NCER #2

the rest of my notes from NCER:

August 2, day 2: I got off to a slow start today after not sleeping very well last night… too many ideas buzzing around in my head as a result of the conference. Trading the first 15 minutes for finding a cup of coffee, I made it to the second plenary session in time to hear former U.S. Senator Bob Graham discuss Everglades restoration, the evolution of the political process, and more. Subsequent speakers weren’t holding my attention though, so instead I went over to the exhibit hall and quickly walked into a dynamic and productive conversation with a planner from a big east coast firm.

After the break it was time to get upstairs and be ready for my own talk, scheduled for third of four in the late morning session. It’s a policy talk this time, about implementing projects in the context of local and regional government, and it fit in well with other talks on implementing the decision making progress, including one from a congressional perspective.

After the talk I had a long and productive conversation with yet another potential teaming opportunity, a conversation that got me thinking about big-picture synergies and ways to leverage technology and social networking to help make things happen.

After lunch, it’s been a mixed bag of talks thus far. One by an old friend I’d lost track of more than a decade ago, and there was an important lesson imbedded in that talk. After that, a disappointingly narrow talk with nothing new to offer, although I did manage to pull some useful region-specific information from it. Now, we’re back to a bigger picture view, in another part of the country.

In the evening, there’s a party sponsored by local firm BioHabitats. It’s a relaxed and fun evening, perhaps a little too much talking about work. I encounter two people from my old Chicago network, people I haven’t seen in over 10 years, and we really enjoy talking about our experiences in the much earlier days of the restoration community.

August 3, day 3. Today, I’m tired. The first two days have been packed full and very intense. Fortunately, the early papers today aren’t that interesting to me, so I’m able to linger over a cup of coffee. Then, late morning, we board buses for field trips. I’ve chosen one that includes visits to a pair of recently removed dams plus another in the design stage for removal.

Heavy cloud cover saves us from the extreme heat of recent days, but it’s still very humid and there are a couple of brief light drizzles. There’s a fair amount of walking involved, a few miles total. Since I have little experience with dam removal, I mostly listen quietly. At one of the sites in particular I’m struck by the changes in the landscape; the long anthropogenic history, finally turned toward renewal. Standing where there was water and sediment only a year ago, in the shadow of abandoned factory buildings and newly planted riparian trees, I take some time to photograph the scene. Not documentary photos, instead I’m trying the capture the mood. At the end I encounter a gentleman who remembers the reservoir from his childhood, and has stopped to see the changes today. He is deep in thought, full of questions, but I need to rush to catch up with the group after a few moments of conversation.

Finally this evening they’ve left us a little free time, so I walk the margin of the inner harbor and find a place to have dinner. Walking back just after dark, the calmness of the water contrasts with the adjacent high-rise urban community, new construction mingled with a few much older buildings.

August 4, day 4. It's a short conference day, and not a particularly productive one for talks with the exception of a big-picture view by someone I'd met a couple of days earlier. By mid-afternoon I've left for the airport, arriving in Chicago by a little after dark.

The transition from idea-oriented conferences to the real world can be a letdown. But this time I'm walking right back into cutting-edge endangered species projects. While the thought process is a little different, in this case the conference experience will probably contribute to fresh thinking.

It looks as if the next NCER event will be a joint meeting with the Society for Ecological Restoration in Madison Wisconsin in 2013.

NCER #1

Just over a month ago I attended the fourth bi-annual National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration, held in Baltimore. It's been a crazy month since then, as I moved on to Chicago, then to Ohio, then back to Chicago, then San Francisco, then finally home, and completed a Hine's emerald dragonfly population estimate along the way.

The ideas from the conference are worth sharing, so better late than never. Here are my notes, mostly taken in live-time at the conference. I'd originally intended to upload them right there, but the host hotel had limited wi-fi access and when I tried to dash down to the lobby it inevitably resulted in either running into someone I hadn't seen in ages, or responding to some important bit of work e-mail instead of doing blog posts. So here's the first of a few entries:

August 1.  It’s bigwig time, also known as the plenary session. Thus far we’ve heard from Assistant Secretary of the Army JoEllen Darcy on Corps of Engineers initiatives, including an upcoming revision of guidance for water resources projects; and Assistant Secretary of the Interior David Hays, with a litany of collaborative federal/state/local efforts.

Now it’s Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley’s turn, and in addition to his polished political delivery, he comes across as knowledgeable on environmental issues, leading off with a discussion of the restoration of Chesapeake Bay. He’s using two key words, words that I hear too seldom from politicians: accountability and transparency. And he’s a metrics geek, as evidenced by the BayStat slides he’s showing us. It’s basically a series of GIS maps to track output instead of input… that is, to track delivery of government services, to measure performance. He's on to something that too many have missed.

He says that the greatest challenges aren’t technological, or financial; that they’re political and spiritual. We’re out of balance, and that we need to use expectations to change behavior.

