Sunrise light on a grove of tufa towers emerging from the water of Mono Lake with soft green and dusty-red wild grasses in the foreground, Canada geese in the shallow water with reflections of the rocky towers, and desert hills in the distance.

Mono Basin Clearinghouse updates: Gull research and real-time data

clearinghouse-updates-2015-CAGU-report_Page_01Recent updates on the Mono Basin Clearinghouse include the following items:

Point Blue has finished its 2015 report on the nesting success of California Gulls at Mono Lake. According to project coordinator Kristie Nelson, it was an above-average year—a welcome finding after a downward trend of below-average populations over the last ten years.

We have updated the Mono Basin real-time data frames page to use pop-up windows instead of frames. This may not sound like an upgrade, but last week the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power blocked framing of their real-time data page, which left the frame next to the explanations page on our site blank. Now when you go to the frames page, the frames give you several options: opening a new window, popping up a single window, or popping up two windows. You may need to allow pop-up windows from monobasinresearch.org in your browser in order to enable some of these features. Our explanations page is an essential companion to the real-time data, since the data is often erroneous or out of context.

We added the Lee Vining Creek 1997 Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license amendments to the FERC licenses you can download on our legal resources page.

In September, the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District updated its Reasonable Further Progress Report for the Mono Basin PM-10 State Implementation Plan, and we posted a link on our Reports and Studies page. Unfortunately, due to the drought, predicted PM-10 (particulate matter) concentrations have been getting worse over the last three years, although the number of violations have not.

If you signed up for Mono Basin Clearinghouse updates by email through Feedburner, you should be receiving them again, now that we’ve fixed some problems our RSS feeds had over the last couple of years.