California Riparian Summit

Earlier this fall I presented a paper, by invitation, at the California Riparian Summit at U. C. Davis. The paper session, a series of case studies on the north coast, was organized by Chad Roberts, and my paper immediately followed an excellent one by Gordon Leppig of CDFW. His talk set the stage nicely, and we both had slides of streams located less than a mile apart from each other... we also both covered larger regions of course.

Both of us challenged the status quo, something I think Gordon has been doing for a while, and something I've found myself increasingly doing in 2017. In this case, looking at a series of recent riparian restoration efforts in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties, I was able to identify some that were well designed and solidly based in science; I was also able to identify a few that, best case, were narrow in scope and focused on only one or a few species and entirely below top of bank; and worst case, at least one project that has no real chance of being long term sustainable. To be blunt, it was a waste of grant money.

When the inevitable questions were asked at the end, I found myself making two connections that should have been painfully obvious if any of us had bothered to step back and really look; 1) some of our grant programs and some of our regulations incentivize, or at least don't discourage, single-species focused restorations, even though we've known for decades that it's far more effective to manage at community and ecosystem levels; and 2) that more than a few projects are driven by engineers, not ecologists, and in some of those cases perfectly valid flood control or bank stabilization or fish passage projects are misleadingly pitched as habitat restoration projects. However, just planting a few alders above rip-rap does not make a restoration project.

One of the bad example projects spent a considerable amount of money on middle reaches of a system that is already urbanized in the headwaters, with further development anticipated just below that. Well over half of the watershed is already in non-compatible land uses, and yet someone (well meaning I think, in this case) is pretending to restore the system, doing things to encourage salmonids to breed and rear in a system that I've got to believe is already functioning as a population sink and is only going to get worse.

Not even an hour later, I listened to another talk that showed a much more realistic approach to urban streams. This one was on Putah Creek, a few minutes walk across the campus from the meeting venue. The emphasis here was on public  access, trails, removing fill to re-establish floodplain, and some limited and realistic enhancement of habitat for species able to tolerate human proximity. The approach was shown by a slide listing number of species of each taxa documented using the area, so the focus is on entire assemblages made up mostly of common species, not just a few rare species. And the plan covered the entire  watershed, even looking at the parts not a part of the actual work but placing those segments in context, and within a well thought out strategy. And, the focus was at least half on the human element; that is, the series of projects will involve the community and build support for other, future efforts.

So overall, I came out of the event with some optimism. Yes, we identified some things that I don't think are being done the right way on some percentage of projects. We, collectively as a group, also identified ways to do better, and several of us shared examples that have been successful or are on track to be successful.

I think we need all of these types of projects. The trick is to understand what we're doing at a big picture level, and then to call them what they really area.