new year

A few New Years Eve thoughts:

In a technical sense, the future of restoration is bright. We've learned so much these past few decades, and there's no reason to think we'll stop learning. There have been some very large habitat restoration projects these past few years, and a few more designed and in the permitting stages now, and the big ones especially tend to have the resources to try new things, monitor, and apply adaptive management.

There are some risks. Political changes at the national level have put some pretty conservative folks in positions of power who aren't exactly advocates of what we do; I'm not sure what it is the republicans think they're "conserving" but it isn't habitat. Teddy Roosevelt must be turning over in his grave.

The Obama administration, while saying all the right things, at mid-levels seems to have in some cases reverted to a command-and-control mentality that I thought was outdated and discarded at the federal agency level. It remains to be seen whether all of last years talk about communication and cross-agency collaboration can overcome the petty bureaucracy.

I also have very real fears about an economy that is based 70% on consumer spending, and which at the same time seems to think it's OK for credit card companies to charge 30% interest (and that's for their customers with good credit). This seems like an excellent way to undermine the very customer base that's supposed to be doing all that spending. We seem to be slowly pulling out of the recent economic mess, but I wonder what we're setting ourselves up for in the future. While slower growth means less rapid habitat loss, it also means fewer resources and fewer projects for the next generation of restoration ecologists.

As we enter 2011, I'm going to remain cautiously optimistic and assume that things will eventually swing back to a balance.

rain

I'm just a few hours back from spending a couple of days in the low coastal mountains of Mendocino County... northwest of Ukiah, at about 800 feet elevation. It's been off-and-on raining, with the heavier and more sustained rain at night, and long breaks during the day. The total precipitation has been substantial, with tremendous variation from place to place. Some areas got a lot more than what I saw. There's a fair amount of snow visible above 3,000 feet, although I never got over 2,000 feet on the drive.

The system handled it pretty well. The densely vegetated north coast acts as something of a sponge, to some extent. These "pineapple express" systems (multiple storms backed up all the way to Hawaii) happen a couple of times every winter, so except where humans have messed with the system in a bad way, there's plenty of capacity for the flow. Every once in a great while the water overwhelms the system, and that's part of the longer term process, that's when rich silt gets deposited on the higher floodplain terraces that form prime redwood habitat.

I was in the transition zone this trip, and could look out from the modest cabin I was staying in and see grassland, oak woodland, and mixed evergreen forest (Douglas fir, tanoak, madrone, and various other species) all intermingled on slopes in every direction, with a riparian corridor running through it all. Just a few miles to the west is a redwood grove.

To the south, grassland and oak woodland become more common. To the north, conifers dominate. In the transition, in the constantly shifting (on a geologic time scale) boundary between what's been called (by Raven and Axelrod) the arcto-tertiary forest, and the madro-tertiary system, plants aren't the only things that change. The range boundaries of a number of animals fall in this zone, also.

It's an ecotone I've spent a fair amount of time in, but it's been a while,. I would have like to stay longer this time, spend a while exploring. It will need to wait til next time, but the rain served the purpose of giving me time to stop and look, and remember.

balance

One of the things I need to constantly work at is finding balance; simplifying in a world of increasing complexity. That's true of habitat restoration, and it's true of life in general.

This morning is a good reminder. It's alternating heavy rain and sunshine. Days like this are interesting, and they are, in this part of the country, part of the landscape level process. The rivers will be running high for the next few days, and hillsides will slump and open up places for new successional gaps.

In an effort to move away from complexity and closer to simplicity and minimalism, I'm leaving in about an hour for the mountains of Mendocino County. I won't be there long, without a cell phone signal or internet access; just long enough to live the weather, to reset the mind.

trouble

Last week there was a petroleum spill on a Midwestern site I've worked on for a number of years. It's not a restoration site, at least not yet, although it does have remnant natural communities and at least two federally listed species present.

The spill happened when a buried petroleum pipeline in a highway right-of-way ruptured. My information remains incomplete at this time, but at least some material got through a culvert and into at least one small wetland on the edge of the site. As far as I know, the spill isn't extensive in area, it's a tiny part of a moderately large site.

Still, it's a cautionary reminder that those sorts of risks exist, and it's worth knowing what runs through or adjacent to a site being considered for future effort.

more on fire

From 1997 through 2000, I participated in a prescribed fire study with The Nature Conservancy of Missouri. Teamed with Beth Churchwell of TNC and assisted by a cadre of volunteers, mostly graduate students from Washington University, we monitored the effects of prescribed fire on more than 20 species of amphibians and reptiles on the 6,000 acre Chilton Creek Preserve, near Van Buren.

The preserve is located in the Ozarks, on the Current River. Mostly it's oak woodland, with areas of shortleaf pine, glades (openings of exposed bedrock and sparse grasses and herbaceous vegetation located mostly on xeric ridgetops), and graminoid fens bordering high-gradient streams. There is a small area of floodplain forest along the river, and at least one cave. The woodlands range from relatively mesic areas on lower north or east facing slopes, to stunted and gnarled post oaks on well drained south or west facing ridges with loose cherty soils. Layers of dolomite and sandstone alternate and are exposed in various parts of the preserve, which consists of alternating ridges and valleys with about 300 feet of local elevation change.

TNC had already designed their burn program when I became involved, and we had only a short time to gather pre-burn baseline data. The preserve had been divided into six burn units using existing roads and trails as firebreaks, with control units located around the periphery of the site and not scheduled for fire. The treatment units were burned on various rotations; annually or bi-annually in some units, or on a randomly determined and variable frequency in others.

We established sample plots in both treatment and control units, and sampled all of them pre-treatment and for two years after the onset of fire management. Thus, some plots were burned once and some twice during our study, and the control plots remained unmanaged.

We sampled three times per year, in early spring, late spring, and fall. Typically we'd spend three days on site each visit, camping within the preserve to maximize field time. Given the rugged nature of the site and the fact that plots were randomly located and thus often far from trails, it was grueling work. We couldn't spare time off for bad weather, so we sampled in heat, cold, thunderstorms, and more.

I obviously can't go into a detailed analysis here, in this limited space. Suffice it to say that after two years, we could see the differences in the vegetation structure... mostly a reduction in the shrub layer and an increase in the herbaceous layer. On part of one plot, a too-intense fire left a shrub thicket two years later, but in most of the preserve it became easier to walk through the woods because of the more open understory.

