The Grand Kankakee Marsh

 

While working on a thought leadership piece with a small team today, what I thought was a distraction came up. It turned out to be a question about a place that I'd spent some time in the field, within what little is left of the once vast Grand Kankakee Marsh. This article explains it well, so rather than repeat I'll link:

https://www.daily-journal.com/news/local/looking-back-the-grand-kankakee-marsh/article_783b1842-262c-11e9-98fa-b393c163324f.htm

I'd forgotten how many places I'd visited, most of them long ago, within that 1,000+ square miles of former wetland. They range from the well known Jasper-Pulaski State Fish and Game Preserve, which I'd visited twice while still in high school to see the sandhill cranes during fall migration; to a cluster of sites managed by The Nature Conservancy and the State of Indiana Division of Nature Preserves in and around what was once Beaver Lake in Newton County; from near the headwaters in St. Joseph County, to the six miles of unchannelized and still meandering swamps downstream of the Illinois border, including Momence Wetlands.

This place was huge, covering parts of at least eight counties. The restoration opportunities are challenging, but nearly unlimited and in many areas still possible.

Crescent City

Thus far I've only hinted at the series of projects that have consumed the last few years. It's time to provide some detail. These are traditional mitigation projects, in the sense that they were required to offset impacts related to a form of infrastructure development... in this case, congressionally mandated improvements to runway safety areas at Crescent City Airport. In this post, I'll briefly describe the impact side of the project. In subsequent posts I'll discuss the series of mitigation efforts, six of them in total. Cumulatively, they aren't the biggest I've done, although they are perhaps the most complex.

Crescent City is in the extreme northwest corner of California, right on the coast. The city and the airport are on a narrow and relatively flat coastal shelf, with the Siskiyou Mountains looming to the east. It's just over 20 miles to the Oregon border. Del Norte County is unique in California, more rain than most places, a temperate rain forest along the coast with Sitka spruce, shore pine, and redwood grading into the diverse mixed conifer forests and serpentine grasslands of the mountains.

Runway Safety Areas are those flat extensions off the ends and sides of runways, places for a plane to safely come to a stop in the event of an overshoot. In this case, to meet the new federal requirements and maintain commercial air service, the RSAs needed to be expanded considerably, resulting in about 17 acres of wetland fill. The work took place in the summer/fall of 2014 and 2015, meeting the congressional deadline with a couple of months to spare. We had a frequent biological monitor presence on the airport during construction.

Federal mitigation requirements were fairly standard and simple, a basic 2:1 ratio for three-parameter wetlands. The airport is in the coastal zone though, and California Coastal Commission generally requires a higher mitigation ratio. The means of determining credit is far too complex to explain here (unnecessarily complex, in my opinion), suffice it to say that I had a nine-page spreadsheet that was used to do the calculations to say nothing of the endless negotiation meetings. The end result was that we needed about 59 acres of mitigation, much of it for wetlands but also some for sensitive upland communities regulated by the state.

I'll run through each location in the next few posts: Four smaller sites on or adjacent to the airport, and two larger off-site areas. Work on those sites overlapped with the RSA construction, and was completed about a year later, in December 2016. We spent two or three years on design and permits, three years on construction, and we are now in the early part of five years of annual post-construction monitoring.

Photo: Graded  and revegetated runway safety area (RSA), about a year after construction.

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.

riparian image

Salt River looking upstream from the Reas Creek confluence, this area was restored perhaps two or three years ago and it's now well revegetated.

I'm hoping to get B&W images of a few other restoration sites as time allows.

Dreams

"Do you dream of a world not yet born?"   - Ed Collins, Natural Resource Director at McHenry County (IL) Conservation District, during the keynote at todays Open Lands Annual Luncheon in downtown Chicago.


It took me years to figure this out, and perhaps I'll try to explain later. It's one of the keys to successful restoration.

Teaser

Here's a quick look at one of the recent restoration sites, immediately post construction. Road removal within coastal dune and wetland habitat. It's a fairly complex project and may take a few entries to describe in detail, and I may wait a bit to do that since we'll need a few weeks of spring weather to get revegetation off to a good start.

gone too long

It's been a little busy; I'll be able to tell you more soon, for now it's enough to mention that for the past two years I've been helping to build the latest restoration site, plus a few other things. That was essentially completed in December, and since then has been mostly devoted to catching up on all the little things that had to be postponed. I've done two presentations on restoration in the past two weeks, one in Pasadena and one in Blue Lake, CA, so a lot of the thoughts are already pulled together.

