Dr. Miles Silman echoed Bobby Hege, the lakes program supervisor for the City of Winston-Salem Recreation and Parks that is overseeing the construction at Salem Lake, in the WFDD article by stating that many Piedmont area lake ecosystems are very resilient when it comes to disturbances because Salem Lake is man-made.
If you think about the amount of flooding that comes down a river due to a hurricane, or a very large rainstorm event, those create tremendous volumes of water. I suspect similar to the kinds of water volumes that were put out by releasing the water to draw down the lake, if not more. The organisms that live in that water are used to having those kinds of disturbances, particularly when you get to larger streams.” – Dr. Miles Silman, Professor of Biology, CINCIA co-founder, and Wake Forest’s Andrew Sabin Presidential Chair of Conservation Biology.
You may read more of the WFDD article here.