In treatment units, we saw reductions in numbers of only two amphibian species, two types of Eurycea which are characteristic of streams and seeps, which were and still are among the most abundant amphibians on the site, and which we hypthesize had been allowed to expand beyond their original habitat niche by tree canopy closure. If we're right, then fire basically forced these species to pull back toward their original stream-associated habitat and abandon the drier uplands.

Some other species increased in numbers. These included, unsurprisingly, certain types of lizards and snakes adapted to drier and more open and sunlit conditions. They also included at least one type of frog, possibly as a result of increased ground cover associated with expanding and denser herbaceous vegetation. However, the duration of the study wasn't really great enough to determine the full extent of potential benefit to some species. This is particularly true for longer-lived species, which respond more slowly to environmental change.

One conclusion can be stated with certainty: There were no catastrophic losses of amphibians or reptiles, despite the relatively aggressive fire frequency. Burning was done both spring and fall (unlike many Midwestern sites, Native American fire was apparently mostly in the spring here, and associated with the hunting migrations of native peoples), but was done under appropriate conditions and by experienced burn crews. Most of the fires were low ground fires, and exceptions were limited to small areas.

It appears that returning prescribed fire to the oak-pine woodlands of the Missouri Ozarks resulted in increased diversity, both in vegetation communities and in the herpetofauna. In the latter case, it did this by reducing numbers of some (but not all) of the most abundant species, while increasing numbers of some less common species.

Perhaps someday I'll return to the site. We recorded GPS coordinates for all sample plots, so even if the landscape changes, which it likely has after more than a decade of fire, it will not be difficult to find the same locations. Whether that happens or not, I have many fond memories from that study, had an opportunity to work with some great people, and learned a lot that I've since applied on other sites.

smoke and fire

Among other things, I sit on the board of the North Coast Unified Air Quality Management District, which covers Humboldt, Trinity, and Del Norte Counties, in northwestern California. At yesterdays board meeting, we had an interesting discussion on an aspect of prescribed fire that land managers may sometimes be unaware of.

First, a little regional context. Relative to other places I've worked, in much of California there is a fear of fire... in many ways, a legitimate fear. Here, where it doesn't rain at all for half the year, fire at the wrong time and place can be catastrophic to both human and natural features.

Particularly in Trinity County, which is a little inland and thus warmer and drier than the coastal counties, every summer is wildfire season. Weaverville has burned twice in its history, and the threat remains that it could happen again. There and in many smaller communities, residents wear masks for several days each summer as particulate matter and smoke from fires miles away descends on the town. Obviously, these folks pay attention to fire policy. And they vote.

The wildfires happen in part because of many decades of land management decisions, including fire suppression and a resulting tinderbox of brush and even-age stands of Douglas fir. In this context, returning fire to the land in a controlled manner seems to be smart policy. Properly implemented, it is.

The danger comes when land managers get overenthusiastic. The tendency is to want quick results. But 150 years of bad land management can't be fixed in three years. These things take time. Unfortunately, some land managers are trying to push prescribed fire into the late summer and early fall period, before the rains come, to get hotter fires and kill more trees. This is an accident waiting to happen, and it also betrays impatience and a misunderstanding of how natural systems function.

The diverse forests that early white settlers found in this region were burned often. The structure of those forests had resulted not from hot fires killing trees, in most cases; instead, they were the result of millennia of survival. Low ground fires killed most seedlings in most years, but usually some seedlings survived. The ones that survived long enough grew to a large enough size to be fire resistant. As old trees died and fell, some of these saplings grew into the canopy. Fire frequency and intensity drove survival rates and locations, in many places resulting in diverse multi-layered canopies, open grown structure, and the presence of a low herbaceous understory.

Local native elders have told me that, at least near the Humboldt-Trinity County line, their ancestors burned in the late fall, right after the first rains. Conditions would have been right for safe fires, easy to control, yet the ground would still be dry enough to carry the fire. I've watched lines of fire, flames only six inches tall, creep up wooded hillsides. Smoke and particulate matter from these low fires is minimal outside the immediate fire line.

The hot, intense fires that happen today during summer wildfires are very different. In even age stands, they can become devastating crown fires killing most trees and spewing huge amounts of particulates into the air. Even prescribed fires, if they're done too early and with the goal of killing some mature trees and shrubs, can have adverse air quality impacts far outside the region of the fire. Not only do these intense fires encourage a different kind of community structure... often the regrowth is a thicket of shrubs and saplings which is even more fire prone... but they can also jeopardize local support for fire management.

Thus, I counsel patience. If the goal is to knock back Douglas fir that are encroaching into oak woodland or grassland habitat, perhaps some of that work should be done mechanically. Cut small saplings, or girdle larger trees thus creating valuable standing dead snag habitat. Follow up with low intensity fires over time, later in the fall when air quality is better. Take a long term approach. Write management plans that look at spans of decades in detail, and consider the implications over centuries. Consider what will be there when todays forest is dead and gone, and saplings which have not yet sprouted have grown into the canopy.

headwaters

Until 11 years ago, Headwaters Forest was allegedly the largest remaining stand of privately owned old-growth redwood forest. It was being cut rapidly, and the area had become a flashpoint between treesitters and environmental NGOs, and the Pacific Lumber Company. As part of a controversial HCP deal, the over 7,000-acre site (about half old growth) was purchased and is now managed by BLM.

Yesterday I visited the fringes of the site, one of the access trails that parallels the Elk River. I didn't have time to get very far into the site, although I'll try to change that soon. Still, it was interesting to see regenerating forest in the river corridor. A lot of work is apparently going into management, including removal of old logging roads, planting of redwood seedlings, and local thinning of over-dense second growth Douglas fir.

I was never out of sight of the trail. Although the site is six miles from anywhere, there were plenty of people out on a mild but rainy day. it's a considerable hike to the old growth, five miles each way, but apparently lots of folks think it's worthwhile to make that walk.

next gen

I spent part of this evening mentoring Humboldt State University students, mostly answering questions about consulting careers.

This bunch has more of a wildlife focus, they aren't specifically in school to learn about restoration. But several mentioned habitat restoration as among their interests, and most perked up when I used the phrase.

