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Biologically Fit by 2100?
Rather than leave the fate of the Bay's wetter wildlands and wildlife to whim, 100 scientists and resource experts have mapped out their best biological hopes for the year 2100 in a report released this June. Many are celebrating the arrival of sorely-needed scientific guidance for the surge of environmental restoration projects now underway. But others are wary of its implications in terms of loss of land and livelihood and its sky-is-the-limit approach to goal setting for our future Bayscape.
According to the information-jammed, 190-page Draft San Francisco Estuary Baylands Ecosystem Goals report, the Bay lost 82% of its tidal wetlands, 69% of its riparian forest and 42% of its tidal flats in the last two centuries, with a corresponding 1480% gain in salt ponds, 2663% gain in lagoons and 406,329% gain in Bay fill.
To recover some of these losses, the Goals map out three alternate visions for the year 2100 in which long lost tidal marshes grow from today's 34,000 acres up to 103,000 acres, with compensating drops in salt production ponds, grazed farmland and marsh managed for waterfowl. (Three visions were developed to show that habitats can be arrayed in more than one way and in different amounts to achieve the same general goals.) In addition to an overall vision, the Goals suggest 124 specific restoration actions, list numerous design considerations for would-be restorers, and preview potential implementation concerns.
"It's great that the Goals looked at our future in such a visionary fashion," says the Audubon Society's Arthur Feinstein. "The Bay Area needs an ambitious restoration program, bits and pieces might keep a few endangered critters going but they won't recreate a functioning ecosystem." "No one else has yet been able to get so many scientists to look at the problems of the Bay ecosystem as a group and issue joint recommendations," says well-known University of California ecologist Luna Leopold. "The community and CALFED had better pay attention."
The Goals' primary thrust is to strive for connected patches of 2000+ acres of tidal marsh centered around endangered plant and animal populations and emphasized along the Bay edge and mouths of streams to maximize benefits for fish. Other aims are to create large complexes of managed saline ponds located near important shorebird foraging areas, to emphasize the natural transitions from mudflat through tidal marsh to upland so that actual functioning mosaics of habitats come back to life, and to avoid perpetuating the piecemeal pockets and isolated strips of habitat restored today.
"When we diked the Bay earlier this century, we took all the diversity out and got uniform mud and homogenized upper marsh throughout the system," says U.S. Fish & Wildlife's Peter Baye, one of the participating scientists. The Goals aim to recreate some of the now missing links, to go beyond the two-dimensional pickleweed plains - many dislocated from the rest of the ecosystem - now being created by many small levee-breaching projects and to add what Baye calls "mature middle marshes and high marsh edges that can't be made to order."
"Folks have been doing all these restoration projects and ignoring everything around them," says Wes Maffei of the Napa County Mosquito Abatement District, one of the participating resource managers. "Some appear not to have considered components such as plant communities, invertebrates, species assemblages and effects on adjacent lands. In other instances one or a few species were the driving force rather than a complete ecosystem view, which is what the Goals attempt to do. "
"The Goals provide restoration objectives for the Bay that are comprehensive in terms of all the biological issues," says Cal Fish & Game's Carl Wilcox, also on the resource managers team. "If we reach this level of restoration it will mean recovery for a lot of species at risk." Indeed, Goals authors hope that resource agencies and would-be restorers will use the new document to help pick and build the best projects for the most species, so they don't get into conflicts such as the one over Sonoma Baylands. In 1994, state and federal fish and game agencies found themselves fighting over the Sonoma project, according to Wilcox, because they had no shared scientific basis for deciding the relative benefits of existing seasonal wetlands on the site versus the tidal marsh to be restored. "We had competing wildlife interests," he says.
Such stalemates fueled a fire for the development of a Goals-type document first laid in the S.F. Estuary Project's 1993 Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan for the Bay and Delta (CCMP). The CCMP called for development of a regional wetlands management plan based in part on the habitat needs of plant and animal communities. Assessing those needs was the purpose of the Goals.
Some of these needs are very specific, as exemplified in the 124 specific actions suggested in the report. These include, for example, enhancing the mixed hardwood forest on Deer Island; reducing wave action at a Corte Madera marsh seal pupping site; expanding a freshwater marsh near S.F. Airport for the benefit of endangered garter snakes and red-legged frogs; building shorebird roosting sites in the Emeryville Crescent; cleaning up possible contaminants on Richmond's shores; and creating shallow pannes for snowy plovers to nest in near Old Alameda Creek.
