Eroding Bayview Park Gets Heavy Lift

Climate Resilience



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...
Read More
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...
Read More

Rocky Road to a Fresh Enough Delta

Nothing reveals just how much the upper Estuary's seesaw of tides and freshwater flows is micro-managed than prolonged drought, and the resulting fiddling with barriers, gates, and water quality standards to prevent the ocean tides and salinity from intruding too far upstream. Come summer, managers begin to talk fearfully of "losing control of the Delta" and the dreaded outcome: salt water too near the export pumps...
Read More
12
Oct

Resurrecting the Carmel River Floodplain

When the storm hit, it was lucky that my parents had a habit of leaving one car on each side of the Carmel River as they commuted from Big Sur into Monterey each day. The 1995 El Niño rainfall had pushed the Carmel River into hundreds of homes, and destroyed the Highway 1 bridge that connected Big Sur with the rest of the world. Most Big Sur residents were trapped during the week it took the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to repair the freeway bridge. But in the era before Zoom, my mother couldn’t just stay home from nursing school. So my parents trekked past the mud of submerged artichoke fields on the river’s south bank and onto the...
Read More
12
Oct

Drought Strains Stormwater Monitoring Endeavors

When it rains, it pours. This old saw passes for an apt description of the new precipitation regime that climate change has wrought for the Bay Area: larger winter storms, but fewer of them. The implications of this shift for ecosystems, infrastucture, and water storage are widespread, and often highly visible. But behind the scenes, it is also complicating efforts to monitor pollution inputs to the San Francisco Bay and other local water bodies from stormwater runoff. The Regional Monitoring Program for Water Quality in San Francisco Bay (RMP) has been collecting data in Bay water, sediment, and biota since 1993. RMP monitoring of stormwater flows after rain events, which began in 2006, has shown that runoff is a major...
Read More
31
Aug

Climate change is heating, salinizing, and expanding the San Francisco Estuary, a review of nearly 200 scientific studies concludes.

Sea level rise, changing snow and rainfall patterns, and warmer waters are some of the changes already observed in the Estuary and expected to continue through the rest of the century as greenhouse gas concentrations rise. Changes to water are at the heart of the documented and further expected impacts; there’s less of it entering the system overall, but more arriving in torrential bursts, and more saltwater creeping inland from the Bay. The scope of the research is expansive even for a review article, in part because climate changes aren’t happening in isolation from other threats and habitat impacts. Writing in San Francisco Estuary and Watershed Science, the authors attempt to summarize not only all known research about climate change...
Read More
Baldocchi at the end of one of the levees breached to restore tidal action at Dutch Slough. Photo: Janet Byron
16
Jun

Sniffing the Delta for Greenhouse Gases

Dutch Slough in Oakley, on the southern edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, is less than a mile from where biometeorologist Dennis D. Baldocchi (above) grew up on his parents’ orchard and fished with pals in nearby Marsh Creek. In October 2021, the California Department of Water Resources breached the levees here, restoring nutrient-rich tidal flows to degraded ranchland. Early in the 20th century, Baldocchi’s father grew dry beans and sugar beets on the peat soils of the Delta’s Liberty Island, and his aunt’s family raised asparagus, sugar beets, and corn on Sherman Island. In 1952, his dad started growing almonds and walnuts at the junction of Sellers Avenue and Cypress Road in Oakley. “My family mined the Delta for...
Read More
13
Apr

Atmospheric Rivers Intensifying as World Warms: How the West Will Know What’s Coming

In just a few years, tracking the West Coast’s atmospheric rivers by airplane has gone from what one hydrologist called “really wild-eyed stuff” to a Congressionally-funded operation. This Atmospheric River Reconnaissance program, which wrapped up its latest season in March, monitors these increasingly powerful storms as they shoot across the Pacific Ocean and delivers real-time data to National Weather Service forecasters. Knowing when, where, and how hard atmospheric rivers will hit is vital to ensuring water supplies and avoiding floods. “California can swing from 20 inches to 60 inches of rainfall per year,” says Atmospheric River Reconnaissance lead Marty Ralph, a research meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We’re very different from the rest of the country — that’s why...
Read More

Will Salmon Simmer Again?

After two critically dry years that coincided with Trump-era rollbacks to environmental protections, some iconic Delta fish are closer than ever to the point of no return. Last fall, for the second year in a row, the fall midwater trawl found zero wild Delta smelt, while a coalition of environmentalists and fishermen is asking a federal court to help prevent a repeat of 2021’s near-obliteration of endangered winter-run Chinook salmon. Their lawsuit is just one of the balls to watch this spring as several projects and processes that could radically affect how much water flows through the Delta, and when, percolate. “There’s a lot going on right now, kind of bubbling just below the surface,” says the Natural Resource Defense...
Read More
15
Feb

Big Boulders, Big Benefits to Coyote Creek Fish

As a source of flowing water, upper Coyote Creek is unreliable at best. Though storms swell its banks in winter, Mediterranean-climate summers shrink this South Bay stream to a series of isolated pools by August. “By October right before the rains come, we’re down to these really small pools that have all the fish in them,” says retired U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ecologist Rob Leidy. Leidy and UC Berkeley fish ecologist Stephanie Carlson began monitoring the annual dry-down of upper Coyote Creek in 2014, with the help of Hana Moidu and other graduate students. The creek itself originates in Henry W. Coe State Park and flows to the Bay through Coyote and Anderson lakes south of San Jose. The scientists...
Read More
15
Feb