... more to follow...

weather

It's been a strange weather year in much of the U.S. I'm currently working on Hine's emerald dragonfly monitoring near Chicago, and have seen several examples already this summer of natural stochasm in action.

Through June, rainfall was well above normal. One site, on a river, flooded at least twice. Others, away from major watercourses, were wet but less extremely so. One storm in late June included high winds, severe enough to break tree branches, and probably to damage the fragile wings of dragonflies caught away from shelter.

Then the the rain just stopped for a couple of weeks, and water levels fell to what would be expected for mid-summer.

This morning another storm moved through. There were more fallen branches, more power outages, more heavy rain. Weather is expected to improve for the rest of the week, so we'll be right back out there to see what effect it's had.

Early in my dragonfly studies, I watched female Hine's emerald dragonflies oviposit in a range of locations from cool spring runs to warmer lower channels. Under normal conditions, the middle streamlet reaches are usually optimal habitat; the spring runs are too cool and slow development, and the lower resches are too warm and too prone to fish and other predation on larvae, as well as increased competition from other odonates.

Using the full length of the streamlet hedges bets, and ensures survival of some animals through drought, or flood, or "normal" conditions. In a stochastic floodplain environment, it's a logical strategy.

Too often when planning restoration projects we fail to account for stochasm. We target "normal" conditions, even though "normal" will not happen in some years. By designing restoration sites without allowing for stochasm, we could potentially doom some populations.

social networking

I'm probably one of the last 34 people on earth who isn't on Facebook, largely as a result of privacy concerns... although in part that's a matter of principle. I do have a fairly active LinkedIn account, a necessity in my line of work, and with careful management of preferences I'm willing to tolerate the occasional annoyances that come with a site's relentless efforts to grow.

Yesterday I was invited... twice, actually... to join the two-day old limited public beta test of Google + and despite what the press is saying about access being cut off for a while, I was able to set up a page with no difficulty at all. As the various articles and tech blogs are saying, there's a reasonable level of control over privacy settings, setup is simple, and it's generally a much more adult experience as one would expect with a more mature company. The integration with other things that I use a lot... gmail, Google docs, maybe eventually this blog? is also a big plus. So I'm willing to give it a try, even as I recognize that it's a tradeoff to some extent, and with the realization that spending more time online is probably the last thing I want to do.

It's a necessity to network effectively these days,  especially for people like me who work all over the U.S. So far this looks like one more potentially effective tool, and time will tell how true that turns out to be.

administrative moments

We're approaching an office move, into new and larger space across the street. That's very much a good thing, the existing space is showing it's age, and the new building layout will be much more conducive to teamwork and functioning in groups.

The move won't  actually happen for about another three weeks, but I'm going to be out on project sites monitoring dragonflies for much of that time, so I need to be essentially ready to go by the end of today. There's a wall of boxes stacked up near my desk, mostly books, but including some paper files and lots of binders full of old endangered species recovery plans and regulatory guidance.

If I ignore the boxes and look only at my nice clean desk and nearly empty bookshelves, the lack of clutter is enticing. That's making me think about how to pare down, simplify, at the other end... a sentiment which will be encouraged by the fact that I've intentionally specified a little less shelf space in the new office.

A lot of what's in those binders is readily available online these days. Last night I began to set up a file structure and tested it by downloading a few documents. I will probably spend part of this upcoming holiday weekend doing more of that, and setting up resource folders on an external hard drive. Longer term, I'm anticipating one drive on my desk, another as a backup and kept offsite, not unlike the way I already back up my photos, which tend to be dramatically larger files than the documents I'm presently working with. Then a set can also go onto the network, and as my ecology group expands the information will be available across offices.

The idea is to exchange entire bookshelves for a couple of hard drives taking up not much more space than a paperback book each. And then, once the easy stuff is done, I can have admin start scanning paper files on slower days, and eventually get rid of most of that paper as well.

I have no illusions about keeping some sort of clean minimalist office, the nature of consulting is that day to day existence is chaotic and unpredictable, and piles of paper will happen when there's no time to sort and arrange things. But perhaps a simplified form of anarchy is a reasonable expectation?. 

Chicago area dragonfly program

I'm leading a program on the federally endangered Hine's emerald dragonfly in mid-July, in the far southwest suburbs of Chicago. We did one of these last summer, and had quite a  crowd. As an added bonus, the program will be outdoors, at a nature preserve with high quality dolomite prairie and marsh communities. Details below:

Hine's Emerald Dragonfly Walk

Saturday, July 16

9 – 11 a.m.

Lockport Prairie

FREE! All Ages.

Registration required: 708.534.8499.