This was a sharper bunch than in past years. They had a plan, at some level, at least a rough goal. When I asked the standard question, what would you like to do, I only heard the dreaded "anything" from one person. Last year, most of them said that. They probably think that helps their odds, but as far as I'm concerned the conversation is as good as over at that point. They need to think for themselves, I'm not going to do it for them.

So it was a refreshing change this time. If I could have, I would have hired one of them on the spot, and others would get an open minded interview if they asked. This bodes well for getting some habitat put back the way it should be. Yeah, I know, it's a small sample size and maybe an aberration, but it raises hope. There are some good ones out there and almost done with school.

concept and constraints

I spent much of this afternoon reviewing documents for a proposed small stream restoration project. Although my task is primarily endangered species review for a project that was designed by others several years ago and is now approaching construction, it's always enjoyable to see how others worked through their thought process; especially when I know some of the people involved. I really enjoy the conceptual design end, and this project is fairly elegant.

The concept report discusses four alternatives, all of which were reviewed by various technical folks as well as state and federal agencies and a local NGO. They range from a no action alternative to one that would attempt to put hydrology all the way back to pre-disturbance conditions, as nearly as possible.

That extreme build alternative is of course rarely viable. In this case it would flood large areas at high tide, including adjacent landowners not involved in the project. It would render large areas unusable for their present purposes, which would probably cost the support of landowners who are currently cooperating with the project. In short, it would most likely result in the death of the project because the economic and social costs would not be politically viable.

Instead, an alternative is moving forward that partially restores hydrology, but limits the inundation area. This meets the primary project goals of improving sensitive species habitat, improving sediment transport and water quality, and keeping flooding within acceptable limits. It would actually reduce precipitation related flooding by increasing channel width and storage area. It's more expensive, but still feasible.

This is the elegant part. The design accomplishes all of the project goals, which can be a challenge when some of them aren't necessarily mutually compatible. I'm impressed because the designers managed to restore enough of the ecological processes to allow the watershed to function with minimal long-term maintenance while keeping enough political support to be permitted and built; it's one of those permit processes, under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act, that I'm currently working on.

The downside is that, as so often happens, there are areas in the upper watershed which are slated for future development and are outside the influence of the project team. So depending on how those places are designed and built, there's a risk of a restored stream increasing in function and quality for a while, and then slowly degrading in different ways as upstream watershed runoff rates and sedimentation increase and water quality input decreases.

Short of controlling an entire watershed, which is quite rare, I'm not really sure how to protect against this. I've seen a few examples of conservation easements being put in place early to buffer streams, but when upstream lands are privately owned, the stars really need to align for this to happen, it needs to somehow be in the interest of those landowners to cooperate. If there are a few larger landowners and all of them agree, it can work. If an area is already subdivided and there are hundreds of owners, the challenges multiply.

gone

Somewhere in the distance of the photo, not far from the bridge that's barely visible, there was once a town called Dyerville. In the early 20th century it was a busy place. There wasn't much left of it after the 1955 floods on the Eel River, and whatever did survive was soon bulldozed and abandoned. There's essentially no trace of it today.

It's a good reminder that the works of man are ephemeral. Although the time scale may vary from place to place and may be very short or well beyond the span of a human lifetime, nature will always win in the end.

rivers

At the very end of the day today, I had an opportunity to take a short walk through the redwoods along the Eel River. I hadn't expected to be able to get very close to the river itself, we've had a fair amount of rain the past couple of days and this morning when I went over Fernbridge the river was toward the high end of winter "normal."

But where the trail I'd picked pretty much at random approached the river , there was a large gravel bar, and the water had receded quite a bit since this morning. So I was able to walk down onto the gravel for a while.

One of the things I had to adjust to when I moved west was the different behavior of rivers here. In the Midwest, I was accustomed to rivers that had been channelized, straightened, which of course increases the gradient, and they usually had downcut. Even some fairly large rivers had done this.

Here, rivers like the Eel flow through mountainous terrain with steep slopes. The Franciscan formation often includes unstable material, easily eroded, and landslides are common. This of course has been tremendously aggravated by human activity; where forests were cleared, erosion increased. This peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, when large-scale mechanized logging became common. During the big storms of 1955 and 1964, entire clearcut mountainsides collapsed into streams.

Clearcutting was common in the Eel River Valley until very recently. With the bankruptcy of Palco and the gentler hand of the new owners, things seem to be moving in the right direction. But it can take decades for sediment to move through a system, especially when that sediment consists partly of cobble and gravel. I'm told by old timers that the Eel is now wider and shallower than it once was, and that deep pools are less frequent now. Although I've not made an effort to measure, it's a fair assumption that interstitial spaces (the openings between boulder and cobble in a clean stream) have been choked with finer sediments, sands and silts. These interstitial spaces are important, because they are used for winter refugia by young steelhead and other salmonids. Clean gravel substrate is also important for Pacific lamprey, which once were common enough to give the Eel River it's misnomer, courtesy of some taxonomy-challenged early settler.

The photo above is interesting, because it shows various successional stages. The gravel bar in the foreground of course is active riverbed during winter high flow events; although it's not really visible without a close in-person look, there was plentiful evidence that it had been under shallow water only hours before I stood on it, and there was fresh fine sediment deposition in some of the low depressions. At summer low flow, the river here is shallow enough to wade without getting much more than ones ankles wet, in fact there is a trail crossing at this location.

On the far shoreline is, first, a narrow band of willows right at the water line. Behind these, red alder grow, a pioneer species which is common on slightly higher parts of the floodplain. Redwoods rise above and behind the alder, on a higher floodplain terrace which floods only very infrequently. Eventually, up the slope and out of the frame, these will transition to Douglas fir.

Behind me as I took the photo, on the sunnier west-facing bank, the riparian band was much wider and included, besides the willows and alder, some fairly large bigleaf maple.

The photo was taken in the heart of 60,000+ acre Humboldt Redwoods State Park, so much of the riverbank is protected for a considerable distance upstream. Still, the Eel has challenges. An important one is the diversion, at the Potter Valley Dam, of most summer flow south into the Russian River Valley to feed the vineyards and cities of Sonoma County, and to in turn replace water diverted from that river. Water allocation in California is something of a shell game, and the ecological consequences are profound.