I'll perhaps back up and talk about the rest of those earlier projects first, but first a bit on today. Despite way too much recent travel I needed to drive up to Brookings, Oregon today and arrived a little early. Great excuse to detour and take a look at habitat (and inhabitants), in this case a small tributary stream just barely inside Siskiyou National Forest. The real reason, besides just wanting to get outside, was to find Dunn's salamander, Plethodon dunni, which reaches the southern limit of it's range at the Smith River just inside California. This is where experience with habitat pays off, because it took less than five minutes to find one, once out of the car. Maybe the third or fourth rock turned in the stream splash zone. In spite of the weather... steady rain... it was a fun few minutes, much too brief, scrambling up that steep stream channel.

More soon.

Urban Stream Restoration

Sometime in the late 1990s we picked up a private sector client in St. Louis. Our first project for him involved a commercial development just southeast of St. Louis airport, and not too far from the then little known but now infamous locale of Ferguson, Missouri.

I’d never worked in anything remotely like this place. Sandwiched between Interstate 170 and a residential subdivision, it was a surreal island of un-natural nature. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of cars went right by it at high speed every day, and yet I’m pretty sure that hardly anyone except the neighborhood kids knew it was there. Covering several acres and elongated in shape, an urban stream meandered through it, 20-foot deep canyons of hard brown silt with scrubby trees on top of the banks. It was badly eroded, and at some point in the past someone had poured concrete over the edge in a few places. Not in an orderly manner, rather they’d backed the truck up to the edge and let the concrete run randomly down the slope. Upstream it was all fed by culverts and ditches. Downstream it ran into large box culverts and large engineered concrete ditches built as part of the interstate highway. Most of the time flow was gentle and water shallow; all evidence suggested that a typical summer thunderstorm could briefly turn it into a raging torrent.

The stream was so entrenched and so badly eroded that we started over. When the entire development site was graded flat, so was the stream, water briefly went through a bypass pipe, and then a wider, shallower, gently meandering channel was constructed away from the future buildings. A wooded buffer was planted on either side. At the lower end a relatively small flat concrete structure was designed to maintain the channel base level and prevent it from once again eroding too deeply.

We had to make the local contractor do the concrete structure over, they tried to modify the design without asking and got the elevations wrong. Once fixed, the system looked deceptively pleasant. There was no hint of the brown scar on the landscape that had once been. The gentle banks were soon lush and green, and the slower flow allowed a thin layer of clean fine gravel to accumulate in the bottom instead of being instantly scoured away downstream where it could clog the highway box culverts.

The goal was limited to reducing peak flows and minimizing erosion, and it accomplished that quite nicely. The regulatory agencies didn’t even ask for anything beyond 1:1 replacement, since it was clear that almost anything we did would be an improvement.

Overall it was a relatively simple and fast paced project. If not for the urban location and the almost otherworldly pre-project appearance, it might not have been nearly as memorable.

Mahon Slough

Several months into the Suisun Marsh project, another one kicked off; this time, in San Rafael.

The first look at the site was a little surprising. What I’d seen of San Rafael up to this point had been typical upscale Marin County. Yet this site, although it was only blocks from downtown, was in a light industrial neighborhood. Auto repair shops backed up onto Mahon Creek, with old cars and trailers parked within feet of the water. A brownfield site, a former coal gasification plant, was across the street; a large vacant lot in appearance, contaminants were held in by a retaining wall and a clay cap.

The creek floodplain had been filled long ago, and pre-project it was a steep-sided tidal ditch with impervious clays on either side. Once, trying to take a soil sample, I had to run to the hardware store to buy a hammer and chisel to break through the surface. Not surprisingly, the creek periodically flooded the surrounding neighborhood. Sometimes the floods were severe.

The overall project was an extension of what is now Andersen Drive; then it was an abandoned railroad right-of-way. There were enough scattered puddles that qualified as wetland to require a few acres of mitigation. Overall it was a small project, yet it had drawn considerable local collaboration. The mitigation site had been chosen with the help of two influential conservation organizations, and as a result the project had their support.

The first day into the mitigation site I had to crawl through a hole in a chainlink fence overgrown with weeds. Two small homeless camps were nestled back in the weeds, but I saw very little human presence.

The mitigation design evolved into a block-long excavation of fill material on either side of the creek, re-establishing the historic floodplain. A planting plan was developed with the help of a local firm, with typical salt marsh species on the lower elevations and a narrow fringe of high marsh at the transition to upland. The permitting process, while a bit more involved than the previous project because of different agency representatives, went smoothly. My colleague and mentor Janet O’Neill flew out from Virginia on one occasion to assist with agency meetings, to excellent effect. I learned quite a bit about how to move permits through the process efficiently.

Then I moved on to projects in other parts of the country, and didn’t have time to track construction. For some reason I thought it hadn’t been built. It later turned out that it had only been delayed for a few years; actual construction took place in 1997.

