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.