Environmental News
Environmental News from Boulder, Colorado
Boulder County hosting composting workshops, bin sale
Sep 27th
Boulder County, Colo. – The Boulder County Resource Conservation Division is offering free composting workshops in Longmont, Lafayette and Boulder, as well a Soilsaver compost bin sale in Boulder.
Soilsaver compost bin sale
- Sunday, Oct. 7, noon-3:30 p.m.
Boulder County Recycling Center, 1901 63rd St., Boulder
Bins are $50 each, tax included, cash or check only
Register online at http://fallcompostbinsale.eventbrite.com
Backyard and worm composting workshops
- Sunday, Oct. 7, 12:30-2:30 p.m.
Boulder County Recycling Center, 1901 63rd St., Boulder
Register online at http://boulderrecyclingcenterworkshop1.eventbrite.com
- Monday, Oct. 8, 6-8 p.m.
Church of the Nazarene, 300 S. Broadway, Boulder
- Thursday, Oct. 18, 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Lafayette Public Library, 775 W. Baseline Road
Register online at http://backyardcompostlafayette.eventbrite.com
- Saturday, Oct. 20, 10 a.m.-noon
Boulder County Parks & Open Space, 5201 St. Vrain Road, Longmont
Register online at http://backyardcompostlongmont.eventbrite.com
- Monday, Oct. 22, 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Boulder County Recycling Center, 1901 63rd St., Boulder
Register online at http://boulderrecyclingcenterworkshop2.eventbrite.com
Contact Jessica Johnson at jljohnson@bouldercounty.org or 720-564-2226 for more information.
In addition to utilizing the new curbside compost bins, residents are encouraged to compost food scraps and yard waste at home. Keeping organics in backyards is an effective way to reduce household carbon footprints and provide quality compost for use in gardens. Come learn how to start and maintain a highly efficient backyard compost system by learning what to feed your compost pile, appropriate bins and methods for our region, tips and troubleshooting, and much more.
When organic materials such as food waste and leaves are sent to the landfill they are buried along with the trash and they break down in a way that produces methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. Composting does not create methane; it is a natural decomposition process that changes the food and yard waste into a beneficial soil amendment.
New CU-Boulder study clarifies diversity, distribution of cutthroat trout in Colorado
Sep 24th
A novel genetic study led by the University of Colorado Boulder has helped to clarify the native diversity and distribution of cutthroat trout in Colorado, including the past and present haunts of the federally endangered greenback cutthroat trout.
The study, led by CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Jessica Metcalf, was based largely on DNA samples taken from cutthroat trout specimens preserved in ethanol in several U.S. museums around the country that were collected from around the state as far back as 150 years ago. The new study, in which Metcalf and her colleagues extracted mitochondrial DNA from fish to sequence genes of the individual specimens and compared them with modern-day cutthroat trout strains, produced some startling results.
The biggest surprise, said Metcalf, was that the cutthroat trout native to the South Platte River drainage appears to survive today only in a single population outside of its native range — in a small stream known as Bear Creek that actually is in the nearby Arkansas River drainage. The strain from Bear Creek is thought to have been collected from the South Platte River drainage in the 1880s by an early hotelier who stocked the fish in a pond at the Bear Creek headwaters to help promote an early tourist route up Pikes Peak.
“We thought one way to get to the question of which cutthroat trout strains are native to particular drainages was to go back to historical samples and use their DNA as a baseline of information,” said Metcalf of the chemistry and biochemistry department and a former postdoctoral researcher at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA. “Our study indicates the descendants of the fish that were stocked into Bear Creek in the late 1800s are the last remaining representatives of the federally protected greenback cutthroat trout.”
A second, key set of data was all of the Colorado cutthroat trout stocking records over the past 150 years, a task spearheaded by study co-author and fish biologist Chris Kennedy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Between 1889 and 1925, for example, the study showed that more than 50 million cutthroat trout from the Gunnison and Yampa river basins were stocked in tributaries of all major drainages in the state, jumbling the picture of native cutthroat strains in Colorado through time and space.
Originating from the Pacific Ocean, cutthroat trout are considered one of the most diverse fish species in North America and evolved into 14 recognized subspecies in western U.S. drainages over thousands of years. In Colorado, four lineages of cutthroats were previously identified: the greenback cutthroat, the Colorado River cutthroat, the Rio Grande cutthroat and the extinct yellowfin cutthroat.
The museum specimens used in the study came from the California Academy of Sciences, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology. Colorado cutthroat trout specimens were collected by a number of early naturalists, including Swiss scientist and former Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz and internationally known fish expert and founding Stanford University President David Starr Jordan.
The new study, published online today in Molecular Ecology, follows up on a 2007 study by Metcalf and her team that indicated there were several places on the Front Range where cutthroat populations thought to be greenbacks by fish biologists were actually a strain of cutthroats transplanted from Colorado’s Western Slope in the early 1900s.
Other co-authors on the new study included CU-Boulder Professor Andrew Martin and CU-Boulder graduate students Sierra Stowell, Daniel McDonald and Kyle Keepers; Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologist Kevin Rogers; University of Adelaide scientists Alan Cooper and Jeremy Austin; and Janet Epp of Pisces Molecular LLC of Boulder.
“With the insight afforded by the historical data, we now know with a great deal of certainty what cutthroat trout strains were here in Colorado before greenbacks declined in the early 20th century,” said Martin of CU’s ecology and evolutionary biology department. “And we finally know what a greenback cutthroat trout really is.”
Metcalf and her colleagues first collected multiple samples of tissue and bone from each of the ethanol-pickled trout specimens, obtaining fragments of DNA that were amplified and then pieced together like a high-tech jigsaw puzzle to reveal two genes of the individual specimens. The tests were conducted on two different continents under highly sterile conditions and each DNA sequencing effort was repeated several times for many specimens to ensure accuracy in the study, Metcalf said.