On a whim, I drove by the site in 2007. I’d been on nearby Rt 101, and was curious what had ever become of the area. I drove over the small bridge, and saw a tidy and aesthetically pleasing salt marsh in the midst of a thriving new urbanism neighborhood.

It was perhaps the surroundings that surprised me more than anything. There was a shiny new office building next door, and a park across the street. There were people everywhere, many of them walking. There was a trail on one side of the mitigation site, as we has envisioned; now it had side paths to the office building, with landscaped gardens among the paths. There was no trash, which is unusual in tidal areas. Clearly, someone was maintaining the site, picking up every little scrap of debris.

The goals of the project had been modest, with the primary focus on increasing floodplain capacity. Habitat goals were limited to species typical of urban areas, because of the small size of the site and the surroundings, there had never been any illusions about use by rare species. Especially given the simple goals, the project had been remarkably successful.

Interlude

I'm going to pause from the project commentary briefly and write about a much earlier influence.

My interest in the natural world dates back to around age five or six, when we moved from the inner city to the suburbs. Suddenly I had a vast new world to explore, one that seemed like a wilderness to a young boy even though today I understand that it was only a succession of old fields and remnant woodlands dominated by weedy species. The prairie and oak savanna was almost gone from that place by that time. Even so, I was fascinated by the larval tiger salamanders I found in a pond next to an old abandoned farmhouse in the path of relentless suburban growth.

By the time I was in second grade I'd devoured every book in the school library that had anything to do with wildlife. One of those books that my parents must have bought for me is in front of me now; a tattered copy of the Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians. The price, $1.00, is in the top right corner of the front cover and I need to handle it carefully to keep the pages from falling out.

The illustrations are crude, yet on page 141 is a drawing that I never forgot. A Pacific giant salamander and an olympic salamander perch atop a flat rock in a habitat very unlike where they actually live. I remember looking at these exotic creatures, at the range map showing a sliver of color on the west coast from northern California into British Columbia, and dreaming of these still unknown (to me) and far away places, 2,000 miles distant which might as well be in another galaxy from the perspective of a nine year old. Of course now I'm sitting within that sliver of color, and have seen lots of these no longer mysterious salamanders. A dream realized, I suppose.

I met many of the authors of those early books once I'd begun my professional career. They were aged gentlemen by then. When I had the opportunity to meet this particular author (the prolific Hobart M. Smith) I'd just found the tattered old book on a visit to my parents house, and tucked it in my pocket. I told Dr. Smith the story above as he smiled and signed the worn old page.

All of this is actually just a way of leading up to my real point. Along with a few illustrations and maps and words, I was drawn to this mysterious amphibious world by even earlier written accounts, authored by a previous generation of gentleman naturalists. They were mostly deceased before I ever read their words, so I never had the opportunity to meet them. Yet I was fascinated by their more flowing and elaborate and less formal writing style, common before the days when every scientific paper became dry and technical and rational and laden with statistical analysis. Those earlier accounts tapped into primal emotions at least as much as they recited scientific fact.

I'll cite two relevant examples. The Handbook of Frogs and Toads, by Albert Hazen Wright and Anna Allen Wright, was first published in 1933. After each species account it included excerpts from field notes. Here I read about pine barrens tree frogs in New Jersey, assorted chorus frogs in the swamps of Florida and Georgia, and leopard frogs in north woods lakes. One day I would have my own journals of notes from road trips; these much earlier ones helped spark that interest. I read them over and over again, and I was not disappointed when I finally was able to visit a few of the same places many years later.

The other example I didn't read til many years later. E. R. Dunn's Salamanders of the Family Plethodontidae has plenty of taxonomic detail in the species accounts. Yet the 1926 original work, and my 1972 reprint not acquired until two decades after that, included many passages like the following one in the forward:

"Yet it is the places that stick in my mind, which I had not seen but for Desmognathus or Oedipus. Cedar Rock in the rain, when the face of it was a waterfall a thousand feet high and a half mile wide, water pouring out from the spruce forest on top, and spreading out over the great dome and down with a mighty roaring to its hidden base. The cliffs of Lost Cove and the escarpment of the Blue Ridge down which we went all one long day, with our senses of direction clean gone, and dark came on, and we followed trails in the woods which ended blindly, until across three ridges we heard a cow bell and the bark of a dog. The silence of the spruce forest on White Top, and the thick moss on the ground there."

It's only three pages in the front of the book, yet it so eloquently captures some of my own feelings while pursuing Aneides or Desmognathus or Plethodon in that same Blue Ridge region more than 60 years after Dunn wrote his words. I doubt I could convey it half as well as he did. Again, he helped inspire new trips out into the wind and the rain and the night for long hikes over rugged terrain.

