Posted on The Spectrum by Joan Meiners, St. George Spectrum & Daily News on Aug 7, 2020
Read the full article, The Water Tap, HERE.
“…Now, new research has found that falling river levels are also a problem for hundreds of species of Western fish and that the fault may lie with the beef industry.
“‘We didn’t set out to investigate the water requirements of cattle feed crops specifically,’ said Brian Richter, a professor at the University of Virginia and the lead author on the study just published in Nature Sustainability. ‘We really started with wanting to gain a better understanding of the extent to which rivers and streams across the United States are being depleted or being dried up because of human uses.’…
“These iconic Western river landscapes can really be damaged by taking too much water out because it perpetuates a very low water table,” Richter said. “We see a lot of areas where cottonwood trees are no longer sprouting up and reproducing because the water in the creek or in the stream has been dried up. We see wetlands that are drying up because the water table has dropped too low.”