metaphor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

snakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

following through

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

turn

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

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

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

resources

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

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

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

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

policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

frogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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