To delve a little more deeply into the actions list, plants, for example, would benefit from the development of more complex marsh habitats as most of the "floristic diversity" occurs in high marsh and upland transition zones, according to Fish & Wildlife's Baye, who made a point of linking the Goals with his agency's forthcoming recovery plan for tidal marsh species. The Goals also suggest reintroducing the now locally extinct California sea blite and near-extinct salt marsh owl's clover. The blite is specific to sandy salt marshes, where waves break against the marsh edge - conditions that are extremely rare in a shoreline ringed with dikes and concrete.
Displacement of native plants by invaders from other coasts, such as Atlantic "smooth" cordgrass, was a controversial topic for the Goals' plant team. "We feel these are four alarm fires," says Baye, citing the invading cordgrass' ability to act as "a tremendous geomorphic agent" (by increasing siltation) and to do genetic damage by hybridizing with the natives. In terms of the Goals, the plant team felt strongly that if the outcome of a tidal marsh restoration project was just going to be invasion of solid stands of exotics, then it should be done elsewhere until infestations are controlled, says Baye. Though some consideration for these issues appears in the Goals, Baye doesn't think they took the need for eradication seriously enough. "We need an all-out war. If there's no regionwide strategy, they will just reinvade - today's piecemeal approach is like spraying a garden hose on a forest fire," he says.
Fish proved a much cooler topic in the Goals process. "With all the small plants and invertebrates found in mudflats, shallows and tidal marshes, you have the beginnings of a food chain that is much more productive than open water," says Bob Tasto of Cal Fish & Game - another participating scientist. "Fish forage and sometimes breed in these areas at high tide, and juveniles often use them to hide from predators." The most obvious fisheries benefit of the Goals may come from any restoration of large areas of tidal marsh in Suisun Bay, where endangered Delta smelt and Chinook salmon smolts could hang out. The Goals also seek to increase the Estuary's stock of eelgrass, a shallow water plant favored by herring and smelt and by hungry California least terns diving for food.
Even insects make a buzz in the Goals, albeit a small one. Spiders, mites and flies all play a role in the wetland food chain, says Maffei, as do small invertebrates like fairy shrimp. "We have to be careful about how we change habitat, or we could lose an important food item for birds like a brine fly or a beetle, or a wasp that pollinates wetland plants. The Goals open the door to these considerations for the first time."
Some Goals participants used to their own niches seemed uncomfortable with the leap they were asked to make between science and vision, and between the best for one species and the best for all. Some mentioned that they'd liked to have had more time for rigorous integration between the different focus teams on fish, birds, insects and the like, while others were frustrated by how long the Goals process took and left the table part way through. More formal peer review and some actual in-the-field research to back up the Goals are also on the wish list. "We were basically pulling together everything we knew and giving our best professional judgment," says Fish & Wildlife's Baye.
Addressing such feedback from both participants and the public is one of the aims of the second draft scheduled to emerge later this year (comments due on this first draft September 1). Anyone wishing to do their homework will find hundreds of ideas and technical tips in both the body of the report, and those dead set on deep background will get a mindfull in the Goals' appendices and accompanying species reports on fish, plants, birds and invertebrates.
Goals workshops held around the Bay this July drew a total of 160 people. Many attendees commended the Goals as a concerted effort on the part of well-intentioned scientists and resource managers to tangle with some really tough issues. Others were not so enthusiastic.
In the South Bay, Cargill Salt expressed shock at a vision that deletes commercial saltmaking from the picture by the year 2100. "The Goals fail to recognize the plain fact that we are going to continue our legitimate and environmentally beneficial business of harvesting salt in perpetuity," says Jill Singleton of Cargill, which sent representatives to all four workshops to repeat the same message: we're here to stay so don't count on our salt ponds for restoration. "Government science should deal with reality, not fantasy."
North Bay farmers were also shocked by the Goals' year 2100 zero acreage of farmed or grazed bayland, but, unlike Cargill, seem willing to talk turkey. "I had to scrape some of our farmers off the ceiling at that workshop," says the North Bay Alliance's Jim Haire, a farmer. "But once they realized this was a scientific wish, not a regulatory action, they calmed down." Haire says North Bay farmers recognize the scarcity and unique ecological value of their lands and only want to get a fair price for it.
