The Need for a Clearinghouse

The Mono Basin is a uniquely spectacular landscape located in California’s Eastern Sierra. Relatively undeveloped, the basin has numerous geological, cultural, and ecological resources, all of scientific interest. The Mono Lake ecosystem itself is vital to millions of migratory and nesting birds. Mono Basin streams provide critical riparian habitat in the dry Great Basin, and other Mono Basin habitats are valuable for a variety of wildlife. As a result, the Mono Basin is often used as a educational laboratory to investigate environmental change and human impacts on the landscape within one relatively compact location.

Past human actions have threatened the health of these landscapes and ecosystems, and extensive work has gone into understanding the resources and into protecting them. Today, much restoration work is proceeding on the damaged Mono Basin streams and is designed to adapt to changing results, thus requiring access to detailed monitoring information. The lack of a central gathering point for this and other accumulated scientific knowledge about Mono Lake and the Mono Basin impedes top quality resource management and leads to duplication of effort. The Mono Basin Clearinghouse will solve this problem by gathering in one place all the relevant Mono Lake and Mono Basin reports, data, observations, oral histories, photographic records, and chronologies.

Additionally, the clearinghouse will serve as a central point for discussion and the exchange of ideas on this information by both scientists and the interested public. We expect the Clearinghouse to deepen people’s understanding of the Mono Basin, enhance the quality of the many educational programs conducted in the area, and lead to new and innovative scientific work. The clearinghouse will be Internet based for maximum accessibility and effectiveness.

Clearinghouse Materials

The Mono Basin Clearinghouse will gather a wide range of materials. The design of the project will be flexible so that new types of information--GIS data and technology for example--can be easily incorporated in the future.

There will be two thrusts to information gathering in the clearinghouse. First, we will go back through existing materials to catalog and convert them to digital format. Second, we will set up systems to capture relevant materials as they are released in the future.

Clearinghouse Startup

The Clearinghouse will be launched with the following types of materials, all of which currently exist in Committee archives:

1. Scientific reports and studies
2. Scientific field notes
3. Scientific data
4. MLC-gathered restoration monitoring data (e.g. piezometer, stream observations)
5. Transcripts of hearings and other legal proceedings
6. Photo sequences taken over time documenting environmental change
7. Oral histories from local residents
8. Chronology of events relating to environmental change (e.g. restoration activities, court proceedings)
9. Catalog of links to relevant documents found on other public websites (e.g. real time hydrology info)

Two items will form the core of the Clearinghouse when it is launched:

1. An electronic version of the multi volume, 20 appendix, draft and final Environmental Impact Reports on Mono Basin Water diversions and
2. A keyword searchable database of 450 scientific reports and studies conducted in or relevant to the Mono Basin

All materials in the Clearinghouse will be available digitally over the Internet. Additionally, all materials will be indexed in databases so that they are easily searchable by date, topic, author, and other relevant fields.

Clearinghouse Expansion

The Clearinghouse will grow as new materials (reports, transcripts, etc.) are released and incorporated into the Clearinghouse database. Other areas for expansion of the Clearinghouse include:

1. A public interface to the photo archive, so that individuals could contribute their own photo sequences to the collection
2. Forums for discussion of various topics. Some would be hosted by scientists, others would be unmoderated.
3. "Guest scientist" feature, where a particular researcher and project are extensively documented with photos, narrative text, special reference collections, and discussion opportunities.
4. Incorporation of GIS map layers in web-friendly interface.

Clearinghouse as a Tool for Science Education

The Mono Basin Clearinghouse offers the Committee a unique method of serving as a communicator between scientists and scientific research, and the interested public. As a condition of funding, many scientific grants now require that researchers include public outreach and education as part of their project. Through the Clearinghouse, the Committee will be in a unique position to partner with researchers to fulfill these requirements by making the research work and results accessible to a wide variety of audiences. This not only assures that researchers will be interested in participating in the Clearinghouse project, but also offers a method of finding partial continuing funding for the project.

Already, the Committee has committed to working with researchers from the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory on the public outreach component of a major, multi-year grant from the National Science Foundation. The Committee’s ability to help fulfill the education components of science grants will be a major attraction for researchers and will expand the organization’s contacts and involvement with science in the Mono Basin.

Clearinghouse Technology

The Clearinghouse will be operated by the Mono Lake Committee in Lee Vining using rented high-speed server space on the Internet. Website creation is done with Microsoft Frontpage, PHP3 scripting language, and Macromedia Flash. Database creation locally is in Microsoft Access, and will utilize ODBC linking to MySQL databases on the server, allowing flexible updating of information. If requirements demand, the possibility exists of switching from UNIX to Windows NT servers and utilizing Access on the actual web server. Reports and other final documents will be formatted in HTML but available for exact download as uneditable PDF files. The Clearinghouse will have its own domain name.

• Reports on the streams and their restoration
• Reports on Mono's migratory and nesting birds
• Reports on songbird survey.
• 1998 showed that riparian songbird diversity was highest at . . .

• Notes and observations

• Water is on the move in the ground below Lee Vining creek as . . .

• Clearly, the recent increase in snow melt has caused Lee Vining Creek to . . .
• Data includes observations on six streams, piezometer readings (to determine groundwater elevation near Lee Vining Creek), observations requested by stream scientists, songbird observations, bird counts, waterfowl observations

5. Photo sequences taken over time documenting environmental change

• Reference the classic Benckhmark tufa photos that have been in Committee publications forever. Many more comparisons exist that show damage, recovery, change.

• "As children, we roamed all over the hills and meadows near Rush Creek, barefoot . . ."
• "In those days, it took three days and five flat tires to get from Los Angeles to Mono Lake."
• ". . . when the creek was running high, the fish would follow the fresh water out into where it mixed with the lake and feed on brine shrimp"
• ". . . a notorious San Francisco gangester stopped by. His name was Bones. Bones was about 5 feet high and weighed about 300 pounds. He pulled out a 25 automatic pistol and . . ."

• On a chilly spring morning, two scientists headed out with a flask of coffee and a backhoe to . . .
• . . .. that was the year a flood picked up a car and washed it right into the lake.

• This morning, Rush Creek was flowing at . . .
• On this same day in 1957, Rush Creek was flowing at . . .

Two items will form the core of the Clearinghouse when it is launched:

1. An electronic version of the multi volume, 20 appendix, draft and final Environmental Impact Reports on Mono Basin Water diversions

• This will be the equivalent of the 35 pounds and thousands of pages of paper that make up the reports.
• And it will be searchable.
• "Evidence suggests that these large lagoons would reform if the lake stood at elevations above . . ."

• "The court found that the city’s water rights were granted without consideration of impacts on these resources and therefore . . ."

Sample entries in the database:

• Rewatering Channel 10 in the Rush Creek Bottomlands, Mono County, CA: 1995 Stream Restoration Programs
• Feasibility Study #5 - An Evaluation of the Potential for Rewatering the Portion of Rush Creek Immediately Below Grant Lake
• Comparisons of Alkali Fly (Ephydra hians) Benthic Colonization on Natural and Artificial Hard Substrates in Mono Lake
• A Study of Pool Morphology in Pre-1941 Channel Segments of Lower Rush Creek, Mono County, CA

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