There is also continuing sediment input from private lands and National Forest lands in the upper watershed. The brown water is plainly visible in the photo, even with receding post-storm flows, the sediment load remains high.

Once, in the big storms of 1986, I stood on a small bridge in Mendocino County where Elder Creek enters the South Fork of the Eel. The entire watershed of Elder Creek is within old-growth forest on protected lands. I looked down into deep aqua blue water, nearly free of silt even as I heard boulders banging off one another below the bridge in the high flow. A few hundred feet more, and that clean water entered the raging brown waters of the Eel.

Perhaps one place to advance the restoration process is in those tributary watersheds. Few remain that are even mostly old-growth, but given enough time forests regenerate. Once they do, the steelhead and coho and chinook that fight their way up the Eel will have good quality streams to spawn. The Pacific giant salamanders, torrent salamanders, and tailed frogs I've seen in high-gradient tributaries of the Eel will persist.

The river itself is a bigger challenge, and there are some major battles yet to be fought. It is too large a system to attack in a physical sense, except in a few key places. But if human induced impacts can be reined in to a sustainable level, the river will eventually, over decades, begin to heal itself.

dragonflies and vegetation structure

In the December 2010 issue of "Ecological Restoration" that hit my mailbox today, there's an article on dragonfly and damselfly species richness relative to vegetation structure. The study, by Catherine Mabry and Connie Dettman, was done in the prairie pothole region of Iowa.

The study is focused at a fairly fine scale, comparing stands of diverse plant composition to near-monotypic stands of reed canary grass and cattail. Not surprisingly, at least to me, odonate species richness was considerably higher in the diverse stands than in the monotypic ones: 30 percent higher, and 45 percent higher if looking only at species of conservation concern, which tend to have more specialized habitat requirements. The authors also had access to an earlier study conducted in one of the wetlands which had at that time been diverse, but since then had been invaded by reed canary grass. They were able to document a loss of both damselfly and dragonfly species in the intervening years.

Publication of the article is timely, because I've been involved in similar issues in Illinois. There, we've watched a once diverse wetland complex gradually lose sedge meadow and graminoid fen habitat to cattail encroachment. Reed canary grass is common too, although the extent hasn't really changed in the 16 years of observations available to me, which suggests that the encroachment of that species happened much earlier.

I've been looking at a coarser scale than Mabry and Dettman, because I'm working with a large, strong-flying species, the Hine's emerald dragonfly. As early as 1998, we documented a correlation to habitat interspersion. Over 40 percent of our observations were in sedge meadow, which constituted less than 10 percent of the habitat on the site. Observations also tended to be close to an edge between low-growing sedge meadow and much taller marsh. Thus, I'm looking at the physical structure of the entire complex of habitat types. Mabry and Dettman touch briefly on this, but it's beyond the main scope of their study.

It's very valuable data. It's common knowledge that structurally diverse habitat supports more diverse animal assemblages, but it took me longer than it should have to get some otherwise knowledgable people to grasp the importance. In this case, the dragonfly species of interest is at reduced density for other reasons (a severe drought that peaked in 2005 and has since ended), but degradation of habitat structure may be hindering recovery of the species at the site. Having quantitative data available from a nearby region makes it easier to build a case for aggressive habitat management.

microclimate

Working in California is drastically different than working in the eastern U.S., is so many ways.

I was reminded of one of those ways on the drive north tonight. As I left San Francisco about 7:00 pm, a full moon was readily visible through thin, broken clouds. Just 45 minutes north, in Petaluma, I began to encounter cells of light showers. North of Santa Rosa, it was raining more often than not.

North of Ukiah, Rt.101 begins to climb in elevation. Not a lot, but between Willets and a little north of Laytonville, the highway is at 1,500 to 1,800 feet. Tonight, that was enough for the rain to begin to turn to snow. Not much, none sticking on the road, but snow was readily visible in the bordering vegetation. Caltrans plows waited patiently in a few places in case it became heavier. Before intersections, signs warned of winter conditions on the higher elevation roads crossing east over the inner coast ranges.

North of Laytonville Rt. 101 drops quickly, and here there was first light rain, then patchy fog. The rest of the way north from here, microclimate was the rule. Every valley, every ridge seemed different than the one before. Rain started and stopped and started again. Fog hung in some valleys but not others.

This microclimate profoundly affects restoration planning. I've worked on sites where a fog gap, a low spot in the coastal mountains, has allowed coastal terrace prairie dominated by California oatgrass to develop and persist in places 10 miles inland that ordinarily would support a valley needlegrass association. That's just one example. Here, microclimate is the rule. Different parts of the same preserve can have different enough weather to affect what grows.

oakland

The name says it all. It tells us what once was here, before the big downtown buildings and the residential and commercial neighborhoods.

Today, driving from downtown Oakland to the east, up Broadway and then Piedmont, gradually sloping from the Bay toward the base of the hills, it took some imagination to visualize what this place looked like before it was a city. But of course it's the modern condition that's the aberration. The oaks were here for thousands of years. The city is a thing of only the last few hundred. Where gangbangers abandoned a wrecked car in the middle of the street last night, hawks once hunted for mice. A mile or two away, where trendy professionals go shopping or out to dinner, Native Americans once gathered acorns.

The rains that fell today, those are still part of the system. They happen here only from November through April, and then it's warm and dry all summer except for the occasional fog. There's much less of that than on the other, peninsula side of the Bay.

The landforms were obvious enough, the ground higher and drier on the east side of town, downtown relatively level. At the end of the day, driving through Alameda and very close to the Bay, we probably crossed areas that once were salt marshes, or where fill has been placed in what was once the Bay.

All of those things can still be seen not far away. Seeing them here, today, meant stepping out of time for a while. Visualization is a good exercise, something we do even in places which have been altered much less drastically than this place. In those places, we visualize not only the past, but the future.

transition

Today, driving south from Ferndale to San Francisco, I watched familiar scenery out the window. I do this drive almost every month, and have come to know it quite well.

At the northern end, it's mostly conifer forest. Douglas fir, with redwood in some areas especially on terraces of the Eel River. Except for coastal terrace prairie right on the coast, grasslands are pretty much limited to certain ridge tops, although they're almost certainly smaller than they once were because of fire suppression. When oaks ring the grasslands or occur as discrete stands, which mostly happens inland a ways, they're usually Oregon oaks.