Those trips still happen. Today we too often take ourselves so seriously or just get too busy and forget to write about those less tangible things which for me at least, are a big part of the reason to undertake such adventures.

Suisun Marsh

In 1993 I was asked to take over a California wetland mitigation project. The woman who had barely started it had transferred out from one of our east coast offices, but had clashed with the engineer who ran our Concord office. After only a few months and with one completed project in the northeast corner of the state, she had left for an opportunity in Atlanta. As the only other ecologist in the company with previous California experience, I was asked to take over the permitting and mitigation design, and as a result I worked about half time from Concord over the next year or two on this and another project.

The project involved the widening of SR 12 through Suisun City, in Solano County. The decision had already been made to mitigate the filling of a roadside ditch through wetland re-establishment on the adjacent Hill Sough Wildlife Area, and an agreement to that effect had been negotiated with California Department of Fish and Game. The outlines of the concept were in place; the deep, straight ditch would be replaced by a meandering brackish and tidal slough. There would be about nine acres of adjacent seasonal wetlands, and the mitigation site would be separated from the Wildlife Area by a dike. We weren't happy about this last part, but CDFG insisted upon it.

My role was to help work out the final design details and then to obtain the permits. We brought out a hydrologist and designed a weir to keep a small area of fresh water below the outfall (the upper segment of the stream was underground in a  residential neighborhood) as pond turtle habitat. I modified the elevations and some of the channel contours to minimize "islands" of upland that might serve as weed traps. I worked with a local landscape architect to develop a planting plan, after first educating him on why non-native ornamentals were not an option (he learned quickly and ultimately did well).

Then I got the permits. These were almost too easy. The Corps of Engineers was quite cooperative. There were no issues with the dreaded Bay Conservation and Development Commission, it was the first time I'd dealt with them and I didn't know any better. Possibly stopping by their San Francisco office to meet staff and ask to use some of their publications for research helped.

The project was built in the fall of 1994, and I visited every couple of years for a while. At first it was fairly successful. We met the permit requirements at the end of year five (Caltrans did the monitoring, I visited on my own time).

Then they walked away. After 1999, no one did anything to manage the site. After another 10 years, the trail had cracks in the pavement and the interpretive signs were too faded to read.

The interior of the site still looked pretty good, still met performance criteria. This included the new channel and the nine acre seasonal wetland, so actually most of the site looked pretty good. The problem was the upland buffer between the channel and the road. It was pretty weedy. Only an acre or two, but still.

I learned the importance of long-term management. I also learned not to place mitigation sites contiguous with roads, if at all possible. It hadn't been a choice in this case, we'd pressed as far into the Wildlife Area as we realistically could.

Overall, the mitigation site is a big improvement over pre-project conditions. I'd always like to see better, however I've got to acknowledge that we met the stated goals even without long-term management. We'd provided additional habitat for two listed species known on the adjacent lands, Suisun shrew and salt marsh harvest mouse. We'd eliminated habitat for non-native gobies documented in the ditch before the project. We'd removed a considerable amount of compacted fill which had encroached into the margin of Suisun Marsh, the largest estuary in the western U.S. And I'd gained California project and permitting experience. More on that in the next post.

Although I disliked working in the suburban car culture that is Concord… it was faster to get in the car to go to lunch than to walk across the six lane street, which was dangerous… I did very much enjoy the project area. Often I'd drive down to the end of Hill Slough Road, past the golden treeless hills and the endless marshes. In the evenings I'd eat in Fairfield or drive over to Berkeley and browse bookstores after dinner. One weekend I drove up to Tioga Pass, making snowballs at 11,000 feet after crossing the baking 100-degree central valley. I took full advantage of the opportunity to expand on my earlier experiences in Southern California, San Francisco, and Mendocino County.

Clarke and Pine

One day in the mid-1990s I was working through lunch, and happened to take a call from someone looking for a qualifications package for mitigation-related work. I sent it off right away, within perhaps 15 minutes. Another 15 minutes and the fellow called back. I'd been the first to respond, the quals looked good, and could I be at a meeting with the Justice Department the next morning?

I could, and I was. Today that might be impossible, but our management structure at TAMS was so flat, our ability to take responsibility so complete and so encouraged, that I didn't need to wait for a signed contract. There was an opportunity, and I took it. The paperwork followed.

The "client" turned out to be a large group of "potentially responsible parties" or PRPs related to the MIDCO superfund sites in Gary, Indiana. I never learned who they were, although I was told it was a who's who of the Fortune 500. They'd shipped things to these sites, some low-level staffer hadn't done his due diligence first, the fly-by-night operator had buried and then burned 55 gallon drums of hazardous materials, and USEPA had gone after the folks with the deep pockets after the operator had declared bankruptcy and fled.

