Month

March 2023
28
Mar

Restoration Reflections: A Hundred Ways to Cherish the Estuary

Restoration is a powerful concept. Physically it entails putting something back, making it right again; emotionally it requires hope for the future, a sense of something worth doing.  In the Estuary, restoration is no longer about recreating some pristine ecosystem that once was. The vast marshes that carpeted the Delta and circled the Bay before Europeans arrived out West are long gone; the great rivers spilling fresh water and salmon downstream are a shadow of their former selves; the myriad creeks and sloughs offering migratory paths and habitats for so many estuarine creatures are now laced with obstacles and lined with concrete.  But for some time now, the call to restoration work has been growing. People in all walks of...
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21
Mar

VA Agreement Highlights Habitat Questions

Restoring marsh and wetland habitat can have significant benefits for dozens of species throughout the Bay and Delta—that’s beyond dispute. But when it comes to saving the Estuary’s most imperiled fish, how much habitat improvements can help in the absence of dramatically increased freshwater flows is a question that has dogged and divided scientists and policy makers for years. As the State Water Resources Control Board considers the latest proposal from the State and water agencies for a flows agreement that would restore thousands of riparian and wetland acres—while dedicating less water to the environment than proposed under an alternative regulatory framework—critics argue that science doesn’t support its underlying assumptions. The debate highlights how much there still is to learn about...
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Ducks. Photo: Rick Lewis
21
Mar

Delta Restoration Baseline Revealed

When the Delta Stewardship Council amended its Delta Plan and established a goal of restoring 60,000 to 80,000 acres of wetland above a 2007 baseline by 2050, it raised some fundamental questions: How much of that goal has already been met, and where? A recent study, presented at the Delta Plan Interagency Implementation Committee Restoration Subcommittee’s first-ever Delta Restoration Forum in February, provides some answers. The amendments to Chapter Four of the Delta Plan, which focuses on protecting, restoring, and enhancing the Delta ecosystem, synthesized 14 existing agency reports and other documents in establishing the 2050 targets, which are deemed necessary to achieve the larger goal of restoring a functioning ecosystem by the end of this century. However, “there wasn’t...
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Construction of groins and headlands at Heron's Head in November 2022. Photo: Port of SF
21
Mar

Eroding Bayview Park Gets Heavy Lift

Carol Bach, who oversaw the restoration of a sliver of tidal wetlands on San Francisco’s industrialized shore in 1999, was alarmed to see her work eroding away decades later. Waves crossing the Bay from Hayward to Heron’s Head steadily carved away at this small peninsula of tidal habitat and public park favored by locals with few other options for waterfront recreation. The erosion was hard to miss: steep escarpments developed along the shore; the size of the marsh shrank; a tidal pool favored by shorebirds breached and became an embayment. “We wanted to stop the erosion, restore the tidal pond, and protect the whole landscape using natural infrastructure,” says Bach, who stuck around long enough at the Port to fix...
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American Avocet on managed, former salt ponds in the South Bay. Photo: Roopak Bhatt, USGS
21
Mar

Riding the Restoration Waves: My Estuarine Journey

After 16 years of working in the San Francisco Estuary, including serving as a manager for key regional agencies, I have ridden several waves of restoration. I’ve seen big changes in how restoration is done, who does it, and who benefits—whether it’s a fish or bird on the verge of extinction or a young person from an urban community learning green job skills on the shoreline. Our view of what matters continues to expand as connections that were once cloudy—between habitat restoration and environmental justice, between upland and bay habitats—come into focus. We’re not just trying to create small patches of tidal marsh but to piece together a huge mosaic of habitats from working lands to wetlands. We now know...
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21
Mar

Taking the Measure of Success at the South Bay Salt Ponds

It is two decades now since some 23 square miles of South Bay salt evaporation ponds became public property. Eighty-eight old impoundments were to be remade into habitat for birds and other creatures—and into a superior flood-control buffer for communities beside the rising Bay. Progress since then has been slow, and fast. Slow, because relatively small swathes of territory have been visibly, obviously changed. Slow, because a whole set of basic questions had to be answered before the work could pick up speed. And fast, because those questions have now been answered, by and large, and the news is pretty good. As sea-level rise makes the project ever more urgent, the way seems open to a rapid transformation in the...
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Creek snorkel survey. Photo: Rick Johnson
21
Mar

