The success of a restoration project is in the eye of the beholder. Take the recently revitalized salt marsh edging Drift Creek in Alsea Bay, Oregon. To ecologists, the sight of new channels winding through bare, brown mud is a thing of beauty, heralding the abundance of life to come, from sedges and rushes to fish and shorebirds.
But, as researchers learned while speaking with people living nearby, not everyone shares this view. Some locals favored the unrestored side for its lush green vegetation and vistas of grazing elk. Resolving such differences in perception is key to local support, which can be required for project funding and permitting.
“Restoration can look unsightly at first,” said UC Davis salt marsh ecologist Julie Gonzalez. “There’s often a disconnect between scientists and other user groups, like community members and landowners, about what successful restoration actually looks like.”
Drift Creek project, restored on one side (A) and left as is on the other (B). Photo: Paul Engelmeyer.
In a new study, Gonzalez and colleagues gauged how various users perceived Oregon salt marshes in Alsea Bay, Yaquina Bay, and South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve in Coos Bay. This one-year pilot wrapped up in December 2021, and the team presented their work at a May 25, 2022 webinar called Restoration Success: Linking Social and Ecological Metrics.
Besides offering habitat to a wealth of native species, salt marshes provide ecosystem services such as storing carbon, enhancing water quality, and buffering coastlines against rising seas and storm surges. But only 15% of West Coast salt marshes remain; the rest have been diked and drained for conversion to farms and housing.
The team devised social metrics for perceptions of salt marsh restoration, compared them to ecological metrics, and suggested ways to reconcile differences between the two. “We wanted to know what to highlight in communications with the public,” study lead and Portland State University environmental scientist Catherine de Rivera explained during the webinar.
The pilot results heartened the researchers. For example, focus groups that brought together ecologists and community members revealed a surprising commonality of environmental values. “They were all concerned with habitat, pollution, and sea-level rise.” said Portland State University’s Melissa Haeffner, who was social science lead on the study.
Social metrics were based partly on how the people in focus groups ranked images of high versus low ecological function. For example, participants chose between an image of the curving tidal channels found in healthy salt marshes and one of the straightened channels typical of developed coastal areas. Ecological metrics included channel sinuosity (hydrology), nonnative plant cover, and wildlife use.
Focus group participants rank marsh photos for aesthetic value. Photo: Aurora Kren
A favorite moment for de Rivera came when a dairy farmer gave the lowest ranking to a photo of a cow standing in a tidal channel. An environmentalist in the same focus group was agog to discover this common ground with the farmer. “The environmentalist said, ‘What, you think that?'” she recalled. “After that, the group came together — it was a powerful experience.”
However, comparison of social and ecological metrics also revealed a divide between community members and restoration practitioners. “There were mismatches between social and management perspectives,” Gonzalez says.
Based on their findings, the team created a public-facing brochure describing restored salt marshes in a different way. While technical reports highlight metrics like hydrology and vegetation, these local people rank these on the low side. The brochure explains why these elements influence issues the public cares about, for example clarifying that sinuous channels provide habitat for fish and other wildlife, while marsh plants provide both habitat and ecosystem services.
The mix of people in the study, from those involved in the restorations to those affected by them, gives credence to the findings. Sabra Marie TallChief Comet, South Slough’s coastal training program coordinator, also credited the team with engaging a broader slice of the community, including those with “less trust of government.” That said, the researchers cautioned that the study may also have an intrinsic bias: because it was conducted during the pandemic, participants had to be willing to wear masks.
To see if their results hold up more broadly, the team wants to extend their work to other sites on the West Coast, including in Oregon, Washington state, and California National Estuarine Research Reserves in the San Francisco Bay, Elkhorn Slough, and Tijuana River. “We can do better on designing restoration projects and collecting metrics with people’s use in mind,” said de Rivera.
Top image: Researchers Gonzalez, de Rivera, and Robertson-Rojas preparing to survey a salt marsh in South Slough Reserve that was restored 25 years ago. Photo: Alice Yeates
Robin Meadows is an independent science journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s a water reporter at Maven's Notebook, a California water news site, and contributor to Chemical & Engineering News, Ka Pili Kai, KneeDeep Times, and Scientific American. Robin is also a Pulitzer Center grantee, an Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources fellow, a contributor to The Craft of Science Writing, a mentor with The Open Notebook, and a UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program graduate. Find her on Tumblr and Twitter.
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Hothouse Earth
By Ariel Rubissow Okamoto
Photo by Megan Nguyen
Nothing could be stranger than sitting in the dark with thousands of suits and heels, watching a parade of promises to decarbonize from companies and countries large and small, reeling from the beauties of big screen rainforests and indigenous necklaces, and getting all choked up.
It was day two of the September 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco when I felt it.
At first I wondered if I was simply starstruck. Most of us labor away trying to fix one small corner of the planet or another without seeing the likes of Harrison Ford, Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Jerry Brown – or the ministers or mayors of dozens of cities and countries – in person, on stage and at times angry enough to spit. And between these luminaries a steady stream of CEOs, corporate sustainability officers, and pension fund managers promising percentages of renewables and profits in their portfolios dedicated to the climate cause by 2020-2050.
I tried to give every speaker my full attention: the young man of Vuntut Gwichin heritage from the edge of the Yukon’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge who pleaded with us not to enter his sacred lands with our drills and dependencies; all the women – swathed in bright patterns and head-scarfs – who kept punching their hearts. “My uncle in Uganda would take 129 years to emit the same amount of carbon as an American would in one year,” said Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima.