In any case my day to day contacts were the attorneys representing the PRPs. Some of them were brilliant, many relatively young, and they were working on things that in some cases had no established precedent. In my case though the task was straightforward, if far from simple: Identify a way to mitigate wetlands filled as part of the illegal dumping. The knowledge I'd gained of the Gary area as part of the airport study proved to be invaluable.

First we had to quantify the historic impacts. I stood outside the fence along U.S. Route 12 as two of my team members in full tyvek hazmat gear delineated remaining wetlands inside the sites. Then we digitized vegetation cover from old aerial photos and compared 1970s and current layers to determine the area of fill. Then back into more meetings with lawyers, ours and theirs, 40 stories above downtown Chicago.

The amount of mitigation needed was large enough that there were few places to consolidate it. There are a lot of remnant dune and swale natural areas in and around Gary, but few of them exceed 10 or 20 acres. There's quite a bit of adjacent disturbed land, buffer areas that in most places could be excavated to re-establish wetlands. In Gary though digging is risky. One never knows what might be buried there, amidst the steel mills there is a lot of undocumented hazardous material. Even the fill itself can be a problem, often it's fly ash or steel slag which needs to be disposed of in a licensed landfill with all the associated transport and disposal costs.

At that time USEPA didn't usually accept land preservation as mitigation for this sort of thing, at least not as more than a small part of the package. However I knew that the single most important piece of land in the project vicinity, from a conservation standpoint, was the 220-acre Clarke and Pine East parcel. We'd sampled it during the airport study and knew that it, along with the smaller Clark and Pine nature preserve across the street and Lakeshore Railroad Prairie just to the north, contained possibly the largest aggregation of state-listed species in Indiana. We knew that Indiana DNR wanted it, and that they'd been unable to get the owner - a guy who ran a local trucking company - to even return phone calls.

With lots of help from Indiana DNR's Division of Nature Preserves, we convinced the Justice Department lawyers to let us try to acquire Clarke and Pine East as natural resource damage mitigation. The pressure from the state agency was essential to the agreement.

In a way, that was the easy part, it took only about a dozen weekly meetings among the lawyers. Beyond that, we knew the landowner was under a cease and desist order from the Corps of Engineers as a result of some attempted sand mining in wetlands a few years earlier. We knew he was delinquent on taxes, and the fallback was the tax sale and then waiting two years.

The hotshot lawyers hired a local family law guy in Hammond to contact the landowner; obviously being approached by high-end corporate attorneys would lead to a higher  asking price. The local guy accomplished what the agencies couldn't and established contact, but the price was much too high, 10 times fair market value. Ironically, the owner had believed that the Gary site we'd studied for the airport was real, thought he was sitting on valuable land. Of course that site had never been viable for an airport, it would have displaced 40,000 people and cost billions just to remediate the hazardous waste, and it was dotted with wetlands that couldn't be mitigated and endangered species. It had been assessed and discarded, but he didn't know or understand that.

I don't know what the lawyers found in that guys closet and dragged out. I probably don't ever want to know. What I do know is that overnight, the asking price dropped to fair market value. The lawyers brokered the deal, the land briefly went to The Nature Conservancy because they were able to move a little more nimbly on funding, and about a year later the land was transferred to the Division of Nature Preserves. Coincidentally about that time I was returning from a meeting somewhere to the east and stopped to visit the Director of that division, John Bacone, in Indianapolis. He said "guess what came today" and handed me the deed to Clarke and Pine East.

We'd just saved the largest remaining example of lakeshore ridge and swale in Indiana, a place contiguous with two other smaller examples and divided only by roads and railroads. A place where jack pine reached it's southernmost extent and grew among scattered black oak and an amazing diversity of sand prairie and wetland plants, including many rare species. A place where lizards typical of places well to the southwest met species of eastern and northern origin. A place studied and discussed at length by Victor Shelford in his "Animal Communities in Temperate America" (1913). I believe it's perhaps the single most important thing I've accomplished in my 24 year career.

In this case others did the restoration, although the deal included some funding to begin that work. Later I'd work closely with some of those same folks to write a collection of ecological knowledge... what could easily be called the ecology of the Grand Calumet watershed... which would later be published in the Transactions of the Indiana Academy of Sciences. Those papers were written, with Corps of Engineers funding, to help identify yet more restoration opportunities. The story is still a work in progress, and I'll revisit yet one more chapter in a future post.