Roughly half of the study was conducted at CU-Boulder and half at the Australian Center for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, where Metcalf had worked for two years. “By conducting repeatable research at two very different, state-of-the-art laboratories, we were able to show the Bear Creek trout was the same strain as the cutthroats originally occupying the South Platte River drainage.”
The Bear Creek trout strain is now being propagated in the Colorado Parks and Wildlife hatchery system and at the USFWS Leadville National Fish Hatchery.
In addition to identifying the Bear Creek cutthroat trout, Metcalf and her colleagues discovered a previously unknown cutthroat strain native to the San Juan Basin in southwestern Colorado that has since gone extinct. The study also confirmed that the yellowfin cutthroat, a subspecies from the Arkansas River headwaters that grew to prodigious size in Twin Lakes near Leadville, also had gone extinct.
Fortunately, most fish preserved by naturalists before 1900 were “fixed” in ethanol, which makes it easier for researchers to obtain reliable DNA than from fish preserved in a formaldehyde solution, a practice that later became popular. Prior to the new study — which included DNA from specimens up to about 150 years old — scientists working in ancient DNA labs had only performed similar research on ethanol-preserved museum vertebrate specimens less than 100 years old.
“One of the exciting things to come from this research project is that it opens up the potential for scientists to sequence the genes of other fish, reptiles and amphibian specimens preserved in ethanol further back in time than ever before to answer ecological questions about past diversity and distribution,” said Metcalf, who conducts her research at CU’s BioFrontiers Institute.
Funding for the study was provided by agencies of the Greenback Cutthroat Trout Recovery Team, including the USFWS, the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service and Trout Unlimited.
“I think in many cases success depends less on the application of a new technology and more on the convergence of people with shared interest and complementary skills necessary for solving difficult problems,” said Martin. “Our greenback story is really one about what can be discovered when dedicated and talented people collaborate with a shared purpose.”
“We’ve known for some time that the trout in Bear Creek were unique,” said Doug Krieger, senior aquatic biologist for Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the Greenback Cutthroat Trout Recovery Team leader. “But we didn’t realize they were the only surviving greenback population.”
The decline of native cutthroats in Colorado occurred because of a combination of pollution, overfishing and stocking of native and non-native species of trout, said Metcalf. “It’s ironic that stocking nearly drove the greenback cutthroat trout to extinction, and a particularly early stocking event actually saved it from extinction,” she said.
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County releases draft Land Use Code regulations for oil and gas development
Sep 17th
Planning Commission to review regulations on Sept. 24
Boulder County, Colo. – Boulder County has drafted a set of proposed Land Use Code regulations for oil and gas development in unincorporated Boulder County and is actively seeking review and comment from the public, industry and state agencies.
The draft regulations are available for review on the county’s Oil and Gas Development webpage.
What: Public hearing on the Draft Development Plan Review regulations addressing oil and gas development within the county’s Land Use Code
When: Monday, Sept. 24, 4 p.m.
Where: Boulder County Courthouse, third floor, 1325 Pearl St., Boulder
Land Use staff will present the proposed regulations to the Planning Commission, which will then consider public comments and provide recommendation to the Board of County Commissioners or provide further direction to staff.
Public testimony will be taken at the hearing (each speaker is allowed 3 minutes). Written comments are also encouraged and can be emailed tocommissioners@bouldercounty.org or submitted to staff in hard copy at the hearing.
The goal of the draft regulations is to work within the authority provided to counties and enact the most protective land use regulations possible for new oil and gas development. Boulder County recognizes the extent of state authority over these operations and seeks to create local regulations that harmonize with state regulations.
Topics addressed in the regulations include avoidance and mitigation of impacts to the county’s air and water quality, transportation system and environmental resources. The regulations also address land use compatibility issues and emergency response.
“These draft regulations are an important part of our multifaceted approach to addressing the issues associated with oil and gas development in unincorporated Boulder County,” Commissioner Cindy Domenico said. “We are seeking feedback so that we can enact effective regulations that protect our environment and the health and safety of our residents, and harmonize with state and federal regulations.”
Timeline
• Feb. 2 – The Board of County Commissioners approve a temporary moratorium on the processing of the required development plans for local oil and gas permits under the county Land Use Code (Resolution 2012-16) and release a statement detailing their concerns about the potential for significantly expanded oil and gas drilling within the county.
• March 1 – Public hearing for commissioners to hear staff presentations and public testimony. After the four-hour hearing, commissioners direct staff to continue gathering information about the impacts of oil and gas drilling on air, water, land, roads and infrastructure.
• April 16 – Commissioners vote unanimously to extend temporary moratorium on processing of applications for oil and gas development in unincorporated parts of the county until Feb. 4, 2013 (Resolution 2012-46).
• May 16 – Planning Commission authorizes the initiation of an amendment process to the oil and gas policies in the Boulder County Comprehensive Plan
• June 20 – Planning Commission reviews proposed oil and gas policies amendments presented by Land Use staff, and takes public testimony.
• July 18 – Planning Commission further reviews proposed oil and gas policies amendments presented by Land Use staff, and takes public testimony.
• Aug. 15 – Planning Commission adopts amendments to Comprehensive Plan.
• Aug. 22 – County Commissioners and Planning Commission hold a joint study session to discuss possible future Land Use Code amendments.
The county anticipates adopting a set of regulations by the end of the year. For more information about the county’s role in oil and gas development, upcoming meetings and public involvement opportunities, visit the county’s Oil and Gas Development webpage or contact Jim Webster at 720-564-2600 orjbwebster@bouldercounty.org.