It came as a bittersweet surprise to biologists and government agencies monitoring the steadily shrinking Salton Sea’s slide toward death by choking dust storms and salt.
Thousands of acres of exposed lake bed have become, of all things, the unintended beneficiaries of lush marshlands that are homes for endangered birds and fish at the outlets of agricultural and urban runoff that used to flow directly into the Salton Sea.
The projects include building a series of ponds and water-transfer systems across about 29,000 acres at a cost of about $383 million, officials said. Some of that acreage is suddenly home to wetlands and their endangered inhabitants, which would need to be protected during the course of any development.
“Part of the challenge we face now,” said Michael Cohen, co-author of a 2014 Pacific Institute report titled,” “is that the rate at which the bureaucracy in Sacramento is moving to meet its obligations at the Salton Sea is falling far behind the rate at which its environmental conditions are changing.”Christopher Schoneman is the project leader for the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge at the southern tip of California’s largest and most troubled body of water.
The other project is a $180-million Species Conservation Habitat, which will be largely funded by state bonds, on former lake bed and shallows that have become cloaked in cattails. It grew into a 360-square-mile lake straddling Imperial and Riverside counties, about 150 miles south of Los Angeles. Rising salinity levels at the Salton Sea have been linked to massive die-offs of perch-like fish called tilapia, which huge populations of migrating birds — including cormorants and brown pelicans — depend on.
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