The one that wasn't

My other major early project at TAMS was the proposed South Suburban Airport near Chicago. Beginning in 1990, we analyzed five alternative search areas ranging up to 18,000 acres in size; full biological inventories of each, over a two and a half year period. While two of the sites were almost entirely agricultural, one included some woodlands of moderate to good quality, and two, the Gary Indiana and Lake Calumet IL sites, included remnants of significant natural communities such as nearshore dune and swale, mesic prairie, and marsh. A lot of experience that would later prove to be valuable came out of this project, not to mention the world-class team I was fortunate enough to work with for those first seven years.

After some political contortions far too complex to describe here, eventually the Peotone site was chosen. It was one of the greenfield, or  agricultural sites and the vast majority of it was in row crops. All of the headwater streams that crossed it were channelized. And therein I found an opportunity.

One of the streams was Exline Slough. Today it's a straight ditch. Where it crosses Beecher-Peotone Road it's as much as 10 feet deep. Each year we sampled fish from within an earthen canyon, unable to see over the sides for the entire 200-meter sampling reach. It had been dredged, probably before 1910, and the rich black dirt sidecast into low irregular levees on either side. it was located just southeast of the proposed airport, well within the noise contours where we'd need to create unpopulated buffer areas.

In spite of the massive alteration we got above average fish assemblages there most years, with IBI scores around 44 if I recall correctly. There was at least one fishkill associated with nutrient over-enrichment, followed by fairly rapid recovery. So it was a reasonably diverse if sometimes unstable assemblage.

The obvious clue came from the name; it had been called a slough for a reason. Standing atop the bank, one could see an elongated basin slowly rising off to either side to the surrounding Valparaiso Moraine.  A glance at a topographic map confirmed it; there was a quarter-mile wide abandoned floodway perched 10 feet above the modern elevation of the streambed. Finally, a look at the 1830's GLO survey notes and map provided additional confirmation. At that time, prior to channelization, Exline Slough had been a quarter-mile wide flowing marsh with a very narrow open channel in the center. It had been like this for miles, from the headwaters all the way to the edge of the higher gradient sloping down to the post-glacial Kankakee Torrent valley.

Exline Slough, we determined, originated from a series of drain tile outlets about a mile and a half north of our sample reach. Here a south facing shallow basin climbed gradually to the divide between the Mississippi River drainage... Exline Slough into the Kankakee River, to the Illinois, and finally to the Mississippi; and the Lake Michigan drainage, via Plum Creek and Thorn Creek and into the Calumet. On the north side of this divide, only a few hundred meters from the Exline Slough drain tiles, we discovered a previously unknown 30-acre prairie set well in from the section roads. It had been heavily grazed by horses, but was restorable.

We quickly developed a concept to grade several miles of Exline Slough back to something like original elevations, re-establishing the wide, shallow and slowly flowing marsh that had once been there. At least two section road crossings would have been removed entirely. The drain tiles would have been removed. The prairie would have anchored the northern end.

Unfortunately, two things got in the way. Most importantly, the FAA issued published guidance restricting wetland mitigation within 10,000 feet of an active runway, for wildlife hazard reasons. The northern part of our site fell within this radius, effectively killing it as potential mitigation. Also, the proposed airport bogged down in Illinois politics. It still hasn't been built almost 20 years later, although land for the first runway (of six originally proposed) and a small terminal has been acquired.

Still, it's worth sharing the concept because there are other places in the Midwestern and Eastern U.S. where it's applicable. Structurally it's obvious enough. What made it so possible though was the existence of a published analog, a reference site a century removed in time. The photo below is from Sherff (1914), based on work done in the Skokie Marsh north of Chicago in 1910-1911 and published by the State of Illinois.

The photo was taken west of Glencoe. Note the relatively narrow open channel, choked with submerged vegetation, and the bordering bands of what appear to be bulrush, dropping into a marsh and wet prairie complex with lower vegetation to either side. Topographically this marsh would have been similar to the one at Exline Slough before both were extensively modified. There's an extensive vegetation list included in the published article and while the two site are perhaps 60 miles apart and they certainly weren't identical, they would have had much in common. It wouldn't have been hard to develop a planting mix from the available information. There's also a surviving area in Barrington Hills, around Spring Lake and Mud Lake, that's similar in appearance and which could serve as a reference site.

This one wasn't to be. However it's an excellent example of how to use historic information and a bit of temporal imagination to re-establish what once was, when the circumstances allow.

Mid-America

The first mitigation project that I worked on as a consultant was Mid-America Airport. When I joined TAMS Consultants in 1990, the very first thing that I was tasked with was writing an Environmental Assessment on this project, and especially conducting an alternatives analysis. This brought me to some fascinating locations in St. Clair, Madison, and Monroe Counties, Illinois (not far from St. Louis MO) in the dead of winter.