For a few weeks each year, the endangered Hine’s Emerald Dragonfly emerges along the banks of the DesPlaines River. A partnership of local industries, cities, and parks are working together to help protect this rare dragonfly. The Hine’s Emerald Dragonfly Habitat Conservation Program is offering a prairie walk in Lockport Prairie. Together with expert scientists, participants will investigate the unique habitat that is home to this and other rare and interesting plant and animal species. The tour will be on uneven natural terrain.  Please bring water and dress for sun, puddles, and bugs. Lightweight pants recommended.

turtles

Today I had a reason to refresh on the Blanding's turtle literature. For the most part what I found online was disappointing, and for the most part it missed key elements of the habitat as well as the biggest threats.

It's easy enough to itemize a list of habitat types, and at first glance it seems to be fairly wide... sedge meadow, marsh, pond, river backwater. But that fails to take into account the fact that these are surprisingly mobile turtles. Saving or restoring one wetland is going to do little good.

In 1997 I had an opportunity to collaborate with the Lake County (Illinois) Forest Preserve District on a Blanding's turtle project. We gathered background information and then surveyed several preserves. Once we'd found one where turtles were relatively easy to find... which meant discarding 10 or 15 snapping turtles and painted turtles from our traps for every Blanding's turtle... we held a couple of individuals long enough for the county to put radio transmitters on them.

One of those animals quickly left the small but deep marsh where we'd captured it and then released it a day later. It walked roughly north for about 800 meters, crossing the state line into Wisconsin in the process. It stayed there, in another marsh, for a few weeks before returning to yet another marsh in Illinois.

This points out several management challenges. The "core habitat," the marshes where the turtle spent days to weeks before moving to the next core, were all of pretty good quality. But it had to cross relatively small areas of less pristine upland habitat to make those moves. Fortunately, in this case, there were no major roads in the way.

Then there were the management unit boundaries. At that time, the species was state listed in Wisconsin but not in Illinois (where it has since been added to the protected list). It crossed not only a state line, but from county land to private land and back again. The original capture location had been less than 100 meters from yet a third unit, a state-owned parcel and for all we knew perhaps it had been there a week earlier. Each unit had different management regimes, different philosophies at work.

Another management challenge, one poorly understood at best in anything I read earlier today is the key set of threats or stressors. There's the usual discussion of habitat loss, fragmentation, and degradation and certainly this does play a role.

But the central issue is neatly summed up in a 1993 paper by Congdon, Dunham, and Loben Sels (in Conservation Biology). They focused on demographics, on the fact that in their Michigan study area juvenile and adult survival is not sufficient to maintain the population of this very long-lived animal, which may not breed until 17 years of age and can live to be at least 60.

Some of the reasons are at least related to habitat. Certainly outright destruction of habitat results in direct and indirect mortality. Perhaps of more importance, when adult turtles need to cross busy highways on those long movements between core wetlands, a certain percentage of them become roadkill. Since adult Blanding's turtles, which can be quite large, apparently have few natural predators, this kind of removal of breeding age animals from the system is a problem.

The authors point out another less obvious problem, one that I saw no references to earlier today despite it being clearly identified 18 years ago; increases in the populations of mid-level predators such as raccoons, foxes, and skunks have led to a substantial increase in egg predation. In the Michigan study, there was no recruitment at all in some years.

There's plentiful indirect evidence of this on some of my Midwestern study sites. Walk certain open, sunlit upland areas in June, and the remains of turtle eggs are all around. Most of these are from more common species, but some of them are Blanding's turtle eggs.

It's challenging enough to put together roadless preserve complexes of sufficient size, with enough core wetlands, to support a Blanding's turtle population of any size. It's even harder to deal with raccoons, which abound for many reasons... fragmentation, edge habitat, loss of larger predators which once kept them in check, the near-demise of the fur trade, and the abundance of suburban garbage cans to help support large populations of omnivores through lean winters.

Head starting alone isn't enough, although it's been successful in some places. It's labor intensive and may require decades of sustained effort. If the preserves are still fragmented, if some of those turtles die on roads, if mid-level predators still are abundant, then it's just treating symptoms and not going after the real problems.  

In this case, some of the answers are clear enough. The question is whether the political will exists to address them.

summer

Although things are expected to be relatively calm this coming week, I'm about to hit my peak summer activity time.

First, it's almost Hine's emerald dragonfly monitoring season. Although I won't have quite as much happening as last year (when we had eight people in the field on any given day, working on two different projects), it's still going to be a busier field season than anticipated.

Toward the end of that period, I'm going to take a break of a few days to attend the National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration (NCER) in Baltimore. My paper presentation is on August 2nd, and this year I'm stepping back from the hard science side to talk about policy, politics, and collaboration. NCER always inspires some fresh thinking, and as before I'm expecting to record my thoughts here in near live time from the conference venue.

organizations

Over the past few years I've had opportunities to interact with a variety of institutions on restoration projects. At the moment I'm thinking of lessons learned from two of those entities.

