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A self-professed “water wonk,” Tom Iseman has worked as The Nature Conservancy’s Water Program Manager for over five years. But the spring of 2006 has been a professional and personal highlight. What wildflower fields are to botanists and cougar sightings are to mammalogists, so giant amounts of water coursing through Colorado’s river systems are to Tom Iseman. This spring’s above-average snow pack has been a boost to Colorado’s endangered native fish, because – for the first time since 2001 – there is enough water for reservoir operators to turn the valves and release excess water to “simulate a flood pulse” for the benefit of the fish. For the time being, the Colorado pikeminnow, humpback chub, razorback sucker and bonytail chub enjoy life as they were meant to since they evolved in Pleistocene age more than 3 million years ago.
The water releases scour away muck and sediment, leaving ideal conditions to create a bumper crop of the fishes’ favorite food: aquatic insects. The high flows also create favorable spawning conditions and provide access to warmer, slower backwater habitats in the floodplain and side channels of the Colorado River.
“I enjoy the fact that by working together with water managers and calibrating our actions to coincide with high water years, we can meet water needs for people and wildlife,” says Tom, an active member of the multi-stakeholder Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. In drier years, the fish must make due with less. “They’re tough” says Tom. But the overall health of the species depends on the ability to bounce back in high water years such as this one.
A native of Colorado, Tom’s love of Western water issues began, ironically, as a history student at Princeton University, where he wrote his senior thesis on efforts to build dams in national parks in the American West. He later studied at the University of Michigan—where he focused on river science and water policy—and received an MS in aquatic ecology. After graduate school, Tom worked on hydropower and water management issues for three years in Washington, DC for the Department of the Interior’s Office of Policy. Throughout, Tom has been focused on the difficult challenge of allocating a scarce water resource in the fast-growing American West.
His talent for working with water will continue to be in demand, as water issues dominate state concerns, and the needs of a growing population must be met while caring for the many water-dependent native species in the state.
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