Restoration Reflections: A Hundred Ways to Cherish the Estuary

Bay Wetlands & Shores



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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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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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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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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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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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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Living with a Novel Landscape: Suisun Evolves

Morning at Suisun Marsh is a living watercolor with a soundtrack. Miles of tule and pickleweed populate the foreground, split by canals glinting silver from the sun. In May, the hills undulate across the northern boundary in classic California gold. A red-tailed hawk’s iconic hoarse screech punctuates the insectine buzz as it takes off from a powerline. At 7:40 AM, it’s already 72 degrees and there’s no trace of a breeze. I’ve come to visit the Marsh from downtown Oakland seeking to learn from biologists, hunters, and land managers what’s at stake in the myriad battles with rising seas, worsening drought, and, especially, encroaching invasive species and what makes it such a singular, attractive landscape.  Indeed, the pastoral foreground is...
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15
Feb

South Bay Trawls Show Fish Like Restored Shores

Twelve years ago, scientists at UC Davis began a survey of the southern end of San Francisco Bay — the Lower South Bay — to see how fish responded to the South Bay Salt Ponds Restoration Project. They discovered an unexpectedly diverse and robust aquatic community and a previously unknown spawning ground for the longfin smelt (Spirinchus thaleichthys), listed as endangered in California and a candidate for federal protection because of its declining numbers. The team, led first by Jim Hobbs and now by Levi Lewis, has complied an invaluable long-term dataset and enhanced our understanding of the surprising ecosystems of the bottom of the Bay. In addition to journal publications, their findings have been shared in blog posts by...
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15
Feb

Let’s Not Forget Suisun Marsh

I started sampling the fishes of Suisun Marsh in 1979 because one of my UC Davis graduate students was looking for a place to study tule perch, a live-bearing native fish. We found not only a lot of tule perch in the marsh, but also an abundance of other native fishes. Clearly, this was a good place to study species for which we had little information at that time. Two things helped with our new project. First, sampling boats could be launched less than an hour’s drive from campus. Second, the California Department of Water Resources needed a study to examine effects of new tidal gates on fish. The gates are designed to retain fresher water in the marsh to...
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20
Aug

Loss of wetland habitat in the Delta has reduced net primary productivity by 94%, but achieving current restoration goals could restore 12% of this loss.

In a new study published in the September 2021 issue of Science of The Total Environment, researchers modeled net primary production of the Delta under historical and contemporary conditions in order to project the potential benefits of restoration. The loss of net primary productivity—the amount of energy available to pass up the food chain—associated with human modification of the Delta since the early 19th century has reduced the energy available to support biodiversity and ecosystem services. Using the San Francisco Estuary Institute’s Historical Ecology Project, which modeled the early Delta based on archival photos, maps, and texts from the early 1800s, researchers estimated the total area for five specific habitat types: open water, tidal marsh, non-tidal marsh, riparian forest/scrub, and seasonal floodplains. The...
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17
Jun

Moonrise over Giant Marsh: New Monitoring Data from Two-Year-Old Supershore Project

Kathy Boyer is used to getting up in the dark so she can slide across the mudflats into the Bay at first light. But this past May, she got a once-in-a-decade treat. As the professor from SF State’s Estuary & Ocean Science Center aimed her boogie board at some two-year-old eelgrass beds growing off the Richmond shoreline, the Super Flower Blood Moon rose in the blue field of the western sky. “It’s hard to get up at 4 a.m. but if I wasn’t doing this work, I would have missed the eclipse,” said Devon Wallace, a student of Boyer’s and a recent SF State graduate, who was enjoying the chance to get in some field experience after a year grounded...
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17
Jun

Three Ways to Feed the Marsh

Seal Beach is drowning. As a result of sea-level rise, subsidence, and limited sediment supply, much of the 920-acre National Wildlife Refuge in Orange County can no longer keep its head above water. Pacific cordgrass, normally exposed at low tides, is being completely inundated. Rare nesting habitat for the endangered light-footed clapper rail is disappearing at high tides. It’s a marsh manager’s worst nightmare, and a potential harbinger of things to come later this century for tidal wetlands up and down the state, including those in San Francisco Bay. The problem at Seal Beach has been building for decades, and by 2016 managers knew they had to act—fast. But options for saving the existing marsh were limited. So on an...
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23
Mar

