microclimate

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

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

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

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

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

oakland

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

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

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

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

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

transition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sand and water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ohio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

command and control

I'm learning more about Logan County, Ohio.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

boardwalk

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

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

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