At the Suisun Bay workshop, duck club owners and hunters arrived in force, worried that conversion of managed to tidal marsh proposed in the Goals meant their lands would be condemned by big government. "Losing 20,000 acres in the Suisun marsh is a tremendous hit," says the California Water Association's Bill Gaines. "The only place we support conversion is in some of the wetlands around the periphery, which levee breaches year after year make too expensive to maintain for ducks." Suisun Resource Conservation District biologist Steve Chappell -- also a Goals participant - felt that waterfowl suffered in the Goals in the rush to create new habitat for endangered fish, mice and rails. "We'd be eliminating wetlands currently productive for waterfowl, shorebirds and resident wildlife for benefits on the 30-50 year horizon," he says.
At the Central Bay workshop, environmentalists commended the Goals as an invaluable aid to advocacy organizations and government agencies working to restore the ecosystem but had concerns about the Goals' entirely voluntary approach. "There may be a role for regulatory incentives or direct regulation should voluntary approaches fail to meet these critical ecological objectives," says Save the Bay's Will Burns.
Goals developers say they expected such comments, as their focus was biology first and reality later. "Now we need to put the Goals through social, political, economic and legal filters so that what comes out is implementable according to all the measures of society today," says U.S. EPA's Paul Jones.
Clearly finding baylands to restore - if landowners are unwilling to sell - may be a major filtering mechanism. "You can only cut the pie up in so many ways if the only pieces left are diked private lands," says Chappell. "If the Goals are used as outlined, as a long-term goal as landowners become willing, then it's a good process, but if they take on a life of their own and get misused to regulate and condemn private lands then there's a problem. We're afraid Fish & Wildlife might use them to implement its tidal marsh recovery plan."
South Bay goals may have to be rethought, says Fish & Game's Wilcox, in favor of working with Cargill to make their existing system as wildlife-friendly as possible while developing a strategy for acquiring any ponds that become surplus for restoration. In the North Bay, economic incentives might spur farmers to keep water on their land a little longer every winter for the benefit of seasonal avian visitors. "If all the oat-hay farmers on the North rim allowed just 10% of their land to pond up every year, we'd be miles ahead of where we are today in terms of benefits," says Wilcox.
Another major filter is obviously economic. Federal and state resource managers have a long history of being strapped for operations and management dollars, leaving them ill-equipped to care for or optimize vast new tracts of wetlands, let alone monitor them for problems or progress. "Without the money it's a fool's game to try and restore all this stuff," says EPA's Jones.
But most of these issues - many of which are acknowledged in the fine print of the Goals document - fall on the implementation side of the equation, supposedly the next step after the Goals are finalized. Going through a reality check would be part of any process for developing a regional wetlands protection and management plan, as called for in the CCMP. The U.S. EPA and the S.F. Regional Water Quality Control Board are already trying to work out how to facilitate such a planning process. The Board's Peggy Olofson envisions beginning with an evaluation of the Goals in light of existing wetland policies and plans (such as the CCMP, the Regional Board's Basin Plan, the S.F. Bay Commission's Bay Plan and Suisun Marsh plan), and then defining a table of contents for a regional wetlands management plan. Efforts would then zero in on working with local interests on subregional issues, on improving the regulatory process for restoration, on evaluating the feasibility of the various projects listed in the goals, and on developing a monitoring program for existing wetland rehab projects. With a most-feasible projects list in hand, legislation and funds to pursue them could be sought, says Olofson.
Some early implementation work is already being done by the S.F. Joint Venture, which brokers public-private land acquisitions for wetland protection and restoration. According to Nancy Shafer, the Venture has begun evaluating the Goals, identifying the most feasible projects, developing a voluntary implementation strategy, and projecting costs for acquisition and maintenance.
In the meantime, several agencies have already identified conflicts with some of their policies, such as the Goals' recommendation that clean dredged material only be employed to help restore wetlands "when its use will result in an essential ecological restoration benefit that cannot be achieved better through natural means." Several local agencies have policies promoting the beneficial use of dredged material whenever possible - largely to reduce environmental problems associated with its disposal in the Bay itself. Another potential conflict might be between Goals recommendations on keeping people away from sensitive wetlands and state policies promoting public access to the Bayshore.
While such issues percolate through any implementation phase that emerges, the Goals will clearly not sit on the shelf. Wilcox says Cal Fish & Game has already used the Goals to target the best existing projects on the table, such as one in American Canyon that would link up existing wetlands and create contiguous tidal marsh for seven miles inland from the Highway 37 bridge on the Napa River. And the Joint Venture's Nancy Shafer is delighted to have a biological foundation to point to when making a case for restoration. "If a property rights group asks me why we need this or that project or so many acres for wetlands, I can point to Goals and say see how it helps all these species. It helps me articulate the why," she says.
Contact: Peggy Olofson (510)622-2402
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