Sediment Paparazzi

As the Estuary faces drowning marshes due to rising seas, people want to see action – acres saved, walls built, marsh mice whisked to safety after crawling to the tip of the tallest gumplant. In terms of action, “sediment monitoring” doesn’t come immediately to mind. Monitoring is something you do after all the action is over, isn’t it? And as for “sediment,” well what’s all the fuss over some dirt and mud? In fact, there is quite a fuss. The Bay region has a sediment management strategy and a sediment monitoring and modeling strategy, and later this month it will have a new sediment supply and demand analysis. Indeed, six different workgroups of Bay scientists, managers, and regulators are now...
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28
Sep

Science in Short ~ Fish Podcast

David Ayers: How Fish Interact with Wetlands Topography  In this podcast, Estuary News reporter Alastair Bland and UC Davis PhD student and fish researcher David Ayers discuss the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, its fish, its marshlands, its flows, and its future. Ayers explains the focus of his research, which seeks to reveal how underwater topography in the wetlands fringing the estuary affects interactions between predators and small fish. While restoration projects often focus on adding more water to this ecosystem and encouraging that water to overflow the river’s banks, Ayers says small fish need more than just water and wetlands to survive. Variation in habitat features, such as the width and depth of wetland channels that wind through these ecosystems, create a...
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18
Jun

Small Town and Big Marsh Brace for Spreading Bay

By Robin Meadows When heavy rains coincided with an extreme high tide in 2005, water from the Carquinez Strait overtopped flood protections in the City of Benicia. Making matters worse, the high seas also submerged stormwater outfalls. Water backed up stormdrains, inundating historic homes and small businesses. As tides keep rising, scenarios like this will play out more often―and with greater severity―along the Solano County shoreline, which extends 40 miles as the crow flies from San Pablo Bay to the Delta. High risk areas in addition to Benicia include Highway 37 and the Suisun Marsh. In 2016, the City of Benicia—population about 28,000—developed “the first stand-alone climate adaptation plan for a city of its size,” says climate expert Alex Porteshawver,...
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18
Jun

Highway 37: The Road to Restoration

From head-on collisions in the 1980s to crippling congestion now, Highway 37 is a familiar headache for highway engineers. Fearing that engineers might not take full account of the vast marsh restorations underway in the area, the Sonoma Land Trust, the Coastal Conservancy, and others joined in a State Route 37-Baylands Group. In 2017, the group laid down markers: Whatever is done with the east-west highway must also improve the passage of tides and stormwaters north and south, not further impede those flows.
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19
Mar

Regulatory Teams Coordinate

By Cariad Hayes Thronson In March the San Francisco Estuary Partnership released its Wetlands Regional Monitoring Program Plan, which lays out the science framework for a long-term program to monitor tidal wetlands around the Bay. “The focus of the plan is how we’re going to answer five guiding questions about the status and trends of our tidal wetlands,” says the Partnership’s Heidi Nutters. The framework is only the first phase of what will ultimately be a four-year planning process. Nutters says the team planning for wetlands monitoring is also working closely with the Bay Restoration Regulatory and Integration Team (BRRIT), which comprises representatives from each of the agencies that permit projects.
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22
Jan

While the acreage of wetland restoration projects is growing throughout the Delta, scientists are still working to understand how best to help these areas become fully functioning, complex habitat as quickly and successfully as possible.

A study published in September’s San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science shed light on some essential questions about what triggers seed generation in wetland habitat. “Wetland restoration practices can be enhanced by a solid understanding of basic plant life history and species ecology,” says co-author Taylor Sloey of Yale-NUS College in Singapore. The researchers looked at three questions: what seeds are present in the seed bank (the viable seeds that accumulate naturally in the soil), and how exposure to cold and flood affects their germination. The study was based on seed bank samples taken from wetlands on the Delta’s Liberty Island. Though the island was drained and farmed throughout most of the 20th century, it has been naturally recolonized by...
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