Tag: brush management

Brush Control Will Increase Groundwater Supply

For over 50 years, Hill Country ranchers have been telling tales of springs bursting from the ground after they removed ashe juniper infected areas. Actually, they probably didn’t call it ashe juniper. In Texas, it’s “affectionately” known as cedar. A recent study on 700 acres owned by the state (40 miles north of San Antonio) is giving federal researchers the data to find out just how much water the trees use, and if a massive program to restore grasslands across the Hill Country would result in more water for cities, farms and wildlife.

“Now we are controlling the water with the landscape,” said George Ozuna, the deputy director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Texas Water Science Center. Until now small-scale studies on parcels up to 50 acres have shown juniper removal from the Edwards Plateau might result in an increase of stream flow and groundwater recharge equal to about 5 percent of annual rainfall. Continue reading Brush Control Will Increase Groundwater Supply

Brush Management and Streamflow

In the past, abundant woody growth (brush) was considered to be bad for Central Texas streams and rivers. However, a recent analysis of long-term streamflow for the major rivers in the Edwards Plateau has indicated that baseflows in these rivers has significantly increased since the 1950 drought. Further, recent levels of baseflows (supplied from springs) appear to be about twice as high as they were before the 1950’s drought. These increases have occurred even as woodlands have expanded in the region, probably because the landscape is recovering from historic overgrazing.

The results of this study are important because they clearly demonstrate that how the land and habitat is managed does have a large scale effect on water supplies. That being said, does this new research conflict with earlier studies showing that recharge may be enhanced through brush management? Continue reading Brush Management and Streamflow

Landowners Enlist in EQIP to Battle Cedar

As water supplies become more valuable, conservationists say proper habitat management is an important way to improve them in urban areas, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has begun an effort it calls Rural Land-Urban Water to promote the connection to urban audiences, funded through their Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP).

“We can’t make it rain in Texas when and where it’s needed,” state conservationist Don Gohmert said. “But conservation measures on the state’s vast rural lands can increase the amount, and improve the quality, of water available to Texas cities.”

In the long run, as cities grow and political power grows farther removed from the soil, the effort is partly a survival measure for the NRCS itself, which splits the cost of conservation work with landowners for habitat management. Continue reading Landowners Enlist in EQIP to Battle Cedar