Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
highlights the perils of greening the resulting mudflats in a hurry. It also
introduces some of the larger landscapes of restoration projects on the
rocky Marin shore, the rural North Bay rim, and the South Bay's patch-
work of salt ponds and wildlife refuges.
The baylands present obstacles both similar to and different from those
faced along the flow lines of a river or creek. But infrastructure such as
dikes, walls, weirs, and dams remain ubiquitous up- and downstream,
forcing planners to work around hard edges while creating soft habitats.
Climate change makes shoreline restoration experiments even more
vital. Resilient living wetlands will be crucial in regional efforts to adapt to
the advance of water over the lowest parts of the shoreline, and into areas
filled long ago to create airports, railroad beds, and downtown water-
fronts. Rising sea levels promise to change the shape and size of the bay
once again, and regional planners are counting on new wetlands and re-
connected floodplains to help absorb some of the shockwaves.
“We're not restoring the bay anymore; we're designing it,” says San
Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) di-
rector Will Travis.
Without the foresight of conservation-minded duck hunters, there might
not be any marshes left in the bay today. Private duck clubs bought up
most of Suisun Marsh in the North Bay, for example, and were the first to
begin “managing” their marshes—regulating flooding to improve habitats
for their winged quarry. But legislation is what allowed the business of
“restoration” to begin in earnest. The California Environmental Quality
Act of 1970 required developers to assess potential environmental impacts
of their projects, followed soon afterward by the Clean Water Act's estab-
lishment of a no-net-loss policy for wetlands. Waterfront developers who
destroyed tidal acreage were soon required to replace them with marshes
of equal or greater size.
While legislators and planners were crafting this new legal framework
for wetland management, biologists and engineers were busy experiment-
ing with the building blocks of restoration—plants, tides, and mud. In the
late 1960s, Tom Harvey, a biology professor at San Jose State University,
planted a clump of native cordgrass (
Spartina foliosa
) in the Faber Tract at
Palo Alto before dikes were opened to the bay. Until this time the general
belief was that, once gone, wetlands were lost forever. Harvey's plants
lived, kindling the notion that marshes might be restored in the Bay Area.
At the time, the nation's only models of healthy wetlands were the cord-