Both are large, sprawling government agencies. Both have entrenched bureaucracies and complex, difficult to navigate organizational structures. In the case of my experience, the difference has been in the people who have been my point of contact. Those people are the reason that one of those agencies will build successful projects in spite of the organizational structure, while the other will continue to wonder why things never work out as planned.

Both of the people I've been working with understand the structure of the agencies they are a part of. One of them uses that knowledge to communicate across departments, and to give us advance knowledge of the best ways to get things accomplished within the system. It's a daunting task, and he sometimes shows the stress. But without him, it would be almost impossible to achieve the end goal.

The other person seems to have preconceived notions and a lack of understanding of the motivations of departments outside of his own. He's given us inconsistent guidance. He recognizes what's broken, but instead of cross-communication, instead of understanding why others ask for the things that they do or explaining his own perspectives, he's only added more complexity. Writing additional guidance won't help if no one reads what they already have, and no one talks to the people who have institutional knowledge. It's not complexity that's needed, it's simplification, understanding, and communication.

It's all been a good reminder that no matter how rapidly technology advances, in the end it comes down to the effectiveness of the people involved in the project.

invasives

There's an op-ed in today's New York Times by Hugh Raffles titled "Mother Nature's Melting Pot" which in essence says that invasive species aren't such a bad thing.

Many, perhaps most with ecology backgrounds will bash the opinions of Mr. Raffles. He's an anthropologist, and some of his ideas don't translate very well across disciplines. I'm going to critique him too, but I'll say up front that what he said needed to be said, and if he's guilty of gross oversimplification, then perhaps so are we ecologists.

First, the critique.

Mr. Raffles provides the words himself, in a metaphor which references human immigrants: "It is... the ever shifting diversity that immigrants like us bring to this country that keeps it dynamic and strong."

What he says may be true when speaking about humans, but it points out his lack of understanding of how plant and animal immigrants affect the ecosystem on at least a short-term timescale. Invasives usually decrease natural diversity, sometimes dramatically so. This is true at a variety of scales from local to continental. In extreme examples they displace most of the native community. Stands of Phragmites (common reed) are a good example. Not a lot grows under the monoculture. Not a lot lives there either. Even the lowly crayfish disappears.

What happens, typically, is that when an invasive plant takes over there is a loss of habitat structure. The complex interaction of hundreds of native species provides food and cover for a multitude of animals. Take that away, replace it with one kind of plant, all the same size and shape, and there's no place to hide, and not much to eat.

It's only a little better when the invasive is an animal. Carp do considerable damage to aquatic ecosystems. Bullfrogs (native to at least the southeastern U.S. but now found in most of the U.S.) are voracious predators on smaller native frogs.

So what we end up with is a simplified ecosystem. To revert to the anthropological example of Mr. Raffles,  it's as if when human immigrants arrived, they killed everything in their path instead of, at worst, displacing earlier residents from one neighborhood to another. Human immigration increases diversity at anything larger than a local scale. Plant and animal immigration, on a human time scale, more typically eliminates what was there before. There is no new neighborhood to move to, especially when humans have created barriers to migration in the form of cities and farmland.

The other problem is related to the pace of invasion. Mr. Raffles is correct that immigration is a natural process in the plant and animal world, and it has probably functioned as long as there have been plants and animals on earth. What's changed is the speed of immigration. Now, humans help the process along, either intentionally (carp, starlings) or unintentionally (gobies in ships ballast water, zebra mussels on the bottom of a pleasure boat).

Once, ecosystems had time to adapt to new arrivals, to assimilate a few at a time. Now the invasion is overwhelming. New things with no local predators arrive, and for a while they have a competitive edge. If a native community survives one, it may fall to the next one, or the one after that. There's no time to recover.

But now, here's my qualification. Not all invasives are created equal. While Phragmites or purple loosestrife can be devastating once they're well established, native biodiversity can persist fairly well in stands of some other species. It's a case by case thing.

More importantly, we ecologists are making the all too human mistake of looking at things only at the time scale of our own short lifetimes... or even less. We assume that what we see now will always be, or at least will be for a long time.

But even within the 25 years or so that I've been working in this field, I've seen changes. There's a place near where I grew up that was, when I was in high school, a thicket of buckthorn. When I went back there last summer, cottonwoods had overtopped the buckthorn and shaded it out. Most of the shrub cover had died back. What had been a successional field had become a forest. In another 100 years, those cottonwoods, a fast growing pioneer species with a relatively brief lifespan as trees go, will probably be giving way to something else.

Invasives undergo successional processes, just like anything else. Other species eventually outcompete them, or the presence of a near-monoculture eventually draws the attention of a browser or a parasite or a disease.

In most of the U.S., what was here at the time of white settlement was not natural. it was a fire-maintained ecosystem, kept artificially open by frequent native fire. Because native tribes had already been decimated by diseases which for the most part preceded scientists and other observers, the dynamic equilibrium which had existed for a few thousand years had probably already been altered to some extent. Fire suppression, logging, agriculture, and development thoroughly shuffled the deck, and invasive species stepped in to fill newly available gaps.

