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.