From The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Dave Buchanan):
What you might see, once or twice a year, are members of the Grand Valley Anglers Chapter of Trout Unlimited continuing a creek-monitoring project begun 13 years ago. While there’s no doubt this long-lived project is volunteer citizen science at its best, please don’t think that “citizen” means unscientific. If anything, the project might be one of the most scientific undertakings a volunteer group can take on.
The West Creek project started and continues thanks to the innate scientific curiosity of geologists John Trammell and the late Dan Powell, whose love of knowledge and all things in nature might have made him the complete naturalist. From the start, the project coordinators kept exacting records of things such as water flows and temperatures, presence of contaminants and even the level of brush along the creek, since that has a large impact on the creek habitat in general. The monitoring has been adopted by the Grand Valley Anglers as a twice-yearly event, with the latest round two weeks ago led by Bill and Mary Graham of Grand Junction…
Those early years of monitoring revealed what Trammell and Powell suspected: that the drought and cattle grazing were the creek’s greatest threats. While ranchers were content to see the cattle chew down the creekside brush, that clearing, plus the muddy, beaten-down banks, left the creek hot and murky, something not conducive to viable trout populations. Trammell said that once the drought forced ranchers to cut back cattle grazing (the BLM still allows one grazing permit for the area), the stream’s trout habitat improved quickly. “The brush (willows, alders and a variety of forbs) rebounded dramatically,” Trammell wrote. “In recent years, we’ve seen cattle return, but I’ve not yet tried to quantify their effect.”
Other questions the monitoring examines include the possibility of pollution from increased development upstream as well as impacts on streamflow from increased domestic use of groundwater that feeds the creek.
More restoration coverage here.