If humans disappeared today, it would take a while for the system to find a new dynamic equilibrium. It might take 150 or 200 years or more, but eventually new assemblages of species would find their niches.

Even if humans continue as we've been doing, which I expect to be the case at least until well beyond my lifetime and until whenever limits and cold hard reality finally catch up with clearly unsustainable economic systems, things will change. In another 20 years, some of the invasives we're very concerned about today will fade back, overtaken by other things. New species will arrive. It's all in flux, and we need to recognize that.

Fighting invasive species creates jobs, and it provides a mission for teams of enthusiastic volunteers, thus creating new networks, places for new connections to be made and creative new ideas forged and tested. Thus I'm going to advocate that we continue to fight invasives. However, it's best if we understand that we occupy a moment in time, and that very little is static. Change is the only constant.

It does not serve us well to take a simplistic viewpoint, no matter which side of this or any other debate we're on. Command and control mentalities are gradually being replaced with adaptive management for a good reason, although too many people seem to have not yet gotten the memo. We also need to think beyond this year, beyond this decade, beyond this century, even beyond several centuries.

metaphor

One of the frustrations of restoration work in California is navigating the state bureaucracy. A number of policies adopted by state agencies provide strong disincentives to restoring habitat by creating absurdly lengthy review processes, inconsistent guidance, and expensive requirements which typically add little or nothing to the on the ground benefit of the proposed project.

Last night it occurred to me that the career of our current Governor may provide a thought framework to evaluate ways to move forward.

Jerry Brown was Governor during the 1970s era when so many of our current environmental policies were formulated. At the time, as a first wave of regulation reining in heavy industry pollution and the like, the approach was command-and-control. For what needed to happen at that time, and as a starting point, that was probably a necessary phase.

The problem is that, at a regulatory level, little has changed since then in California.

Jerry Brown's thinking has evolved with the times, as evidenced by his apparent willingness to pursue serious budget negotiations... a refreshing change from the shell games of previous administrations. Finally, we're (I hope) confronting the problem in a meaningful way, with give and take asked of all sides.

The thinking of our state regulatory agencies has not evolved. Our world has changed, and with rare exceptions they have not. Bureaucratic inertia rules.

So my question is... how can we take the sort of adaptive management that seems to be manifesting in the Governor's office, and make it happen at the State and Regional Water Boards, at Fish and Game, at the Coastal Commission, and at other state agencies?

snakes

Spring is approaching, and with it groundbreaking on a variety of projects. I'm beginning to get requests to visit sites to complete required pre-construction surveys.

One of these sites is in the Sacramento Valley, and it's potential giant garter snake (Thamnophis gigas) habitat. We're not certain if the species actually occurs in the project area, which is currently in rice production, and the nearest documented locality is about six miles away. But it might be there, and as so often happens, it's more efficient to assume presence and mitigate.

There's some controversy about the habitat needs of the species. The agencies generally consider rice fields to be habitat, and it's true that snakes do sometimes enter them. Rice fields are wet in summer, and thus they mimic the presettlement wetlands of parts of the Central Valley which were once fed by now diverted Sierra snowmelt well into the summer. Rice fields also harbor tadpoles... Pacific tree frogs or introduced bullfrogs... and as the fields are drained in late summer, snakes may forage in the shrinking pools of water if there is more permanent vegetated wetland habitat nearby to provide cover and food in other seasons.

Rice fields are also subject to frequent disturbance, and they can concentrate pesticides and herbicides. They are structurally simple. In my opinion, they're marginal habitat for giant garter snakes, at best. They're used only because so little else exists.

Giant garter snakes persist on some of the National Wildlife Refuges in the area, but these tend to be command-and-control facilities driven by pumps, and managed for waterfowl. They are largely dry in the summer months, and thus they differ considerably from the historic condition. Where more permanent water is present, snakes can do well because vegetation is more structurally diverse and food sources more predictable.

It seems at first glance to be easy to restore the requisite habitat. In practice it may not be so easy, because the water control system is so vast. Yet there are certainly at least some areas where restoration is feasible, and indeed it's been done at a few mitigation banks. Overall though, the lack of imagination is striking, when considering this species.

While I'm out on those sites, I'm going to be looking around, getting a better understanding of the landscape, and of the possibilities.

following through

While I'm working through my current reading material, here are a few thoughts on an older project... one that worked pretty well for a while.

I was still pretty early in my consulting career, and the client... a California state agency... had already developed a mitigation concept. The previous consultant had botched a few things, and one day I got one of those "help" calls from one of our west coast offices. I spent about the next year completing permitting for the project, and making some minor adjustments to the design.

