Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
they were destroying,” says Philip Williams, who has been building wet-
lands in the Bay Area for nearly 30 years.
In the rush to create instant wetlands, the bayshore regained few of the
functional benefits of natural, mature wetlands, which include absorbing
floods, filtering pollutants, cycling nutrients, producing the basic food-
stuffs of the aquatic ecosystem, and providing warm, quiet, shallow nurs-
eries for fish, birds, and other wildlife.
In these early decades of experimentation, automated helpers such as
modern tide gauges, radar, and global positioning system (GPS) units
weren't included in project budgets. Williams remembers running one
early project for the Coastal Conservancy using human, rather than elec-
tronic, brains for monitoring. He organized a system in which volunteers
at various marsh stations would record the changing level of the tides
every 15 minutes over the course of 30 hours by observing measuring
sticks stuck in the mud. Though the plan looked fine on paper, Williams
didn't quite think through every detail. “We set up a nice base camp on
Black John Slough with coffee and everything, and we rotated everyone
every four hours, shuttling volunteers out to their stations through these
small sloughs in canoes. Then it got dark, the tide dropped, and I realized
we couldn't get to all these people because it was too shallow,” he says.
“They had to sit out in the marsh all night.”
After a while consultants like Williams began specializing in creating
bay wetlands and learning from their experiences. Some began to monitor
the results of their efforts and adjusted accordingly. Others benefited from
the critiques of neighbors and environmental watchdogs.
Corte Madera's Muzzi Marsh was one of the bay's first large-scale and
most continuously monitored restoration projects. The Golden Gate
Bridge District began the project in 1976, breaching the outer dike in four
places as mitigation for building the Larkspur Ferry Terminal. In 1980,
managers increased the amount of water flowing to the landward portion
of the marsh via a remedial channel. By the late 1990s, plant expert Phyllis
Faber noted that cordgrass grass and pickleweed had spread throughout
the new marsh.
Another milestone project got its start 10 years after Muzzi, when engi-
neers breached a slough levee and opened up a deep borrow pit at Warm
Springs in the South Bay. Here, researchers learned how the depth and
characteristics of the substrate play an important role in the rate of vegeta-
tion. Over the following two decades Faber observed the site evolve from
supporting salt marsh vegetation to growing brackish species nurtured by
the swelling flow of fresh water out of the discharge pipe of the San Jose
treatment plant.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the region restored wetlands at 34 sites. Of
these, 70 percent were for mitigation purposes and included Cogswell,