Driving down Highway 101, the land begins to change near Laytonville. Sprawling old oaks dot flat pastures just north of town. But conifers still blanket the mountains in the distance. I once spent parts of three winters on a research site west of Laytonville, and most of that preserve is old growth Douglas fir, with patches of oaks and grassland and a few unusual things like knobcone pine. Chaparral begins to become common on drier south facing slopes.

Drive another 20 minutes to Willets, and south of there the transition becomes clear. Another 20 minutes to Ukiah, and oaks probably outnumber conifers. From here south oaks and grasslands become the dominant feature of the landscape. Coast live oaks become abundant, and a little more to the south valley oak begins to appear frequently.

This transition is reflected in the animals, too. Lots of species have range boundaries in southern Mendocino County. Here, near Elk on the coast, the California red-legged frog and northern red-legged frog overlap by only about 10 km, with the range boundary trending to the northeast from there. Similarly, the California and Pacific giant salamanders are demarcated near here. Northwestern salamanders occur only north of this area. The very limited range of the red-bellied newt straddles the transition, across parts of Sonoma and Mendocino Counties. That's only the beginning of the list.

And that's todays snapshot in time. The blurry line between northern and southern community types has marched back and forth over the eons, and more recently with glacial advance and retreat. Thus the slightly messy boundary, because different species of plants and animals recolonize ground at different rates, and have different habitat preferences.

I didn't have time to stop this trip, except for lunch in Santa Rosa. On the return drive on Sunday night, I'll cover the just over 250 miles from San Francisco to Ferndale in the dark, so won't see much of the roughly 30 or 40 miles of the most rapid transition, just the shadowed outline of the closer trees. But I'll know it's there.

sand and water

Sometime in the early 1990s, I went exploring in the Kankakee sand area south of Chicago. Here, post-glacial outwash was blown into dune fields, and today the black-oak covered dunes rise above surrounding level farmland.

There are a lot of places worth visiting in the Kankakee sand area. There's a unique flora and fauna there, including southern and western species thriving on the warmer and drier sand. This is as close as it gets to lizard land around Chicago. Literally, because two species, the six-lined (or prairie) racerunner and the western slender glass lizard are associated with the sand areas.

Today though, I'll talk about my first visit to Conrad Savanna, in Newton County Indiana. Following directions in the then-current version of an Indiana Nature Preserves directory, I went for a walk in the preserve located just off U.S. Rt. 41. At that time, it covered perhaps a few hundred acres.

One of the characteristics of the earlier phases of natural land acquisition is that, of necessity, we usually must focus on saving the core areas. With limited resources, we can't buy it all right away. If we wait too long, something we can't replace may be lost, so we seek out the rare places, the unique places.

At Conrad Savanna, that's what initially happened. On that first visit, I found a preserve consisting of a dune field with black oak sand savanna and a few small sand prairie openings. Essentially all of the preserve was higher than the surrounding landscape, and I wasn't able to find any water within the preserve. The dry-mesic to xeric communities had been preserved. On the adjacent privately owned farmlands, there was some water, in the form of roadside drainage ditches. In these ditches I found green frogs and northern leopard frogs. Here was a classic example of biodiversity being excluded from protected lands by decisions on what to purchase. In this case, the entire wetter half of the spectrum was excluded, still at risk.

Unlike many preserves, which are acquired and then left like little jewels in isolation, at Conrad Savanna the story doesn't end here. Yesterday I did a little browsing on the area, and found that a project I'd seen the very beginnings of has continued to grow. Indiana DNR and the Division of Nature Preserves, in partnership with The Nature Conservancy and others, have continued to acquire land in Newton County. They'd already bought a place called Goose Lake when I was there, although the lake was long drained, but there was a lot of private land in between. Apparently those properties have now been linked together, and thousands of acres have now been protected. An acquisition that size must by definition include a range of communities, from dry to wet. If the preserve is big enough to plug some of those ditches, it can be even wetter. The dune fields now become one element within a larger fabric.

For now, I'm not going to delve too much more into this. Better to wait, and to visit the site on some future Chicago trip. Once that happens, I expect to have a much more interesting story to tell.

ohio

Last month I had an opportunity to briefly stop at Cedar Bog, near Springfield Ohio. I'd met people before who had done research there, seen pretty pictures at scientific conferences, but had not actually visited the site until this time.

First, a characterization; it's not really a bog. It's a fen. That means it's fed by calcareous, not acidic, groundwater.

The photo is of a graminoid fen opening on a marl flat, surrounded by white cedar. There's a real mix of species here; boreal, coastal plain, and a few prairie species from further west all growing near each other. Other parts of the site are forested fen, or red maple swamp forest, or floodplain forest. I've seen only a small part of the 427 acres, the part visible from the mile or so of boardwalk and trail.

There are a number of "prairie fens" in this part of Ohio, openings in what was once mostly forest. The dragonfly type locality 30 miles to the north that I wrote about recently was probably once one of them. Cedar Bog is one of the better ones, and one of the larger ones. It's a shadow of it's former self though. The shallow lake basin it occupies is reportedly 7,000 acres, and most of that was once wetland of one kind or another. It was slowly drained and converted to agriculture, until only the preserve remains.

I know relatively little about Cedar Bog. I've spent only about an hour there, have spoken with a few people in the past who know the site well, but on the day I visited the relatively new interpretive center was closed. I've read a few articles, and heard a few papers presented at symposia.

I know that some good people put in considerable effort to save this place, at a time before that was fashionable. That required vision and courage on their part, and without them there would be nothing left for us to see today. I know that there have been at least three scientific symposia about Cedar Bog, and that printed proceedings exist of the articles from those events. I know that at least some restoration work has been done within the preserve, including enlarging some openings by clearing encroaching woody vegetation.

Without having any of the local context, I also have questions. Looking at an air photo, I see surrounding farmland. I can't help but wonder how much of that farmland could be restored. Sure, it would take decades to re-establish even the beginnings of swamp forests and complex fens. In the shorter term, I'm more interested in restoring hydrology. Because the small stream that passes through the preserve has been channelized, which has probably lowered the water table in at least parts of the preserve. Because at least some of those surrounding farms have tiles or other hydrologic modifications. Because restoring hydrology even within the preserve requires enough land to do so without flooding nearby private land. Because there is a well documented correlation between preserve size and species richness and diversity.