It was one of those things that had to be an improvement, because pre-project it was nothing but a straight-sided ditch with weedy banks. We ultimately restored a gently meandering tidal channel with bordering seasonal wetland and a short interpretive trail. Because it was the first restoration project that I'd worked on and actually seen built, I visited several times over the years to see how it was doing.

Through the five year monitoring program, things went well. The agencies signed off on a "success" and then... nothing. There was, as far as I can tell, no maintenance after that. I'm not even sure if anyone except me has looked at the site since then.

The tidal channel still looks pretty good, as of last summer. The brackish water does a pretty good job of keeping weeds out, so there's a nice bulrush-dominated community lining the channel.

The problem is that the project site borders a busy highway. Predictably, the area between the road and the channel has become pretty weedy. What's perhaps even more disappointing is that the interpretive signs are faded and unreadable, and weeds grow through cracks in the trail.

On the interior half of the site, across the tidal channel from the road, things are much better. I don't have access to the site and have chosen not to climb the fence, but as far as I can tell the seasonal wetland there is working as it was intended to. It's not pristine, but it's not unusually weedy either. That part of the site is contiguous with adjacent public open space, and it's functioning pretty nicely.

Overall, the disappointment is minor. There are a few lessons learned; one is that because no parking was provided for the interpretive trail, no one other than the kids from the adjacent subdivision ever seems to go out there. The local municipality has posted no parking signs along the road (they went in years after project completion), so it's just barely possible to squeeze one small car off the roadside by the trailhead.

I guess the project counts as 75% successful. There was never any stated intent to maintain a pristine native upland community, but the presence of invasives along the roadside is troublesome. The biggest lesson, for me, is that project sponsors can't always be counted on to maintain a mitigation site after the monitoring period, especially when all of the people involved have retired or moved to other jobs.

It's been about 18 years since the permits were issued and the project was built. I intend to revisit the site from time to time, every few years, to watch the trajectory. Never stop learning.

turn

For a variety of reasons, I've been delving into the literature on business strategy these past couple of days, and will be continuing that over the weekend and probably beyond. It's something I do every now and then, and since I have academic background in management it's relatively easy for me.

Although the original reason had little to do with habitat restoration, I'm already finding relevant lessons. I guess everything is connected.

More on this once I'm in a little deeper.

resources

Yesterday I spent a little time reorganizing and tidying my bookshelves. Handling old reference material, I couldn't help but notice one striking thing: Most of it isn't available online.

These days, we tend to look on the web first when we're researching a topic. Certainly there are some unique things online, things we can't easily obtain anywhere else, so in that sense it's an advance. The web is also useful when we're on a tight deadline and don't have the time to physically chase things down. But increasingly, we're lured into thinking that's enough... and now I'm not so sure that it is, at least for in-depth research.

I handled a lot of books yesterday, and of course older technical publications are pretty lengthy, and have a pretty limited audience, so it can be hard to justify posting. But it's the obscure gray literature stuff that can be especially useful and hard to find. For that matter it's not easy to find in a physical sense either; a lot of what's on my shelf had a very limited press run and most people never knew it existed. I picked a lot of it up at state agency or NGO offices, or received copies directly from authors. A few of these things find their way online, but not enough of them do.

It's a good reminder that newly available electronic resources can add to the knowledge base; if we don't simultaneously discard all that came before.

policy

I'm in the middle of writing a conference abstract for presentation this summer. In the past, I've tended to focus on technical and scientific things, usually related to field research. In the past few years, I've also presented a few papers that looked at more of a project implementation overview, case studies of restoration implementation. This time I'm moving in a policy direction. I'm attempting to summarize my restoration-related experiences as a small-town elected official. I'm finding that it's more difficult than I expected.

Unlike my past papers, there's nothing quantifiable here. The careful study designs and formulas and statistical analysis of science don't translate very well to the world of special interests and sound bites.

I'm realizing that this disconnect is exactly why it's important to talk about this. Scientists can't communicate effectively with policy makers unless they understand the mindset and are able to speak the language.

In my case, I'm the only member of our City Council with any ecology background. We have one fellow with an academic background, something in mathematics, and he's able to adapt easily enough. The others include a businessman, a rancher, and a state employee who works on the operations side. It's a safe assumption that most City Councils don't have anyone with a science background.

Instead, elected bodies are driven by political philosophy, constituency, and the realities of managing limited financial resources in difficult economic times. In California, there's generally also distrust of a state government that's been dipping a hand in local pockets for years to feed it's own dysfunctional bureaucracy and lack of fiscal restraint.

A Council might back a restoration project, if it doesn't cost too much or the money comes from someplace else, and if there is some perceived local benefit (a tourism draw, or mitigation for a badly needed infrastructure project). Surprisingly, the local Chamber of Commerce can sometimes be an advocate; birdwatchers at a local wetland restoration often stop on Main Street for lunch and stay in a local hotel.

