Posted on 04/22/2017 7:53:39 PM PDT by nickcarraway
“It grows in dense thickets that block sunlight and out-compete native specialty plant species, many of which are listed as endangered,” said Jen Michelsen, the water district’s environmental programs manager. “However, removing mature French broom in the sandhills habitat is challenging because of its huge root systems.”
The water district manages roughly 2,000 acres of land in the San Lorenzo Valley Watershed. Of that land, 180 acres is sandhills habitat within the Olympia Watershed — an area in the Zayante area northeast of Felton.
The sandhills are basically the exposed remnants of an ancient seabed. In 1963, the fossil remains of an extinct species of sea cow that lived about 10 million to 12 million years ago in shallow, nearshore waters were discovered in the Olympia Watershed.
When the waters of this ancient sea receded, they left behind large deposits of porous, high-grade sand that turned out to be exceptionally good for optics, glass and silicon chips. As a result, much of the Santa Cruz Sandhills habitat endured devastating mining operations. Until 2002, CEMEX mined sand from the Olympia Watershed, which is how the extinct sea cow was found.
An estimated 7,000 acres of sandhills habitat once existed. Today, maybe 4,000 acres exist, according to ecologist Jodi McGraw. Of that acreage, only 2,500 acres remain undeveloped.
Today, rusting vestiges of the sand mining operation are strewn across the Olympia Watershed like old, iron bones. Yet the robust biodiversity of the sandhills continues to surprise scientists. Numerous species have evolved to survive in the porous, nutrient-lean sandy soil, some of which are found nowhere else in the world. The Olympia Watershed is home to the Zayante Band-Winged Grasshopper, the Santa Cruz wallflower, the Ben Lomond spineflower, the Ben Lomond buckwheat and Bonny Doon manzanita.
(Excerpt) Read more at santacruzsentinel.com ...
Atrazine
.
It took us a few years, but we’ve removed virtually all French broom from our property. We still have to pull a few new shoots each year as birds and other animals drop/poop seeds. The shrub develops its seeds in pods. At the end of the summer, when it gets really hot, if you’re around French broom, you’ll hear pop pop pop pop. The sound is the pods popping open and the seeds shooting out.
I have an uncle (84) who is an architect/developer and believes in treading lightly on nature. He had a development with a creek running through it and for a number of years it would flood because of the brush and overgrowth in the creek. He cleared a lot of it out and was promptly sued by Santa Cruz County. One of his punishments was to replace the poison oak that he cleared.
He got fed up with the communists running the coastal commission and infesting Santa Cruz County and moved to Panama 10 yrs ago to develop a project down there. Of course Panama has it’s own set of incompetence to deal with so perhaps it was out of the frying pan into the fire but part of his mission down there is to help them get up to speed on the engineering concepts (drainage, proper curing of concrete, etc..)of successful/longlasting projects.
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“The sandhills are basically the exposed remnants of an ancient seabed. In 1963, the fossil remains of an extinct species of sea cow that lived about 10 million to 12 million years”
I’m curious to what caused the sea level rise, way back when.
"Water Oistrict?"
...and French Broom?
It's all explained in Genesis 6-10.
Try pasting this link in your browser: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+5:32-10:1
I think it was the opposite. The Santa Cruz mountains used to be under water. Now they aren’t.
In peaceful rural Poland in the mid-1980s, a great uncle of mine was beaten and murdered — apparently by the secret police because he was a courier for Rural Solidarity. When communists are in power, even an elderly retired farmer may be treated as a mortal threat to the regime.
Sometimes it isn’t so much the sea dropping as land rising
Its Santa Cruz...
I imagine French Broom is allergic to salt. Most plants are.
I hope I don't need an /s...
Anti French liberals doing environmental damage in California. :-)
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