“Our janitors are shutting off the lights you leave on,” said Aida Cardenas, speaking about the frontline workers she trains, mostly immigrants, who are excited to be part of climate change solutions in their new country.
The men on the stage, strutting about in feathers and pinstripes, spoke of hopes and dreams, money and power. “The notion that you can either do good or do well is a myth we have to collectively bust,” said New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy whose state is investing heavily in offshore wind farms.
“Climate change isn’t just about risks, it’s about opportunities,” said Blackrock sustainable investment manager Brian Deese.
But it wasn’t all these fine speeches that started the butterflies. Halfway through the second day of testimonials, it was a slight white-haired woman wrapped in an azure pashmina that pricked my tears. One minute she was on the silver screen with Alec Baldwin and the next she taking a seat on stage. She talked about trees. How trees can solve 30% of our carbon reduction problem. How we have to stop whacking them back in the Amazon and start planting them everywhere else. I couldn’t help thinking of Dr. Seuss and his truffala trees. Jane Goodall, over 80, is as fierce as my Lorax. Or my daughter’s Avatar.
Analyzing my take home feeling from the event I realized it wasn’t the usual fear – killer storms, tidal waves, no food for my kids to eat on a half-baked planet – nor a newfound sense of hope – I’ve always thought nature will get along just fine without us. What I felt was relief. People were actually doing something. Doing a lot. And there was so much more we could do.
As we all pumped fists in the dark, as the presentations went on and on and on because so many people and businesses and countries wanted to STEP UP, I realized how swayed I had let myself be by the doomsday news mill.
“We must be like the river, “ said a boy from Bangladesh named Risalat Khan, who had noticed our Sierra watersheds from the plane. “We must cut through the mountain of obstacles. Let’s be the river!”
Or as Harrison Ford less poetically put it: “Let’s turn off our phones and roll up our sleeves and kick this monster’s ass.”
4th California Climate Change Assessment Blues
by Isaac Pearlman
Since California’s last state-led climate change assessment in 2012, the Golden State has experienced a litany of natural disasters. This includes four years of severe drought from 2012 to 2016, an almost non-existent Sierra Nevada snowpack in 2014-2015 costing $2.1 billion in economic losses, widespread Bay Area flooding from winter 2017 storms, and extremely large and damaging wildfires culminating with this year’s Mendocino Complex fire achieving the dubious distinction of the largest in state history. California’s most recent climate assessment, released August 27th, predicts that for the state and the Bay Area, we can expect even more in the future.
The California state government first began assessing climate impacts formally in 2006, due to an executive order by Governor Schwarzenegger. California’s latest iteration and its fourth overall, includes a dizzying array of 44 technical reports; three topical studies on climate justice, tribal and indigenous communities, and the coast and ocean; as well as nine region-specific analyses.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.
For the first time, California’s latest assessment dives into climate consequences on a regional level. Academics representing nine California regions spearheaded research and summarized the best available science on the variable heat, rain, flooding and extreme event consequences for their areas. For example, the highest local rate of sea level rise in the state is at the rapidly subsiding Humboldt Bay. In San Diego county, the most biodiverse in all of California, preserving its many fragile and endangered species is an urgent priority. Francesca Hopkins from UC Riverside found that the highest rate of childhood asthma in the state isn’t an urban smog-filled city but in the Imperial Valley, where toxic dust from Salton Sea disaster chokes communities – and will only become worse as higher temperatures and less water due to climate change dry and brittle the area.
According to the Bay Area Regional Report, since 1950 the Bay Area has already increased in temperature by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit and local sea level is eight inches higher than it was one hundred years ago. Future climate will render the Bay Area less suitable for our evergreen redwood and fir forests, and more favorable for tolerant chaparral shrub land. The region’s seven million people and $750 billion economy (almost one-third of California’s total) is predicted to be increasingly beset by more “boom and bust” irregular wet and very dry years, punctuated by increasingly intense and damaging storms.
Unsurprisingly, according to the report the Bay Area’s intensifying housing and equity problems have a multiplier affect with climate change. As Bay Area housing spreads further north, south, and inland the result is higher transportation and energy needs for those with the fewest resources available to afford them; and acute disparity in climate vulnerability across Bay Area communities and populations.
“All Californians will likely endure more illness and be at greater risk of early death because of climate change,” bluntly states the statewide summary brochure for California’s climate assessment. “[However] vulnerable populations that already experience the greatest adverse health impacts will be disproportionately affected.”
“We’re much better at being reactive to a disaster than planning ahead,” said UC Berkeley professor and contributing author David Ackerly at a California Adaptation Forum panel in Sacramento on August 27th. “And it is vulnerable communities that suffer from those disasters. How much human suffering has to happen before it triggers the next round of activity?”
The assessment’s data is publicly available online at “Cal-adapt,” where Californians can explore projected impacts for their neighborhoods, towns, and regions.
The results are alarming for our state’s future: an estimated four to five feet of sea level rise and loss of one to two-thirds of Southern California beaches by 2100, a 50 percent increase in wildfires over 25,000 acres, stronger and longer heat waves, and infrastructure like airports, wastewater treatment plants, rail and roadways increasingly likely to suffer flooding.