Natives Who Can Rough It

Name a native fish. One that spends lots of time in the Delta. One that’s not a salmon, smelt, or sturgeon. One whose population isn’t plummeting, and in fact seems to be doing just fine. By now the list of possibilities has been shortened severely — though not exhausted. A number of native fish still ply Delta waters in stable numbers, but precisely because there are no restoration projects, monitoring programs, or conservation efforts designed to save them — or perhaps because they’re not game fish, or particularly large, or traditionally “charismatic” —  theirs are not household names. To the extent that they are recognized by the general public at all, some are even referred to, somewhat derisively, as “rough”...
Read More
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...
Read More
16
Dec

How the West Can Survive Smaller Snowpacks and Bigger Atmospheric Rivers

Mountains are the foundation of water in the western United States, natural infrastructure that captures snowfall during the winter and releases snowmelt over the spring and summer. In California, the snowpack holds nearly as much water on average as all the reservoirs put together, effectively doubling the state’s surface storage. But, as the world warms, we may not be able to rely on this ecosystem service much longer. A new study projects that snowpack shrinkage will likely disrupt the West’s water system well before the end of the century. This finding adds urgency to water managers’ efforts to adapt to climate change. “This is not a problem for later,” says Michael Anderson, state climatologist at the California Department of Water...
Read More
15
Dec

A new partnership is pushing to tally the “blue carbon” in marine and coastal ecosystems.

Seagrass meadows, kelp forests, and even the seabed can all lock away carbon—but exactly how much is still up in the air for these and other ocean ecosystems. The Seascape Carbon Initiative, a partnership formed in late 2021 between four environmental problem-solving organizations and one independent carbon verifier, is pushing the science forward so protecting and restoring these valuable ecosystems can join mangrove forests and terrestrial forests as certifiable nature-based carbon capture projects.   “Conceptually, the science is pretty good,” says Steve Crooks, the lead wetlands and coastal management scientist for Silvestrum Climate Associates, which is one of the organizations working to accelerate the research. “But when you actually get down to the detail of trying to develop market mechanisms...
Read More
25
Oct

Can Birds and Solar Float on the Same Ponds?

In the late 2000s, small-aircraft pilots gliding above the Napa countryside began to notice an odd, glassy glint reflecting off a tennis-court-size patch of land between vineyards. Large solar arrays were less common back then, but the solar panels themselves likely weren’t the reason planes doubled back, flying low, for a closer look: it was their placement in the middle of a pond. Floating solar panels, like the ones Napa’s Far Niente winery finished installing in 2009, could be a real windfall for a watery Bay-Delta region seeking carbon-free energy. Secured to buoyant platforms or pontoons, low over the water’s surface and at a slight angle, the panels can cover a large area without competing with agriculture or housing for primo sun-drenched land. They slow evaporation from the water sources they...
Read More
25
Oct

Fog Cool for Oysters

On bright hot days, standing in the shade can feel a lot better than standing in the sun. The same goes for oysters living in the inter-tidal shallows of San Francisco Bay. When the tide is low, the oysters bake in the sun. During extreme heat events they can even die. But in this coastal region there is one factor that could help mediate the heat: fog. Indeed, over the past year, San Francisco State graduate student Alexandra (Allie) Margulies has been examining fog data and monitoring oyster density at five sites around the Bay, and recruitment at 10 sites, building on a long-term monitoring dataset collected by the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.  “Fog can help scatter...
Read More
17
Jun

Trail to a Fire-Safe Watershed

Long insulated from severe risk by mild temperatures and the fog that regularly swaddles the Santa Cruz Mountains, San Mateo County now finds itself — like the rest of the Bay Area — facing the climate-driven prospect of catastrophic wildfire. The threat is leading one of the county’s largest landowners to devote unprecedented resources to fire-prevention efforts in the Peninsula Watershed — efforts that will also restore parts of the landscape to an approximation of their historical condition. “In the last few years, the weather has changed in regards to the relative humidity,” says Fire Safe San Mateo County’s Denise Enea. “Normally you would go up to [the redwood-forested ridgeline at the edge of the watershed] and it would be...
Read More
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...
Read More
17
Jun

Ancient River Channels Could Speed Groundwater Recharge

By the time California finally began regulating groundwater use in 2014, most of the San Joaquin Valley was in critical overdraft. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that groundwater pumping in the region has exceeded replenishment by an average of 1.8 million acre-feet per year over the last few decades. This imbalance was even worse during our last drought, when overuse shot up to 2.4 million acre-feet per year. Overpumping puts groundwater aquifers at risk of compaction, permanently reducing their water storage capacity and making surface lands sink. Now, however, San Joaquin Valley groundwater managers must find and implement a fix. The state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act mandates balancing the region’s pumping with replenishment by 2040. Managed aquifer recharge...
Read More
17
Jun

Bay Trail Retreat at Bothin Marsh

The Bay Trail connecting Sausalito and Mill Valley is a bustling pathway where recreational bicyclists, bike commuters, and pedestrians all mix amidst the bayfront marsh scenery of the Bothin Marsh Open Space Preserve. Around thirty times per year, though, this scene looks dramatically different, as high tides flood the area with seawater, making the path impassable. Experts say this demonstrates how vulnerable the path and marsh are to sea-level rise, and an ambitious new project is underway to re-engineer the pathway and help the marsh adapt to this future. On June 8, the team working on this “Evolving Shorelines” project announced a final design that moves the Bay Trail to follow the perimeter of the marsh, but the decision didn’t...
Read More
1 2 3 7