Scientists are notoriously bad at converting complex technical knowledge into press-friendly sound bites, and they often aren't very good at building coalitions to push a project through a maze of funding constraints and regulatory hurdles. Yet, if we're actually going to build restoration projects, these are necessary skills. Someone needs to bridge the gap.

frogs

This morning five of us went to survey a restoration site for northern red-legged frog (Rana aurora) egg masses. There were two of us from the office, myself and the design engineer for the project; a department of Fish and Game biologist; and two young temporary DFG folks.

It was an interesting day, weatherwise. It was mild, in the upper 50s, with occasional rain, mostly light, a few short intervals of heavier stuff. The site, covering several hundred acres, is on relatively level riparian lands close to the coast, but we could see the clouds lifting over the nearby coast ranges, hanging in some of the ravines.

The site is at the edge of tidelands, and some of the wetlands are brackish. There is an an ambiguous line, where Spartina has dropped out of the plant assemblage and saltgrass is becoming sparse, and is being replaced by sedges and rushes. Here, in the upper ends of shallow meandering sloughs and in knee-deep rain pools in pasturelands, we found what we were looking for.

Most of the eggs were in the deeper parts of these relatively shallow pools, where emergent vegetation becomes a little more sparse but before the open waters of the very centers of the pools. Outside of this transition zone, in shallower and more densely vegetated water, Pacific chorus frogs (Pseudacris regilla) called all around us.

Most of this parcel was once salt marsh, before the construction of levees, in some cases over 100 years ago. Soon, we hope, those levees will be breached, and the tide will return. This means the frogs will need to find new refugia, on the other side of new low berms which will be built to protect adjacent landowners, or a little upstream above tidal influence. We will most likely help things along a little, by incorporating fresh water pools into the design, and by relocating egg masses or tadpoles from some of the areas which will be directly impacted by project construction.

But first, we need to understand where the frogs are today, and how common they are. That work will continue for a little while, since the northern red-legged frog has an extended breeding season which is thought to extend from December into March (today in one case I found two egg masses six inches apart, one in the process of hatching, the other very freshly deposited). Unfortunately I can't be out there every day, today was intended to orient those who will actually be doing the field work.

I thought it was important that the design engineer accompanied us. I can describe things to him easily enough, pointing at drawings on a desktop. That's not the same as seeing it with one's own eyes. He even found one egg mass himself. He's going to remember that, and it will perhaps make the design just a little more personal.

manifesto

Not surprisingly, with a new Governor in office in California and the essentially dysfunctional condition of the State government that Jerry Brown has just inherited, there's a lot of speculation about change. A lot of the early attention will of course be focused on fiscal matters. A little later, there are some things related to environmental regulatory policy that could be revisited as well. Today I'll throw a few ideas out there to start, and will probably revisit this from time to time.

California led the nation in imposing strict environmental regulation. The downside of that is that being among the first, we didn't get a few things quite right because we were breaking new ground. There's also a matter of timing: Many of the regs were written in the 1970s, when a command-and-control approach was standard. That's shifted over time. Especially over the last few years, there's been a lot of talk at the federal level about communication and collaboration, among agencies and among stakeholders. California, for the most part, has not kept up with this paradigm shift.

Here are my first few suggestions for things to revisit.

Wetlands: At present, California has multiple agencies regulating wetlands, each with it's own definitions. The Regional Water Quality Control Boards take their authority from the Porter-Cologne Act, and issue 401 Water Quality Certifications. The Department of Fish and Game has Streambank Alteration Agreements, not really a permit, and not strictly about wetlands, instead covering the actual stream channel or, depending on who is interpreting, sometimes bordering riparian areas. Finally, the Coastal Commission and the Bay Conservation and Development Commission get in on the act within their jurisdictions; the former uses a rigid one-parameter approach to delineating wetlands.

There was an attempt a few years ago, led by the RWQCB, to agree on one wetland definition. That seems to have quietly faded away, at least I've heard nothing of it recently. Perhaps that's just as well, because several of the alternatives being floated would have created a brand new definition, one that, like the existing state definitions, has very little to do with science. That would have only made things worse.

I'd go further. I'd consolidate wetland regulation under one agency, probably the RWQCB. The other agencies could enforce the regs within their jurisdiction, but otherwise they'd act as commenting agencies, as in the federal system. I'd use a three parameter method to define wetlands, preferably the same as the federal definition, using the Corps of Engineers 1987 manual and the appropriate regional guidance, with one key difference: With no need to be limited by the interstate commerce regs of the federal government, jurisdiction could extend to all wetlands which met the test, not only those functionally connected to navigable waterways. That would mean that an isolated vernal pool would be protected, as long as it had all three parameters (hydrology, hydric oils, and wetland vegetation). Simple, predictable, consistent. Do away with ambiguity, and there's no excuse not to know where the lines are.