The ultimate project site was at first known as the Scott AFB Joint-Use Project, because this ended up being the first joint use airport in the U.S. (there had been earlier examples in Europe). Scott AFB is on the west side of Silver Creek, and the concept was to build a new runway, taxiway, and terminal east of the river. Both the military and civilian sides would share existing maintenance and control tower facilities, reducing both costs and environmental impacts. It also kept Scott AFB off the base closure list, thus building a lot of local economic support.

Even with some very creative designing to minimize impacts, the need for a connecting taxiway across the 1.5-mile wide floodplain associated with Silver Creek meant some pretty substantial impacts to second-growth floodplain forest which qualified as jurisdictional wetland. To this day it's the largest mitigation project that I've actually helped build, by about double: We mitigated 100 acres of fill at a 2:1 ratio, or 200 acres of mostly bottomland hardwood forest re-establishment.

The concept was fairly simple. The existing floodplain forest, while vast, was badly fragmented. The forest had been repeatedly cut and most of it was from 30 to 50 years old; one small section was about 90 years old and beginning to show some mature habitat structure, but mostly we were working with even age stands dominated by cottonwood, silver maple, box elder, and green ash. Agricultural fields had been cleared within the forest and leveed off. In wet years they simply flooded from the inside, and most fields produced crops only about half the time. Most of the fields were small, although the largest one, and the cornerstone of our mitigation concept, was about 70 acres. The general idea was to breach the low levees to restore connectivity to the river and the floodplain, and then to plant trees. We also jump started things by salvaging some of the larger trees cut in the taxiway area, and placing them upright in the largest mitigation site as snags. The idea was to get structure more typical of mature forests in place right away. Reducing fragmentation was a primary goal, and with the help of USACE-WES and USFWS we applied a then draft Bottomland Hardwood Forest Community HSI model to document existing and predict future conditions.

We also took an opportunity to re-meander the river and an associated tributary. The northwest end of the new runway required relocating part of Silver Creek, in a reach just south of Interstate 64 where it had been straightened and channelized. The new design included sweeping meanders similar to those intact in the southern part of the project site. We planted willow stakes to stabilize the meanders and to encourage formation of a riparian zone, and included some in-channel structure in the design.

Mitigation construction began in October of 1993, and the impact side of the project was built in 1995-1996. Most of the mitigation was completed at the same time, with a Phase 2 area north of I-64 built a few years later to compensate for some impacts that were also delayed.

We experienced heavy flooding in 1997, the same well known Mississippi River events that flooded parts of the St. Louis riverfront and destroyed entire small towns such as Valmeyer (our engineers helped design the relocation of Valmeyer to the top of the bluff). Our new meanders held, although the in channel structure was swept away and replaced with natural woody debris. Then came some very dry summer months. In spite of all this the mitigation held up fairly well. The design was flexible enough to allow for stochasm. It was resilient, a term not much in use yet at that time. That experience has influenced my restoration concepts ever since.

What would we have done differently? The agencies asked for relatively homogenous oak and hickory plantings, and we didn't argue as hard as we should have. In practice the oaks and hickories did pretty well on the somewhat drier terraces, and not well at all on the lowest and wettest areas which grew up instead with willows and other soft mast species. This turned out to be OK, because when I went to the Corps with monitoring results and aerial photos documenting excellent interspersion of habitat structure, we were released from permit conditions for the Phase 1 part of the effort. Everyone, agencies and consultants, learned from the experience. That was in 2005, which was the last time I visited the site; someone else completed the Phase 2 monitoring.

So the only thing I'd really change would be to not waste money by planting hard mast trees in the wettest areas.

We documented increased biodiversity. Fish sampling resulted in mainstem IBI scores returning to just above pre-project levels and tributary IBI scores well above pre-project and into the very good range. Amphibian species richness increased slightly (I published this data a few years later), and state-listed red-shouldered hawks nested in our snags the first year.

This photo shows the largest mitigation unit as of 2013; maybe someday I'll return to the site again, but that will require coordination with and permission from airport security. So for now I'll rely on remote sensing. That's Silver Creek on the left, and some of the more mature remaining forest is on the left of the river. The mitigation site (about the center third of the photo, from the river to that vertical green slash within the brown just right of center, that's a ditch which bounded one side of the site) continues to show good interspersion, although it looks like there's been some recent flooding. The pond just left of center was excavated as part of the project to mimic an oxbox pond. The small more densely wooded area in the top right is a pre-project stand of then very young trees, about 20 years older than the mitigation plantings. The pale green area in the very bottom center is the wettest part of this site, and is unlikely ever to support more than a few large trees.

