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Estuary Project Demonstration Projects
It's hard to introduce "watershed management" without seeming overly ambitious or ambiguous in an era where efforts to save air, water and land all have their separate compartments, as do those aimed at protecting little fish, big trees and thirsty humans. Ambitious because watershed management addresses all these things at once, embracing whole ecosystems; ambiguous because it breaks conventional boun-daries as it leaps from pebble to stream to bank to field, from city to farm to mountaintop, from rancher to biologist to student. In this context, where on earth do you start?
The Estuary Project started in nine specific places 18 months ago, and its network of demonstration projects for watershed protection is fast-growing into a model of how to make local actions have regional impact, how to put big government behind real people, and how to make the Project's Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) for the Bay and Delta come alive from the ground up.
"There's a synergy here, a regional partnership of people looking not only at the success of their individual projects, but also how they fit together as a whole," says manager Tim Vendlinski.
Each project demonstrates how to implement one or more of the CCMP's 144 actions. To fund them, the Estuary Project contributed close to $600,000, augmented by a 25 percent non-federal match. It also organized quarterly meetings among project leaders. "We've helped innovative thinkers connect on a personal, technical and policy level," says Vendlinski. "It's a model for how government can do business as a catalyst, of how emerging local projects can become facets of a large-scale ecosystem approach."
The following special section presents project summaries and highlights of recent activities. Contact: Tim Vendlinski (415)744-1989
Inventorying Streams
The hardhead is a lowlander - a native minnow that lives in low and middle elevation stream habitats and one of the multitude of species that makes lowlands some of the most biodiverse zones on Earth. Unfortunately, lowlands are also where people most like to build their homes and cities.
Finding the last unspoiled stream habitats in the Bay watershed was what EPA's Rob Leidy was after when he netted a hardhead in Napa Creek last summer. The discovery of a species that's been fast-disappearing as pollution and habitat degradation take their tolls was hopeful. "In some streams, we've found really nice intact remnants of native fishes and amphibians," says Leidy. "That's sort of surprising to some people because the Estuary is so urbanized."
Napa Creek is one of 400 riparian sites throughout the Bay watershed where Leidy has been inventorying fish, amphibians and plants for this demonstration project. His most recent discovery shows how well natives, versus interlopers, fair in the extremes characteristic of California's freshwater environments. "After last year's heavy flows, it seems there's a decline in introduced species," he says. "A lot of the exotics aren't really adapted to these flashy, high flow systems, which flushed them out, if you will. Of course in areas where reservoirs were built, the flows have been changed, and the exotics still dominate."
Once high-quality, high-risk stream zones have been identified, priorities can be set for protection and the creation of Aquatic Diversity Management Areas designed to preserve whole ecosystems. Contact: Robert Leidy (415)744-1970 Budget: $224,699
Mapping Conditions
Al Gore's dream of a nationwide data superhighway is already alive in the Estuary in the form of a computer-based Geographic Information System (GIS) that can map and compare different environmental and land use factors. "We're making digital information into live, usable, interactive files," says Professor Robert Twiss of U.C. Berkeley's Center for Environmental Design Research.
Twiss and the Center have spent more than five years building a GIS for the San Fran-cisco Bay-Delta region. They now have more than 50 basic data layers showing everything from streams and wetlands to urban growth scenarios in the Estuary's 34 hydrologic units. The newest layers are coming in from other watershed demonstration projects.
The project will soon offer 12 of the most-asked-for layers on a CD-ROM disk. And plans are underway for a "situation room" where planners and the public can use advanced GIS technology.
To Twiss, GIS and advanced telecommunications have the power to assure wide public access to information. Rather than having one centralized government repository, Twiss envisions a large number of information suppliers (universities, government agencies, volunteer groups) and users (libraries, schools, homes, private firms) connected by a network.
"Demystifying and deprofessionalizing this kind of information is a very important democratic principle," says Twiss. "It's enormously empowering. It's a way for the Estuary Project to connect at the grassroots level." Contact: Professor Robert H. Twiss (510)642-2896 Budget: $89,858
Entrusting Citizens
Can citizen monitors provide reliable data for decisionmakers? The answer is a resounding "yes," says Mike Rigney of Coyote Creek Riparian Station, which has trained almost 200 volunteers over the past year to survey water quality and habitat along urban streams in Santa Clara County.