This is all true for almost any preserve, no matter how small or large. There's always a limit of course, but for many preserves those limits are physical. They can't readily be enlarged, because they border an Interstate highway, or a heavily urbanized area, or there's a quarry next door. If there are constraints at Cedar Bog, they're political or financial, the land is there, and it appears to be feasible, in a technical sense, to restore some of it.

Only those with knowledge of the place and of local society can make the value judgments and the hard decisions. But it always starts by wondering what else might be possible.

command and control

I'm learning more about Logan County, Ohio.

It turns out that there is public land adjacent to the Hine's emerald dragonfly type locality. Indian Lake State Park wraps just about all the way around the man-made lake, created about 1851. The state lands come very close to where the dragonflies were collected in 1929-1930, and they were state lands at that time. I've found only coarse-scale maps thus far, best guess is that the type locality is a few hundred feet outside the public land boundary.

Taking a closer look at Google Earth, it's evident that the dredged channel is now much wider than the 20 feet described by E. B. Williamson in 1931. It's more like 50 feet wide now, almost all the way up to the bridge. According to a newsletter I found, the North Fork is scheduled to be dredged again in 2011. Apparently, there are two dredges working pretty much every year in Indian Lake and vicinity.

Then, I found "Indian Lake State Park's Natural Resource Management Plan, 2007-2012" posted online. If I read it literally, it's a metaphor of everything wrong with natural land management practices in America.

I can't find any evidence that park management knows that a federally listed dragonfly was first described from their backyard. There's an appendix with species lists for just about everything except dragonflies, although it's much more thorough for some taxa than for others.

Resource management goal #2 is to "continue to use the Lake Management Plan and Lake Dredging Plan to monitor, control, and protect the lake and lakeshore areas." So basically, never-ending dredging is official policy. That's necessary because:

"Indian Lake, a shallow lake with a dirt or silt bottom, is the ultimate downstream destination of the 63,000+ acres of residential and agricultural land that comprise the watershed. Sediment entering the lake over the past 100 years threatened the future of the recreational value of Indian Lake and property values around the lake and surrounding community, not to mention the loss of productive farm ground. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) had operated a suction dredge in the lake, as money allowed, for nearly 30 years to remove sediment. The cost of this operation had risen to over $300,000 per year." (from Appendix 1 of the Resource Management Plan).

The situation improved somewhat after 1987 with the onset of no-till farming practices and reduced upstream erosion, and with formation of a "Development Commission" to help raise funds for dredging. Yet the dredging continues, and no cost is given.

Let's go back to the beginning, and look at the sequence of events and how things got to where they are.

Prior to Euro-American settlement, the North Fork of the Great Miami River meanders through swamp woodlands, it's dynamic course depositing sediment within the relatively low-gradient valley. Sediment loads would have been low relative to modern times because of nearly complete ground vegetation cover. Thus, the 1800s valley represented over 12,000 years of post-glacial sediment deposition.

1851, dam construction begins. By 1857 the lower North Fork and the confluence with the South Fork are inundated by the rising lake.

Surrounding lands are cleared for agriculture, greatly increasing erosion and runoff. Water quality suffers, and the North Fork in most recent accounts is rated as "non-attainment" by OEPA. The greatly increased sediment load begins to fill the already shallow Indian Lake, and eventually frequent dredging becomes necessary to support recreational use of the lake.

Dredging gradually extends up the North Fork. In 1929, a 20-foot wide channel extended to a quarter-mile below the SR 117 bridge, according to Williamson. In a 2006 air photo, the channel is closer to 50-feet wide almost up to the bridge, and at least 20 feet wide above the bridge. The channel is straightened, bypassing the sinuous historic meanders.

Channelization moves more sediment, more quickly and more efficiently, from the farm fields into the lake. Soon the dredging operations increase to keep up. When the North Fork itself begins to clog, it is dredged again, as it apparently will be next year. This will once again allow efficient sediment transport into the lake.

This is 1950s command-and-control thinking, tempered slightly by late 1980s no-till agriculture. And it's all being subsidized by the taxpayers of Ohio.

I suppose it could be argued that it creates jobs for a couple of dredge operators, a few truck drivers who transport the sludge tainted by agricultural pesticides to wherever it is they take it, and a few bureaucrats who handle the paper.

Natural ecological processes had addressed this by creating, over time, a wide floodplain where excess sediment was deposited by a meanding channel. The meanders and the lower gradient channel slowed floodwaters, allowing sediment to deposit. The adjoining swamp forest and resulting woody debris input further filtered sediments. If a channel began to fill, it migrated laterally. A dynamic equilibrium held for millenia.

The "efficient" humans came along, and messed everything up in less than 100 years. Now we're fighting a never ending battle to maintain that disequilibrium. Somewhere along the way, we extirpated a population of a rare dragonfly, and who knows how many other things.

If not for the subdivision in the way, and the stubborn human attitudes, this could all be put back for the cost of perhaps a decade of dredging. The road is no real obstacle, it could be raised or the bridge widened. The original channel course could be determined from old maps and photos, it could be re-established and the old straight channel filled, and wet-tolerant trees and shrubs planted or allowed to naturally regenerate. The sediment load into the lake would immediately drop dramatically, because it would instead deposit on the floodplain. Hydrology studies could determine how much the water would back up in a 100-year event, and if necessary some additional floodway capacity could be excavated to prevent damage to upstream property. The permits and design to do all this would be of moderate complexity at most. There would be a short term (a few years) creation of engineering, environmental, and construction jobs, and because of transportation costs local firms would likely do most of the actual construction work with direct benefits to the local economy.

But first, a little imagination and creativity is required. This is the key first step, the place where restoration starts.

boardwalk

Cedar Bog Nature Preserve, near Urbana, Ohio. This is in the swamp forest portion of the site, a fairly common scene in Ohio; a wet flat with red maple and a few other seasonally wet-tolerant species. There's a small channelized stream a little off to the right and out of sight in this photo.

I stayed carefully on the boardwalk here, because 1) I had limited time, and 2) there was plenty of poison sumac in the understory, and I've only made the mistake of messing with that stuff once. I'd prefer not to do that again.

