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Show Moss Seeking Funds For Water Study Senator Frank E. Moss (D-Utah) (D-Utah) said Tuesday that he will ask Congress to appropriate $50.-000 $50.-000 for research to determine if Utah water yields can be improved im-proved by the elimination of use-Jess, use-Jess, water-consuming vegetation. vegeta-tion. He said the growth of such nlahts along Western streams is increasing rapidly and is already discharging millions of acre feet of water into the atmosphere every year. He said President Eisenhower's Eisenhow-er's appropriations requests did not contain funds in the Forest Service budget for a Utah program. pro-gram. Senator Moss said he has therefore written Senator Carl Hayden (D-Arizona), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee subcom-mittee on Interior and Related Affairs, asking that consideration considera-tion be given to adding the $50,-000 $50,-000 to the fiscalr year 1962 requests. re-quests. Moss said the Forest Service, is now carrying on this type of research in Arizona and California. Cali-fornia. He said that he had been informed in-formed by Richard E. McArdle, Chief of the Forest Service, that the studies in those states "will (Continued on page 4) Moss Seeking Funds For Water Study (Continued from page 1) develop certain principles that will be broadly applicable to other areas," but that, "because of differences in vegetative types, soils and climate, it will be necessary to carry out similar studies in Utah to obtain relationships rela-tionships directly applicable to the Great Basin area." Senator Moss said that the program pro-gram for the National Forests presented in 1959 by Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson recommended an increase in this jtype of research. He said this possibility of increasing in-creasing water yields in arid states by eradicating useless vegetation and modifying the vegetative covering of watersheds water-sheds had also been emphasized in the report presented recently by the Senate Select Committee on National Water Resources. Senator Moss was a member of that committee. "Water-loving and generally worthless vegetation (phreato-phytic (phreato-phytic and hydrophytic plants) along western streams cover nearly 16 million acres in their entirety and are expanding rapidly. This vegetation may discharge dis-charge from 20 million to 25 million mil-lion acre-feet of water into the atmosphere annually. Salvage of even a small part of this water could have a marked and appreciable ap-preciable effect on the water economy in the western states. Estimates of potential savings range from 6 million down to 1 million acre-feet using presently present-ly known methods. "Research to date by many federal and state agencies, and private v- organizations, indicates that reduction in evapo-transpi-ration from watersheds can be achieved through various land management techniques such as the adoption of certain patterns of forest cutting or modification on vegetative cover in nonforest-ed nonforest-ed areas. . "Strengthening of the federal research program . . . should include in-clude an expanded 'effort on evapo-transpiration reduction." Senator Moss said the organization organ-ization at the Intermountain Forest For-est and Range Experiment Station Sta-tion in Ogden is already well prepared to conduct a research program for Utah. |