There are two reasons I'd do away with the state's variations of a one parameter approach. First, it has little basis in science. The state often classifies areas as wetlands which don't function as wetlands, including fog-belt pastures which have a few patches of wetland plants mixed in with upland annual grasses, and which perhaps pond up for a day or two after exceptionally heavy rains. Almost all of the time, these places function as upland.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, a one parameter approach tends to force mitigation into extreme upland locations, places which don't have any of the parameters. This means trying to create wetlands in places which don't have hydric soils or a historic wetland seed bank, or appropriate hydrology. Forcing a wetland into where it shouldn't be, basically digging a hole in upland, is a good way to fail. Mitigation should instead attempt to restore lost functions of places that were once wetland. Let's say a wetland was drained by ditching, so it still has hydric soils and a seed bank, but it no longer has the appropriate hydrology. Plug the ditch, the wetland is back. No need to wait decades for hydric soils to form. All too often this logical approach, with it's higher probability of success, would be rejected by state agencies because in their view, the degraded pasture already qualifies as wetland.

Protected Species: California has a "fully protected species" act which pre-dates the state and federal Endangered Species Acts. It's a perfect example of well-meaning regulations that were out on the cutting edge... in their day. Some of the nine covered species are now protected by the ESA and CESA, but a few aren't; because we now know they're pretty common. However, the fully protected species regs remain on the books, even though they're now redundant.

The reason this matters is that those regs pre-date the concept of incidental take. In practice, that means DFG has no mechanism to issue a permit that would, for example, allow management of habitat for these species. Let's use prescribed fire as an example. Burn grassland habitat that's being encroached upon by coyote brush, and maybe a few individual animals are killed or injured, but in the long run the population thrives because habitat is improved. Without fire, the coyote brush continues to encroach, until eventually there is no more grassland habitat, and the population completely disappears.

Some of the best DFG biologists support repeal of the fully protected species regs, but they're allegedly still intact because a few environmental groups continue to resist. This is misguided, because it's demonstrably harming at least a few species to maintain this archaic system. I also feel that laws are pointless if they're unenforceable, and this one certainly qualifies.

On a more general note, I'd like to find ways to encourage more flexibility in agency thinking, to allow more independent judgement. For example, there are policies which make perfect sense in southern California or in the central valley, but which are counterproductive in the cooler and wetter north coast or in certain mountain regions. Yet the regs are typically enforced rigidly and mindlessly, in a one size fits all approach. In what is arguably the most ecologically diverse state in the continental U.S., that just doesn't make sense. The same prescriptions can't possibly be effective in deserts and temperate rain forests, at sea level and above timber line.

These are just a few of the more obvious examples. The present system has a lot of inertia, and it won't change overnight. Pointing out a few ideas, a few ways to do things better, is just the first step.

openings

Today we took a new years trip, five of us, to Humboldt Redwoods State Park. First we did the standard old-growth loop, in this case through the Rockefeller Forest; half a mile of some very impressive trees.

Then we headed deeper into the park, to a grassland opening on a south-facing slope. It's a fairly steep climb, and only three of us chose to give it a shot. Eventually we made it to the top edge of the opening, some 500 feet above the parking lot.

I've sampled this particular opening a number of times, but hadn't been there in about three years. It's changed quite a bit since then. First, it's slumped. Half the road is closed and the lower part of the trail is completely gone. There are new ravines in places I don't remember any. That's probably one reason the grassland opening exists; the entire slope is dynamic, a slow-motion landslide. Large trees can't get established in much of the area. In presettlement days, the openings were probably burned on a regular basis, and their position on a south facing steep slope also contributes to the open character. Still, the vast majority of the park is forested.

Trees are encroaching from the edges of the openings. Oregon oaks, like the one in the top right of the photo above, are being shaded out by Douglas fir. A few years ago, State Parks began to manage a few of the openings, and that effort is evident in the photo. There's a dead Douglas fir in the top left, girdled or burned, and stumps of a few smaller ones that were cut.

Thus far, I'd say it's a draw. The opening is a bit larger than I remember it in a few places, a bit smaller in a few others. The dynamic nature of the site is striking though; shifting ground, shifting hydrology, shifting treelines. All in only a few years.

An hour of effort indicated that the amphibian community is doing just fine. In that time I found six California slender salamanders, five ensatina, and three arboreal salamanders. Considering it's been colder than usual recently, that's not a bad tally for a short search. As at other sites I've monitored, the amphibians are coping well with clearing and burning. At this particular site that's important, because amphibians (and reptiles) are more abundant at the edges of the grassland opening, and especially around the oaks, than they are in the interior of the adjacent conifer forest (although a couple of stream-dwelling species would rarely venture into the clearing). I'll head back in the spring, in March, the time of year when most of my pre-burn sampling took place, and get some more directly comparable data then. Several additional species should be surface active by then.

The view from the top was well worth the climb; tens of thousands of acres of forest, with the grassland opening and Bull Creek in the foreground.