Teams looked at vegetation, fish habitat, reptiles and amphibians, birds and water chemistry. The Station developed a quality assurance protocol for each team that included working side-by-side with scientists and comparing results. According to the Station's Chris Fischer, volunteers surveying fish habitats matched scientists' work 100 percent, and other teams were almost as accurate. "The key was intensive training at the beginning of the program," says Fischer. But training went both ways, says volunteer Nancy Hardesty. "The theory of putting data on spreadsheets is very different from the reality of wading up to your waist in water and trying to collect data," she says. "We had to make practical adjustments to the data collection sheets so we could work in the field effectively."
The Station is developing a how-to manual to make the whole process exportable to other programs, says Fischer. An analysis of quality assurance protocols for citizen water chemistry monitoring is already available (see Now in Print). Contact: Mike Rigney (408)262-9204 Budget: $85,000
Interweaving Habitat and Human Use
Sandhill cranes are flocking to the Cosumnes River Preserve along the rich floodplain where the Cosumnes meets the Mokelumne and where a major ecosystem restoration project is underway. In 1990, only 750 of the stately, long-legged, long-necked, gray birds wintered at the Preserve; last year there were over 3,000, says Ducks Unlimited's Andy Engilis.
The Preserve's 5,200 acres interweave marshes, pastures, croplands, grasslands and valley oak forests. The demonstration project, a 560-acre subsection, will showcase how oak forest and seasonal wetland restoration can combine with the preservation of farming and prime agricultural land.
The Nature Conservancy's Greg Elliott believes this habitat mosaic is what attracts the cranes. "The birds have adapted to the changing land use in the area. They can forage in ag lands and pastures during the day, then roost in the marshes at night," she says. "They don't have to fly far to get to their prime feeding grounds." To help, farmers leave stubble from crops like rice and wheat in Preserve fields after harvest. In upcoming growing seasons, one demonstration farmer will try out integrated pest management and organic farming to see how these techniques benefit wildlife and people. "Human pursuits can be successfully integrated in and around the river, riparian corridors and natural and restored wetlands," says Elliott. "The project proves that human activities don't have to be detrimental." Contact: Cosumnes River Preserve (916)684-2816 Budget: $53,500
Curbing Ag Drainage
Eroded soil and agricultural chemicals running off farm fields into Bay-Delta water-ways are a major uncontrolled source of pollution. Monitoring the success of best management practices (BMPs) designed to curb this pollution is the aim of a cooperative demonstration project of the state's Department of Pesticide Regulation and the West Stanislaus County Resource Conservation District.
The agencies are gathering data about pesticide use patterns, soil types, sub- drainage basin boundaries and land use in the Stanislaus area, says the department's Muffet Wilkerson. Wilkerson believes the demo project will provide a "good baseline" for finding out how effective the BMPs are. "We'll be able to start at a certain year, and as management practices change over time, we'll be able to see which ones account for various effects. This is a fairly detailed look at things. It's almost a field-by-field look at what's going on out there," she says. Contact: Muffet Wilkerson (916)445-4042 Budget: $41,408
Providing the How-To
Blanketing vineyards with coconut hair may seem like a strange fruit and nut combo. But Sonoma County grape growers, hard-hit by the root-chomping louse phylloxera, are finding the matting useful as they struggle to replant entire vineyards and keep their topsoil in place. "If somebody rips out an old vineyard and doesn't have good engineering advice, they could lose up to 150 tons per acre of topsoil, which would then go directly into the watershed," says Tish Ward, a grape grower and board member of the Southern Sonoma County Resource Conservation District.