A Steelhead Renaissance in San Mateo Creek

Rich Johnson steps through an inconspicuous gate between two backyards not far from the downtown San Mateo Caltrain station and points down a steep, overgrown streambank to a piece of PVC piping, barely visible beneath the tumbling water. “That’s our furthest downstream PIT array,” says Johnson, an aquatic biologist with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC). The Passive Integrated Transponder array is one of four stations along San Mateo Creek that capture signals from tagged steelhead as they migrate up and down the creek.  More than a month after a series of atmospheric rivers deluged the Bay Area in January, San Mateo Creek is still running high, fed by unusually large releases from Crystal Springs Reservoir. The high flows...
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A freshly groomed bank far left. Some of the old revetment now forms riffles mid-river. Photo: Daniel McGlynn
21
Mar

Setbacks and Swallows for the Sacramento River

Adam Henderson spreads out an atlas with colorful pages on the closed trunk of his white sedan. It’s an early morning in February and the sun is just high enough to start burning off a blanket of fog that’s settled among the nearby willows and cottonwoods. Behind us, across a gravel parking lot, is a gate that’s an access point for the Sacramento River National Wildlife Refuge, controlled and maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. On the other side of the gate, a couple hundred yards of flat field ends in a 20-foot drop that acts like a well-defined shoulder for the river—and it’s the reason why we are standing here. Thanks to January’s heavy rains, the river...
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Treatment near Bair Island with airboat. Photo: Drew Kerr, ISP
21
Mar

The Battle for Native Cordgrass

Now in its 17th year of monitoring and treatment, the San Francisco Estuary Invasive Spartina Project remains a uniquely ambitious invasive plant removal effort: from its timeline (indefinite) and size (covering 70,000 acres with more than 150 landowners and managers) to its budget (about $50 million to date) and use of technology (genetic testing, GIS, airboats, helicopters). It’s been an effective one, too, reducing stands of invasive cordgrass in the region to a tiny fraction of what they once were. “We are excited at the continual progress over two decades, even with all the permitting and pandemic challenges,” says project manager Marilyn Latta of the California State Coastal Conservancy, which manages the Invasive Spartina Project (ISP) in partnership with the...
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Los Rios Check Dam open for fish passage. Photo: Max Stevenson
21
Mar

Reconnecting Putah Creek with the Ocean

After decades of restoration, recent Chinook salmon runs in Putah Creek have reached 1,800, producing young that swim toward the ocean by the tens of thousands. But, says Putah Creek streamkeeper Max Stevenson, this growing population still faces considerable obstacles.  Putah Creek flows from headwaters in the North Coast Ranges to the Toe Drain of the Yolo Bypass, and was dammed near Winters in the 1950s to divert water for Solano County. Salmon began coming to the creek after settlement of a lawsuit in the year 2000 that stipulated releasing water for fish as well as optimizing spawning grounds.  Salmon need loose gravel to dig spawning pits, or redds, that are up to six feet across. “They flop over and...
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Techniques used to add sediment to the Montezuma Wetlands included hosing it from a sediment laden barge. Photo: Darren Graffuis
21
Mar

More Mud Please for Novato Baylands

Imagine a complex of tidal wetlands skirting San Pablo Bay unbroken from China Camp to Mare Island, providing vital wildlife habitat and protecting inland communities from storm surge and sea-level rise. With stretches of this shoreline formerly diked and drained (or in Hamilton Wetlands’ case, converted to a military airfield), reconnecting it may have once seemed unlikely. Yet today just two gaps remain, one of which is included in a restoration project that’s already underway: Bel Marin Keys. And it’s a doozy. The problem is one of scope—and more specifically of mud. The project site, currently partitioned into fields for agricultural use by a grid of berms and drainage ditches, is so large (1,900 acres), and the land so subsided...
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21
Mar

Saving a Species Struck by Systemic Oversights at Clear Lake

Since the 1950s, four native fish extinctions have taken place in Lake County’s Clear Lake: the thicktail chub, Clear Lake splittail, Pacific lamprey, and hardhead. A fifth endemic species, the Clear Lake hitch, is teetering on the brink. “Agencies view the hitch as just a fish. But for Tribes the hitch is sacred,” explains Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians tribal elder Ron Montez, Sr. “We believe Creator placed this fish here to help us survive for thousands of years. The chi (Pomo word for hitch) not only fed the seven Tribes around the lake, but it fed Tribes who came in from surrounding counties—Sonoma, Napa, Sacramento—and sustained all these people since time immemorial. That’s gone now. Anyone younger than...
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Seining Luco pond. Photo: Brian Williamshen
21
Mar

