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with private boat docks, and landfill expansions at places like Black Point,
Bel Marin Keys, Bahia, and Novato, Audubon partnered with others to
protect a 3,000-acre corridor of baylands reaching from the former Ham-
ilton airfield all along the Petaluma River into remote ranchlands.
Saving the marshes along the Petaluma River was a great triumph, be-
cause it helps connect Marin County habitats with the much wilder 55,000
acres of wetland open spaces of the North Bay rim. Restoring these rural
ranchlands and seasonal wetlands involved little more than straightfor-
ward dike breaching and revegetation. A far more difficult landscape was
Marin's Hamilton Air Force Base, with its old runways and antenna fields
to transform, its regiments of abandoned buildings to tear down, and its
oil spills and landfills to mop up.
As part of a multiuse redevelopment of the base into a new community
adjacent to shoreline habitats, the California Coastal Conservancy and the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have been trying to implement one of the
most complex wetland restoration designs undertaken in the bay to date.
The design is complex because it uses material from harbor dredging proj-
ects to bring the long-subsided landscape up to tidal elevations, and be-
cause the 2,500-acre project re-creates the entire spectrum of shoreline
Hamilton wetland restora-
tion site in Marin County,
where dredged material is
being beneficially reused to
raise subsided lands to ap-
propriate levels for new
habitats. (Courtesy of the
U.S. Army Corps of Engi-
neers)
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