This demonstration project provides that advice, complete with the coconut matting, in a manual called Vineyard Management Practices: An Environmental Approach to Development and Maintenance. The district, which researched and published the manual, has sold 250 copies to date and sponsored a field day on sustainable agriculture last June. Assisting growers who want to use environmentally friendly vineyard management techniques is critical, says Ward. "The writing's on the wall, but there is no system in place to help us make that transition." Contact: Tish Ward (707)935-1474 Budget: $33,333
Monitoring the Estuary
Virtual monitoring will become reality in the Estuary once the computer-based Wetlands Atlas envisioned by the Aquatic Habitat Institute goes on-line. With a few keyboard strokes, scientists, citizens, agency staff and elected officials alike will be able to link up via an interactive data base that includes everything from the ecological values of a specific marsh to a list of who has jurisdiction over that shoreline band.
The on-ramp to this Estuary lane on the information superhighway is a Regional Wetlands Monitoring Plan now under construction. The atlas is just one part of the plan, and the plan, in turn, demonstrates one element of the overall Bay-Delta monitoring strategy for wetlands, wildlife, land use and water quality called for in the CCMP.
According to Institute scientist Dr. Josh Collins, the new wetlands monitoring plan will yield comprehensive information about the conditions and functions of tidal marshes on both a local and regional basis, along with methods for measuring these factors. It will also set out the roles that citizen monitors can play in the overall Estuary monitoring process. "Once we gather this information, we want to extend its benefits as far through government and society as possible," says Collins. This demonstration project will also lay out the basics for information exchange among the 200 entities currently involved in wetlands monitoring region-wide. "The Wetlands Atlas will allow citizens to access government more easily, and it will also help government talk to government, especially at the staff level," he says. Contact: Dr. Josh Collins (510)231-9539 Budget: $160,000
Training Cows
Now that the fences are up around upper Wildcat Creek, cows aren't as much of a problem as people. Hikers have been leaving the gates open. "We've trained the cows," says EPA's Tim Vendlinski. "Now we need to train the people."
Before they were trained, the cows created some problems, says Jean Woods of the Contra Costa Resource Conservation District. "They drank directly from springs and stomped around the wetlands area." They now drink from newly installed water troughs, and new fences keep them away from the stream banks. In addition, their pasture has been divided into four sections so that their owner, Leonard Mohring, can rotate the use of the fields and thus protect fragile native grasses and wildflowers. Range scientists recently began sampling pasture vegetation to measure the effects of this new grazing regime.
These steps - a cooperative project of the Soil Conservation District, U.C. Berkeley, East Bay Regional Parks and Mohring - show how the impacts of cattle ranching on stream environments can be reduced.
"It's a little more work for us," says Mohring, who leases the East Bay parklands and constructed the fences himself. Woods says Mohring's cooperation has been a key to the project's success. "He's a responsible rancher. He builds good quality fences, too." Contact: Jean Woods (510)672-6522 Budget $73,960
Linking Up Planning
"You can't address watershed protection at the same level for every square inch of California," says Dr. Scott McCreary. "I've tried to suggest a methodology for setting priorities."
In two working papers, McCreary's demonstration project presents a methodology for classifying watersheds and ranking resources and threats, and suggests ways to knit watershed management into the fabric of existing land use planning and environmental protection efforts.
The methodology begins with a straightforward inventory of natural resources and threats to those resources, then identifies the magnitude of threats to specific resources in the context of the whole Estuary, then pulls it all together into a cumulative risk assessment of multiple threats. "We took raw unsorted, unranked data and tried to make sense of it in a comparative way," says McCreary.
Using this methodology, McCreary and his co-authors found out, for example, that of all 34 Estuary watersheds and receiving waters, the South Bay faces the highest overall threat from multiple impacts, the North Delta stands to get the largest increase in runoff due to urban growth and the East Delta stands to lose the most wetlands to planned development.
The second paper delves into the institutional side of watershed management and suggests ways to incorporate it into city and county Storm Water Management Plans (now required under the Clean Water Act), the General Plan Guidelines developed by local governments and the environmental impact review process required under the California Environmental Quality Act. Both papers build on previous research on the effects of land use change on the Estuary and are now available for review (see Now in Print). Contact: Dr. Scott McCreary (510)649-8008 Budget: $46,667
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