Suisun’s Working Landscapes Support Fish

On a sunny spring day in 2014, two UC Davis PhD candidates in waders pulled a 30-foot seine through Luco Pond (also known as the Potrero Duck Club) in Suisun Marsh. Luco Pond is within the Nurse-Denverton Slough Complex where duck clubs use tidal gates to control water exchange. After 45 minutes of counting diminutive fish, Brian Williamshen and Melissa Riley were excited to tally more than 6,900 sticklebacks, a thorny-backed native fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. “There was definitely a moment of excitement,” Williamshen says. “But when we were at our 50th fish, and the little spines kept poking us in the fingers, our emotions shifted to like, oh man, we still have hundreds more to go!”...
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Vogel Island after breaching during first filling. Photo: EIP/Bill Arnerich
21
Mar

Lookout Slough Restoration will be the Delta’s Largest Yet

When the restoration of Lookout Slough is complete, Lookout Slough will be no more. Created to provide water for a century-old duck-hunting club, the human-made canal will be filled in as part of a $119 million, 3,400-acre tidal wetlands restoration, the largest ever in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. “Drought and climate change have elevated the importance of these types of multi-benefit projects,” said Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, when the project broke ground last June. “This project will reduce flood risk for communities in the Central Valley and create much-needed habitat for Delta smelt and other endangered and threatened fish species.” By their expected completion in late 2024, the new tidal wetlands will replace former...
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Aerial view of Bouldin Island. Courtesy MWD
21
Mar

An Inclusive Vision for Bouldin Island

Over resistance from local governments and environmental organizations, in 2016 Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District purchased five islands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. While it wasn’t immediately clear what the powerful water agency intended for these islands, the move reminded some Californians of the “Wild West” years of water rights claimed by surreptitious land purchases. Now, years later, it appears the District is making good on that purchase by taking a leading role in Delta restoration efforts. The Delta Islands Adaptations project, funded through a watershed-restoration grant from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, has zeroed in on Bouldin Island (the other four islands purchased at the same time were Webb Tract, Bacon Island, Holland Tract, and parts...
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Shorebirds-on-1-restored-habitat_U.S.-Geological-Survey_William-Chan
21
Mar

Wetland Restoration is for the Birds

It’s high tide at Eden Landing Ecological Reserve, on San Francisco Bay due west of Union City, and Nathan Van Schmidt is counting birds on Pond E9 with both hands. Van Schmidt, science director for the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory, has a clicker in his right hand to track American Avocet, and another in his left for Northern Shoveler. “Wetlands can support an incredible biomass of birds,” he says. “And Eden Landing is one of the birdiest places in the Bay.” The Observatory, a local nonprofit bird conservation organization, helps the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project to monitor how birds are doing on 82 managed ponds and restored tidal wetlands. This pond, with water levels maintained at about...
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Measuring sediment accretion and Hamilton wetlands restoration site in Marin County. Photo: ESA
21
Mar

From Sticks to Satellites: Restoration 1960-2023

The 1960s and ‘70s were a time of rapid change for the San Francisco Bay shoreline. It had long been treated as a waste disposal site or area to fill for development, but public outcry for protection reached a crescendo in 1969 with the birth of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC). The passage of the federal Clean Water Act in 1972 meant that destruction of wetland habitat—already 90% vanished from the Bay—had to be mitigated, or re-created elsewhere. For the first time there was public support and a legal obligation to restore wetlands, but scientists had to figure out how. On June 3, 1976, an intrepid group of restorationists in the small Marin County town of...
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Top Photo: Bay Trail in Richmond. Photo: Ben Botkin
21
Mar

Boots on the Bayshore: Bay Trail

It’s largely taken for granted within the San Francisco Bay environmental community today that public trails through parks and preserves are both right and good: right, in the sense that they can offer equitable access to our region’s most treasured natural assets; and good, because they engender support for protection and restoration. But along the waterfront, trails weren’t always so welcome. “The local chapters of the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club were adamantly opposed,” recalls Tom Mikkelsen, who led implementation of the Bay Trail, an ambitious multi-use trail ringing the Bay, from its inception in 1988 until 2001. “Every time we came up with a project that was close to the edge of the Bay, they opposed it. And...
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