Plan to Study Watershed Gets Funding

The Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach has been awarded a $200,000 grant that will be used to plan an ambitious interactive exhibit about the region’s watershed and how humans have drastically changed it.

The grant, among the aquarium’s largest, comes from the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy. Aquarium officials hope it will lead to a $1.3-million conservancy grant to fund construction of the project, aquarium President and Chief Executive Jerry Schubel said Wednesday.

“We want to be the master storyteller of the Pacific, and the real story” is how humans’ relationship to the Pacific has changed, Schubel said. In a relatively short few hundred years, he added, “we have gone from having an insignificant impact on the Pacific and watershed to dominating the largest ecosystem on the planet, and we want to tell that story.”

A watershed consists of land drained by a river and its tributaries.

The Rivers and Mountains Conservancy coverage area extends from the San Gabriel Mountains to the sea and encompasses 66 cities: 56 cities in east Los Angeles County and 10 in western Orange County

Because it is near the aquarium and is fed by both rivers, San Pedro Bay would be used as the model to illustrate the full spectrum of human effects on the watershed, which supports 7 million people, Schubel said.

The bay’s drainage basin is also the world’s third-largest seaport, and the drastic change since its development affords a very visual lesson, he said.

“San Pedro Bay would not be there but for the breakwater created for the port,” Schubel said.

The $200,000 grant will fund planning and design by engineers and scientists of a curriculum, a classroom and three large-scale models of the watershed.

“Each of these watershed table stream models will depict the entire watershed,” Schubel said. “The first will reflect the original lack of breakwaters; Los Angeles is still a pueblo at this point.

“Right next to it will be the watershed in its existing condition, where the L.A. River is in a concrete straitjacket. You will be able to see what we have done in a very short period of time.”

A third interactive model will allow the visitor to explore various ways of improving the watershed.

The $200,000 grant is funded with money from the California Clean Water, Clean Air, Safe Neighborhoods, and Coastal Protection Bond Act of 2002 (Proposition 40).