Flood Plan Boosts Floodplain

Restoration



20
Jun

Flood Plan Boosts Floodplain

The 2017 update to the Central Valley Flood Protection Plan, to be released later this summer, radically revises the flood control strategies that have prevailed for more than a century. The plan recognizes the connections between the flood system, the water system and the ecosystem, and relies less on levees and more on floodplain restoration to upgrade the state’s aging and inadequate flood control infrastructure.
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04
May

Corte Madera’s Flood Fight Goes On and On

If you peek through the chain link fence behind the Ross Post Office in Marin County, you will see a suburban creek that looks much like any other. Some sections of bank are armored with riprap and wire, others with concrete, and others not at all. Scattered alders grow at the edge of water that riffles over stone and around muddy bends. If you peek through the chain link fence behind the Ross Post Office in Marin County, you will see a suburban creek that looks much like any other. Some sections of bank are armored with riprap and wire, others with concrete, and others not at all. Scattered alders grow at the edge of water that riffles over stone...
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27
Mar

Going Local Buys Future for Bayshore

When Bay Area voters approved Measure AA in June 2016 they not only created a significant new source of environmental funding, they also made California history, levying a parcel tax across the entire region for the first time. The measure, which resulted in creation of the SF Bay Restoration Authority, may be a catalyst for a regional approach to wetland restoration, rising sea levels and other challenges.
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26
Mar

Back to the Bones of the Delta

Anyone who’s been around debates about the Delta’s highest and best
 uses for decades has seen a long train of plans touting this or that kind of restoration to save salmon, smelt, mice, birds and other endangereds. What’s different about the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s recently released Delta Renewed guide is that it finally puts all that’s been learned together in 
one place in a mere 100 pages.
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15
Dec

Options for Orphan Species

Off a bustling Delta highway, next door to a branch of the California Aqueduct, sprawls a tidy collection of shipping containers, humming pumps, and cylindrical tanks. This resolutely artificial site is devoted to preserving a disappearing piece of natural California: the Delta smelt. “Our fish are a refuge population,” says Tien-Chieh Hung...
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21
Sep

Wetland Protections in Transition

Environmentalists are heading warily into the fall following two regulatory developments that they fear may cramp efforts to protect California’s wetlands. In June the State Water Resources Control Board released a draft document overhauling wetlands protection procedures but leaving open the question of exactly which wetlands are eligible for protection. In the same month the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that landowners may mount court challenges to U.S. EPA or Corps of Engineers jurisdictional determinations before a permit is issued, potentially generating a torrent of wetlands-related litigation.
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20
Jun

Buckler Brouhaha

There’s a big dispute over a small island at the edge of the Suisun Marsh. John Sweeney, the current owner of Point Buckler Island via a limited liability corporation, faces enforcement action by the Bay Conservation and Development Commission and the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board for diking and draining a tidal wetland and dumping excavation spoils in Suisun Bay. The extensive work he did was subject to regulation by state and federal agencies, and no authorization for it was ever requested or granted.
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09
Mar

Mainstreaming Resilience

Whatever the “perturbation” coming our way – a flood, a drought, a weed or Donald Trump – our recovery, in the aftermath, depends on something ecologists call resilience. It’s a term everyone is pasting onto their management initiatives these days. But what exactly does it mean?
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10
Sep

Scaled-Down Plans to “Fix and Restore”

Surprising many observers, Governor Jerry Brown announced late in April that the Bay Delta Conservation Program, which had embraced the new water conveyance popularly known as the Twin Tunnels and a broad program for restoring the complex and heavily impacted Delta environment, was being split into two new entities: Cal WaterFix and Cal EcoRestore. On the restoration side, he announced a more modest goal of 30,000 acres, down from the original 100,000.
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26
Mar

Cullinan Finally in the Fold

Real estate developers often name their projects for what they’ve displaced: Quail Acres, Live Oak Estates. Egret Bay would have been another such necronym. The 4,500-home development proposed for the former Cullinan Ranch on San Pablo Bay in 1983 would have left little room for egrets, or other birds. A citizen’s group, Vallejoans for Cost Efficient Growth, supported by Save the Bay and other environmental organizations, helped kill Egret Bay, and, in a deal brokered by Congresswoman Barbara Boxer, the land became part of the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Then came the process of restoring the badly subsided 1,500 acres to tidal wetland. On January 6, the dike between Cullinan and Dutchman Slough, a tidal arm of the...
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16
Dec

