Passport to Texas

This is Passport to Texas

After Texas’ 5-year drought, the rainfall Memorial Day weekend was like resetting nature’s clock…

04- When it comes to our thirsty ecosystems across the state.

Cindy Loeffler is water resources branch chief at Texas Parks and Wildlife.

08- The bays and estuaries, with their characteristic salinity levels, having a flush of fresh water–especially at this time of the year–is ideal.

That flush of fresh water will, in time, help improve the productivity of the bays, which serve as nurseries for many of our sport fish species. Yet, Loeffler says productivity could decrease before it rebounds.

10- We may see some setbacks, in terms of impacts to oysters–if the water is too fresh for too long. But long term, we’re very excited about what it means for our coastal estuaries.

Conditions across the landscape have improved, too.

20- One just needs to look out the window, or go outside, and just see how green everything is. All of the vegetation is just very healthy and thriving. Importantly, our pollen producing plants, nectar producing plants, important food sources for insects-butterflies, bees, birds-lots of critters we depend on in Texas.

What are the short and long term effects of this new water windfall?

02- That’s a really great question.

And we try to answer it tomorrow.

The Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program supports our series.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife, I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2015 at 12:00 am and is filed under Flooding, Water, Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Program. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.