This image is intended to set the stage for what I'll write about next.

the land has a story to tell

Last month I visited a friend in Springfield, Ohio. Driving out from Chicago, I chose not to take the Interstate, and took smaller roads instead. Coming in from the northwest, entering Logan County, I recalled that there had once been a Hine's emerald dragonfly locality nearby.

The next morning I found time to go online and do a little searching. My memory had been accurate; the type locality had been in Logan County, near Indian Lake. That's about all I was able to find without getting back to my files which were 2,000+ miles away. So at the end of the trip, I did enough recon to get a sense of the land north of Springfield (more on that later) and filed it away for future action.

This morning at the office I was working on an entirely different aspect of the Hine's emerald dragonfly, which is a federally endangered species. Mostly it was number crunching, calculating density estimates for a major field study I'd led in Illinois over the summer. There, a dozen or more Hine's emerald dragonfly populations persist while in Logan County Ohio no one has seen the species since 1930. However, in writing up a tech memo with todays analysis, I had occasion to pull out the original description of the species, published in 1931.

In that paper, E. B. Williamson provides an unusually thorough description (for that time) of the type locality. He says:

“Ohio State Road Number 117 crosses the North Fork of the Little Miami River north of Huntsville, Ohio. The North Fork is a small stream at the bridge, only a few feet wide and at the season we were there carrying but little water. From its source a mile or two above the bridge it meanders through open and pastured fields in an almost flat terrain of clay soil. Below the bridge there are some willows, adjacent thickets, a few trees, and long, dense growths of lizard-tail through which the water winds its way, often concealed by the abundant vegetation. This condition passes abruptly after about a quarter of a mile into a deep dredged channel about 20 feet wide, which extends into Indian Lake. The upper end of the dredged channel, possibly a quarter to a half mile in length, is in heavy swamp woods, winding through which is the old channel of the creek, now reduced to pools of greater or lesser length.

In this woods is a heronry which Professor Hine visited on June 7, 1929. Leaving the woods along its northern side where it adjoins a golf course, he saw a dragonfly hovering two or three feet above the ground in an open spot under a bush."

A week later, James S. Hine and C. H. Kennedy returned to the site:

“The day was rainy and apparently unfavorable. They failed to find any Somatochlora in the woods, but on visiting the dredged channel they were able to take five specimens resting on low bushes on the wood’s side of the high bank of earth thrown up by the dredge when the channel was dug."

A total of six specimens were collected in 1929, and only one in 1930 despite searches by a larger group. It appears that the dredge activity had recently disrupted the habitat, and that the collectors found the final remnants of a dying population.

On a 2006 Google Earth photo, the type locality is easy to locate. There is now a dredged channel to a point well above the bridge. North of the stream and west of SR 117 is a residential subdivision, and across from this is a narrow wooded band and then open farmland. Downstream is an extensive woodland extending all the way to Indian Lake, and within the woodland several old channel scars are visible. Depending on which channel was active in 1929, the specimens were collected either near the subdivision-woodland boundary, or a short distance into what is now woodland. There is currently no evidence of a golf course, although it’s possible that the subdivision occupies the former location.

Here's what I'm able to determine from Williamson's description, a look at that Google Earth photo, and (just now) a look at a detailed surficial geology map of the region:

The site is associated with the headwaters of the Great Miami River drainage, and specifically with the north fork;

Most of the surrounding land has been dramatically altered, with the possible exception of some woods on the downstream end that don't appear to be of very good quality;

The North Fork appears to be much more extensively dredged now than in 1930;

As with most other known Hine's emerald dragonfly localities, the site is underlain by dolomite bedrock. Unlike most of those other sites, at the Logan County locality the bedrock is covered by anywhere from 150 to 250 feet of glacial till, outwash, and alluvium;

Sand and gravel outwash deposits just north of the channel appear to be the most likely source of groundwater, however the site appears to be relatively level;

Organic deposits are prevalent between SR 117 and Indian Lake in the vicinity of the channel, with alluvium up channel and till to the south;

There is no evidence of suitable remaining habitat anywhere in the immediate vicinity of the type locality.

Chasing down additional detail would most likely require a return visit to Ohio. The oldest photos I can find online date to 1994, and these show conditions similar to those in the 2006 photo mentioned above. Normally, air photos are available from as early as the mid to late 1930s, and getting a look at these, and at any slightly older maps of the area, would be among the highest priorities to reconstruct historic conditions. Of course, there's no substitute for actually walking the land.

What little I've learned thus far has raised some interesting questions. First, this place is quite different than the other populations I've visited. Understanding the type locality may shed light on the overall habitat requirements of the species, and may assist with restoration efforts elsewhere.

Would restoration be possible at the type locality? In theory, probably. In practice, any serious attempt to restore hydrology might very well flood the adjacent subdivision. There is also, as far as I can tell, no publicly owned land to start from. Then there are the genetic issues, with the nearest source populations hours away by car.

Next, some thoughts on what I saw during my too-brief visit to the area. In the meantime, there's more on the Hine's emerald dragonfly on my web site

aspect

I'm just back from a hike through Russ Park. It's within the city limits of Ferndale, so close that I was easily able to walk there. In a straight line, it's perhaps four blocks from my front door, a little more than that counting the less than straight roads in between.

The park sits on the first ridge of the Wildcat Hills, which rise quickly at the edge of town. The top of the ridge is perhaps 480 feet, not high relative to some of the ridges to the south. But there are some very steep slopes within the park, some approaching vertical.

Winter storms coming in off the ocean from the northwest cross the level Eel River delta, and hit the Wildcat Hills. In part because of the extra precipitation that results, there's a stand of Sitka spruce on the north facing slopes. Sitka spruce is more typical of places well to the north, and this is one of the southernmost large mature stands. On the somewhat sunnier south facing slopes, Douglas fir predominates. The several ravines which drain the park tend to support something closer to a riparian community, red alder and at lower elevations, bigleaf maple. Everywhere in the park is a dense carpet of ferns, some of them six feet tall, and bright green moss.

The forest in Russ Park is not old growth; in fact the place has been quite dynamic over the past few centuries. Government Land Office survey notes from the 1850s describe a place with large spruce 36 inches in diameter and more, and also with considerable standing dead timber. The cause is uncertain; a major Cascadian earthquake is well documented from approximately 1700, and it likely did plenty of damage on the unstable steep slopes of the Wildcat. But 150 years would have been plenty of time to recover from that. So what the surveyors described may have been caused by drought and catastrophic fire, or an insect infestation, or any of several other things.

