than the techniques used to fight building fires in urban areas. Wild land crews use hand tools and chain saws to remove trees and brush, in essence “starving” the fire of fuel. Water is used in the clean up stages and is not considered the main fire suppression strategy.
Severity patrols are being conducted by both City of Boulder crews and the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. This will allow for a timely response along the western edge of the city.
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