Offers They Can Refuse

The numbers are daunting: 8,000 acres to be restored to fish-friendly tidal habitat in order to comply with federal wildlife agencies’ Biological Opinions; another 65,000 if and when the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan is implemented; more still if you add in mitigation for levee operations. Where will that acreage come from? State agencies and other public entities already own some parcels suitable for restoration, but not nearly enough: the rest will need to be purchased from its current owners or covered by easements. (Eminent domain is not on the table; it’s not even clear if it could be invoked for habitat purposes.) And legal constraints make buying land in the Delta harder than you might think. Dennis McEwan of the Department...
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27
Sep

Alameda Work Trickles On

Along Alameda Creek, which drains a 640-square-mile watershed, humans have built dams, buried creeks, and reshaped channels. “The watershed is huge and complex, and all these changes, compounded over time, have left us with a long and arduous path to getting it to function more naturally again,” says Carol Mahoney, a planner for Zone 7 Water Agency.
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23
Sep

Defter Delta Restoration

An issue paper endorsed by the Delta Stewardship Council this August seeks to spark progress throughout the myriad stages of habitat restoration. As public and private interests gear up to help endangered fish and migrating birds by restoring habitats in six priority zones of the Delta and Suisun Marsh, this paper lays out tools and concepts for getting the most out of these investments and learning from our mistakes. The paper details steps for achieving effective restoration, reviews barriers such as conflicts with existing land uses and the complexity of permitting processes, and recommends strategies for addressing these challenges.
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18
Sep

Wild River Lands in Suspense File

Remember that chart showing how a bill becomes a law in your high school civics textbook—all those boxes and arrows? Odds are it didn’t include the Suspense File of the Assembly Appropriations Committee, a legislative limbo where bills can expire without ever coming to
a vote. That was the fate of Senate Bill 1199, a measure introduced by State Senator Loni Hancock (DBerkeley) in April to add portions of the Mokelumne River to the California Wild and Scenic Rivers System. Supported by Friends of the River, the Foothill Conservancy, and the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors, SB 1199 cleared the Senate in May. In the Assembly, Appropriations Chair Mike Gatto referred the bill
to the Suspense File because of its alleged fiscal...
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19
Jun

Hamilton Done, But More To Do

Breaching the outboard levee near Marin County’s Hamilton community this May is cause for both a whoop of celebration and a sigh of relief. Celebration because it was an ambitious wetland restoration project with a complicated design and multiple partners that wasn’t easy to pull off, yet in just a few months it’s become a beautiful landscape filled with blue water, green shoots, yellow flowers, quacking ducks, and happy neighbors. Relief because at times the costs and challenges of moving so much mud to the site, in order to the raise the elevation of subsided wetlands, seemed overwhelming to those in charge. But they did it. And now they need to do it again; only this time they hope it...
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19
Jun

Freeing Fish While Locking Up Mercury

Restoration planners were worried that connecting a former salt evaporation pond with the Bay could introduce long-dormant mercury to the wider ecosystem, and initial studies of levels in water bird eggs and fish reinforced that concern. A set of adjustable gates between the pond and the river allows seasonal closure of the pond and the ability to control the flow. But that raised a new question: would the river’s steelhead run get sidetracked...
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03
Mar

The Island That Came in from the Cold

For years, Skaggs Island was a tantalizing blank in the map of San Pablo Bay wetlands restoration. Renee Spenst of Ducks Unlimited says it was “one of those places in a strange limbo.” Two-thirds of it was owned by the US Navy; the rest was privately-owned farmland. Converting any of the 4,400 acres back to tidal wetland was out of the question. “The agencies doing restoration just had to work around these two parcels,” recalls Beth Huning...
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restoration collage
01
Jan

Editor’s Pick Restoration Stories 1993-2013

Walk back through time with this sampling of early stories from Estuary's first two decades of publication. Many stories of the day focused on rescuing creeks and rivers from culverts and rip rap, restoring diked or farmed wetlands, and experimenting with techniques to bring native species back to altered landscapes.
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