In any case over the next half century most of the trees on the ridge south of town were cut. Turn of the century photos of Main Street show nearly bare grassy hills in the background, with a few patches of young trees returning.

The 105 acres which are now Russ Park were donated to the City of Ferndale in 1920 by Zipporah Patrick Russ. It's noteworthy that donations of parkland are apparently one of the reliable paths to what passes for immortality in human culture; most everyone else from that time is forgotten today, and yet each day we walk those trails, we see her name.

It's unlikely that any of the forest standing today within the park is more than 100 years old. It does not yet have the complex multi-layer canopy and abundance of standing dead snags and down woody debris that characterizes old growth. Yet it's now a mature forest, and over the next few decades it will progress toward the old growth state. The three light gaps caused by storms a few years ago are regenerating, each adding complexity to the site.

When I left the house around noon today, it was foggy but dry. There had been some light rain last night, but nothing during daylight hours. As I ascended the trail I entered the fog, and soon, near the top of the ridge, it was for all practical purposes raining. Not from the sky; instead, this was fog drip, the mature trees harvesting the fog, the drops falling onto the trail. The trees are now large enough to create their own weather, in the process perpetuating themselves and the lush green undergrowth below them. An ecological process disrupted for decades by logging has once again begun to function.

It was a relaxed and uneventful walk. On the way back down I found a rough-skinned newt walking on the trail, his bright orange belly warning would-be predators away from his toxic skin secretions. A few frogs called sporadically from the ferns, not moved into the ponds yet. Small birds, nuthatches and chickadees, flitted from tree to tree. A larger mammal moved away from me, unseen in the dense growth; probably a deer, although I've seen bear on that hillside before.

Russ Park is maintained by local volunteers. While it's not a formal restoration project, spruce have been planted in a clearing where non-native eucalyptus fell in winter storms, and the trail needs constant attention to maintain access. I saw three other people today on the trails, so it's a resource that is used by the local community, and by tourists visiting to birdwatch or just get outdoors for a walk. Certainly I appreciate having it so nearby.

time

Early in my consulting career, I was asked to conduct an endangered species evaluation at a site in north-central Massachusetts. It was a complex site, about 500 acres of mostly spruce-fir forest with a variety of wetland types and small streams disappearing and re-appearing in the sandy soil. With my then-colleague Christine Ross, we spent about three days out on the site before returning to a Boston office to write up the results.

On the first of those three early spring field days, we were given a guided tour of the site by a forester who had years of local experience, who had been caring for that particular site for a long time. He knew every inch of the land, cared about it deeply. He maintained a professional attitude, never expressed an opinion on the proposed development of the site, but it must have pained him. Although he'd overseen selective cutting of the site, it had been done so lightly that it was almost impossible to tell.

That development never happened. It was a bad idea, poorly thought out, and it fell apart under the weight of economic feasibility. The fact that we'd found evidence of a couple of sensitive species on the site never really had a chance to factor into the decision.

But over those three days walking a mature forest, I'd repeatedly stepped over remnants of old stone walls. Clearly, much of this site had once been farmland. Because of the wet and rocky soil it had quickly been abandoned for more fertile places. Over the intervening 200 or maybe 300 years, it had recovered quite nicely. The vernal pools were so full of wood frog and spotted salamander egg masses that it seemed almost possible to walk across the pond on them. It was a magical place.

The project site had a little more history behind it than most of the U.S., or at least more history written down, more than we know about those other places. While there we'd stayed in a revolutionary war era hotel just across the state line in New Hampshire, and other things of that age were fairly common in the neighborhood.

The project site had come full circle. The forest had been cut, the land had been tilled, and abandoned. The forest had grown back. Maybe not the same as the original forest, but diverse in a way that reflected the ecological process in play at the time of regeneration, and a few fairly random accidents of seed bank and land management.

In most of the U.S. we're still looking at a much shorter time cycle. But even in my own lifetime, I've seen change. Places that in my childhood were buckthorn thickets in former farm fields now have large trees beginning to shade out the shrubs. Only weeks ago, I drove by a place that had once been so dense, it was impossible to see into. Now, I could walk through it without difficulty.

Often these changed places aren't the same as what was once there, what they would be with fire management. But my point is that change is never ending. Looking at any snapshot of time is misleading, especially when it's done within the context of a human lifetime.

When I first became involved in habitat restoration, a friend who thought in terms of 100 years impressed me as a visionary. Today I understand that we need to be thinking over timescales much longer than that.

new

The first of the updates are posted at http://kmier.net and there is now a link back to this blog.

The index page is updated, and the dragonfly and about pages are new. The habitat restoration page is about 60% updated. The rest still needs some work... maybe tomorrow.

changes

At last, the web site update is underway. It's been an extremely busy summer, but the same work overload that delayed the updates has provided a wealth of new material, especially on the federally endangered Hine's emerald dragonfly.

But now, back to coding. The index page is ready, there's just a little more writing to do for the second-tier pages and then it can go live.

Upscale nature

Today was spent hiking at Ryerson Conservation Area north of Chicago. From 1984 through 1989 I was a volunteer here, conducting amphibian research and occasionally assisting with educational programs. During those years I learned a great deal from many people, and came to know very nearly every bit of these 550 acres.

Today was just a fun hike, no real looking around, nio real going off trail, just enjoying the fall colors.

There's been some restoration work done here, perhaps the most important being some hydrology work including plugging old ditches in the northern flatwoods. I had some involvement in that project. It's the wrong time of year to look at it, much too dry in the fall. In early spring, when the flatwoods ponds are full and the leaves haven't really reappeared and it's still easy to see what the water is doing, that's the time to visit.

resources

Last night I wrote a project description for one of my latest habitat restoration projects in San Mateo County, California. That's offered the incentive to update one of my web sites, to add an entire section on restoration projects in an attempt to get some real world experience, with photos, out there. The intent is to get that up and running very soon at least in a skeleton form, and to link back to this blog from it. Thus the blog will be an informal mechanism to record random thoughts and things that are in various stages of completion, while the web site will hold more formal descriptions and articles about projects which have actually been designed and, often, built.

Once it's actually up I'll post additional information here.