Excerpt from the Summer 2015 issue
Why are healthy meadows important?
In the ideal scenario, the credits will be turned into funding to restore additional meadows, thus creating a self-sustaining cycle that would result in broader restoration of meadows across the Sierra and southern Cascades. The reality is that there are dozens of meadows that are considered prime candidates for restoration.
One way to frame the importance of this work is to consider its potential to help alleviate two of our state's most pressing environmental challenges: global warming and the drought. With projections of climate change showing that more Sierra precipitation will come in the form of rain rather than snow, the ability of meadows to store and release water efficiently will become even more critical to our state's water supply.
(To read the full article, click here)
Curtis Knight, CalTrout's Executive Director, offered this perspective: "With this project, our organization is taking its first step into the larger arena of addressing climate change, the most complex ecological problem of our time."
Although the science of how a restored meadow is better at storing carbon is very new, there are some early studies that point to large potential benefits. For example, a Feather River watershed study showed that restoring meadows could provide a one-time increase in below ground carbon stores by 110 to 220 CO2e tons per acre over a 2 to 10 year post-restoration period (Wilcox et al. unpublished project results 2009). These carbon sequestration numbers are very large and comparable to estimated rates of CO2e sequestration reported for Delta fresh water wetlands and redwood forests (Miller et al. 2008, Miller et al. 2011, Knox et al. 2014).
The initial four projects, including CalTrout's project at Osa Meadow, will follow the same research design in terms of applying the greenhouse gas protocol to evaluate how meadows located in different geographical settings respond to restoration practices. Each project will compare and measure differences between the restored meadow and a control meadow that is in a degraded state. Another goal is to compare the results from these two meadows in each study to a "reference" meadow that is fully functioning and not in need of restoration.
As Mark explains, "We will be able to measure the marginal differences between functioning, degraded, and restored meadows over a period of four years, which is the length of the initial projects. We will be able to see if we are getting closer (in the case of a restored meadow) over time to the reference meadow."
Click on image to enlarge