There was one other lesson, one I don't have an answer to. Some of the suburbs nearby, especially along the interstate corridor, sprawled post-project. Where three towns meet, retail developers played the towns off against each to get concessions. The result was shopping malls with no pedestrian friendly features, and only the bare minimum of stormwater retention. They represent the worst of suburban sprawl and car culture. Those places were beyond our planning control, and yet in the long term they will affect local water quality as well as quality of life. It's a policy dilemma that's larger than any one project.

24 years of restoration

The next series of posts will focus on the various mitigation projects I've worked on since 1990. While all of these qualify as habitat restoration at some level, the things they have in common are that I worked on them in my consulting role, and most (but not all) were intended to mitigate for some project-related impact. Perhaps later I'll take a look at some of the pure restoration projects I've been involved in over the years, however there are some important lessons to be learned from the mitigation projects.

These follow only a very rough timeline. The larger projects lasted for years, in one case for 14 years. Smaller projects came and went in the midst of these. Some were designed and built quickly, others were built only several years after design. So there's some jumping back and forth within a very roughly older to newer progression.

Ten Mile Dunes, north of Fort Bragg, California. This was a random stop, a quick 20-minute hike off Rt 101 on the return drive from a meeting early last week. I was impressed at the amount of restoration on this site, not much non-native Ammophila left; lots of native dune mat, lots of bare sand. It was quite windy along the coast that late afternoon, and the sand was very much mobilized. It was a great chance to see ecosystem processes in action. There were also a few snowy plovers active on the sandy shoreline of the river and in the nearby dune margins.

Guthrie Creek

This was taken at the beginning of a Saturday hike down the Guthrie Creek trail, on BLM's Lost Coast Headlands site near Ferndale, California. It's only a mile each way, and about 800 feet elevation change, one of the easier hikes I've done this year. It's well worth the minimal effort.

Most people stop at the Fleener Creek trailhead not far above Centerville Beach. It's a shorter and easier trail, but it's also more crowded. Continue on the one lane road, winding and in places unpaved, and one drops down into the Fleener Creek valley, rises up the far side, and then winds past coastal grasslands and patches of Sitka spruce and Douglas fir forest. The terrain seems somehow disconcerting, disorienting to some first-time visitors; I presume that it's the twisted and broken topography of this young and unstable place a handful of miles north of the Mendocino triple junction.  In any case, eventually there's a small parking lot on the right with tide tables conveniently posted and the Guthrie Creek trailhead just beyond.

Although not  currently targeted for restoration, it does show some diversity. In the foreground of the photo, on the south-facing slope, is coastal scrub. At the bottom a patch of grassland is visible, probably weedy annuals although it's no longer grazed. A ribbon of willow-alder riparian threads through the valley. On the opposite north-facing slope patches of Sitka spruce intermingle with more scrub.

The pocket beach below, much of it safely accessible only at low tide, is bordered by nearly vertical mudstone cliffs. It's a quiet place, with few visitors except the occasional AV coming down the beach and even fewer hikers on the trail. It's been different every time I've visited, more than a dozen times now; a section of cliff newly collapsed, the stream mouth in a new location every time, driftwood and large tree stumps in new arrangements. It's a good reminder of how dynamic nature is, in this place where winter storms and the occasional earthquake re-arrange things at will.

Salt River

From a boat ride this afternoon on the newly restored lower Salt River channel. The new channel is on the lower right, the center and distance show bordering salt marsh re-established by removing a levee and with some grading. This was taken during an eight-foot tide, fairly high for this location.

Evidence of the past

This photo was taken near the mouth of the Eel River last week. The redwood stump is huge, the smaller, left edge is more than six feet high. It's standing in the midst of a large open area... there's a bit of coastal terrace prairie visible in the foreground, a shallow tidal marsh with pickleweed grading into invasive Spartina beyond that, and coastal dunes just visible in the background. The river is off to the right, perhaps a quarter-mile away.

We know the stump has been there a long time, and it's highly weathered. It's possible that it was deposited here during the 1964 floods which inundated most of the estuary. Redwood tends to occur a few miles inland here, so it  was probably swept down the river first from somewhere upstream.

It's a good reminder of the power of  ecological processes, in this case the floods which periodically occur on the Eel. We can restore or otherwise manipulate to whatever degree, but it's important to remember that someday the waters will once again rise, and as a result some locations will change profoundly as a result of scour or sediment deposition.

flatwoods

Another photo of Ryerson Woods (Lake County, IL) from last weekend. This one gives a better look at the trailside area where a shallow ditch was filled to restore hydrology.

Northern flatwoods are an unusual community on claypan... in this case a dense, yellowish clay just a few inches below the surface... characterized by stunted oaks including swamp white oak, various shrubs, and a herbaceous layer which includes several uncommon sedges. In late winter and spring it's very wet with numerous small vernal ponds which support a diverse amphibian community, and in late summer and fall conditions are typically very dry.