The wet winter and strong spring snowmelt pushed the salinity level at the Great Salt Lake down to about 14% by May 1. That's within the healthy threshold for the lake again.
SALT LAKE CITY — Janice Gardner vividly remembers what it was like to venture out into the Great Salt Lake's vast wetlands as she and multiple groups of volunteers began counting shorebirds as part of the first extensive shorebird count in the area since 1995.
While the water levels are still about 4 feet below the minimum goal outlined by experts, its gains are also temporarily repairing some of the other issues that experts saw in the fall, including dangerously high salinity levels that had put its ecosystem on the brink of a collapse. The volunteers almost immediately noticed there weren't many brine flies, a major source of food for the millions of migratory birds that pass through the lake every year.
Meanwhile, the rising salinity levels remained a problem in many experts' minds. A team from the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands ended upto help slow down the rate of the high-salinity water flowing from the north arm into the southern arm. " within a zone … that the brine shrimp and the brine flies are happy, so to speak," Gardner added. "The food they need can grow, and so they're happy."Ben Abbott, an assistant professor of ecosystem ecology at Brigham Young University, calls the return of bugs an important indicator of the lake's health and the ecosystem. He refers to the lake's current water levels — and salinity levels — as "night and day" compared to last year.
Gardner and the team of volunteers also returned to the Great Salt Lake and various other bodies of water in the region between April 24 and April 28 to count the birds again as part of the first spring survey since the 1990s.
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