Now we know better. Scientists have taught us that healthy wetlands are among nature’s most productive works. They’re loaded with proteins, vitamins, minerals, plant life, microscopic organisms, insect larvae, and worms—including one known as the fat innkeeper—and with birds and fish who make delicious meals of the above.

“Wetland” is a general term covering various types of land that are submerged at least some of the time—tidal marshes, freshwater ponds, vernal pools, and almost any depression that holds water from time to time. Tidal marshes are our subject here. Local, state, and federal laws now protect those that remain.

But there’s a complication. Some important developments must be built in wetlands: harbors, marinas, ferry terminals, and bridges, for example. Laws provide for such public developments and for some private ones as well.

Wetlands thus used are lost. In their place, other wetlands that have been disturbed by man can be restored—if not to a pristine state, at least to a healthier one. Those who are permitted to build on wetlands, even for a good purpose, are required to mitigate the damage through restoration projects. The restored wetland is expected to be as productive as what is lost, or more so.

Wetland mitigation is a process that has been controversial since it began in the early 1970s. Who should do it, how it should be done, who should pay for it, whether it is or can be successful, and whether it should be done at all are all subjects of fierce and continuing debate. Some environmentalists have been sharply critical, both of the concept of mitigation and of the process by which it is put into effect.

“The best thing is to keep wetlands where they are,” says Barbara Salzman, president of the Marin Audubon Society. “Mitigation is warranted if [the proposed development] is to the public benefit. But once you go this route [issuing permits in return for mitigation], there’s no way out of it. It leaves all wetlands vulnerable. It encourages development not for the public good.” To those who argue that some marshes are too small to be worth saving, she responds: “Why not keep them? They provide resting places for migrating birds. If they’re working at all, they’re wetlands.” Salzman and other critics of mitigation also contend that some restoration projects fail.

If these criticisms are well founded, what have the multitudinous agencies in charge of managing wetland mitigation been doing? We are speaking here of some eminent bodies.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, California Coastal Commission, and San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) grant the permits for filling, dredging, and diking wetlands within their jurisdictions. They elicit comments from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Environmental Protection Agency, National Marine Fisheries, and California Department of Fish and Game, and certification from Regional Water Quality Control Boards.

The permit-granting process is a civil engagement involving the applicant, wetland agency officials, and Mother Nature. Among the main points of contention: whether the proposed development could be relocated or modified so as to avoid affecting the wetland; whether the wetland to be restored as mitigation will be in the vicinity of the original wetland and create the same kind of habitat as the one to be lost.

If these questions are answered to the satisfaction of all involved in the process, a restoration design is drawn up and examined. Will it support the species of plants and animals, and the tidal action, that scientists seek to preserve? If there are doubts, the design will be amended before a permit is granted. But alas, however well intentioned the approved design may be, Mother Nature’s intentions may be otherwise. (The art and science of wetland restoration is still young.) And those responsible for executing the permit may not be diligent in detecting and dealing with the resulting difficulties. The road to wetland mitigation should be posted with a big sign: “Hazards Ahead.”

Does the mitigation process work as intended? Does it truly compensate for unavoidable losses of wetland habitat? It may take years of watching restoration progress to answer these questions, but we can gain some insights by looking at three restoration projects serving as mitigation: Bracut Marsh in Humboldt County, Muzzi Marsh in Marin County, and Batiquitos Lagoon in San Diego County. The first two were early efforts that turned out to be learning laboratories. The third benefited from advances in scientific knowledge.

Bracut Marsh is a six-acre restoration on the edge of Arcata Bay in Humboldt County, five miles north of Eureka. It is bounded by a highway, railroad tracks, and the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

This restoration, begun in 1981, was to compensate for the filling of four little marshes that were a nuisance to quite a few people. They were scattered along an industrial waterfront, impeding certain notions of progress.

The private owners of the land containing these “pocket” marshes were pressing the City for permission to develop or sell. The City fathers and mothers had public uses in mind for the sites. But the Coastal Act prohibited the filling of wetlands. Stalemate.

Then the Coastal Conservancy concocted a novel solution. The Coastal Commission would adopt guidelines to allow filling the pocket marshes if the owners would compensate by funding the restoration—to be undertaken by the Conservancy—of one larger, potentially more productive marsh.

The owners and the City agreed. Restoration of Bracut Marsh began, but not auspiciously. Everything that could go wrong went wrong: site selection, project design, monitoring performance. Wetland people sigh when they speak of it.

“The site had serious physical constraints. It was cut off from tidal influence. It was covered with compacted river gravel and, beneath that, wood debris left from an old sawmill operation,” wrote Liza Riddle in a case study done for the Army Corps of Engineers in 1992. Riddle was the Conservancy staff member in charge of the Bracut Marsh project in its later phases. She is now director of projects for the Western Region at the Trust for Public Land.

The marsh restoration design was flawed as well. It called for breaching a dike, creating channels for tidal circulation, and depositing bay mud over the debris. Unfortunately, the tidal action was miscalculated. It did not bring in the sediment required to keep the debris covered and to nourish wetland vegetation. “The result was a poor marsh habitat,” Riddle wrote.

For years Bracut Marsh languished. The costs of monitoring—so essential to detecting and correcting unanticipated failures—had not been covered in the original contract, so nobody watched what was happening. At last in 1987 someone noticed that the marsh seemed in poor health, and the Coastal Conservancy retained wetland biologist Mike Josselyn and hydrologist Philip Williams to prescribe remedies.

Josselyn found the soil quality poor, vegetation sparse, bird use not as anticipated, and wood debris clogging up the breach. He also noticed a strange phenomenon: methane gas bubbles and long white filaments drifting about. They were created by a sulfur bacterium called Beggiatoa, which was oxidizing hydrogen sulfide to sulfur and, in the process, emitting an odor reminiscent of rotten eggs. The cause of this unpleasantness was the decomposition of the errant wood debris.

Josselyn and Williams recommended that the debris be removed and that the clogged breach be cleared, allowing the bubbles, filaments, and Beggiatoa all to be flushed out to sea. They also proposed other measures that might increase the low marsh habitat called for in the restoration design.
Earnest efforts at these improvements have followed, but Bracut stoutly refuses to be a low marsh. Instead it is a high marsh. “High marsh is no less valuable,” said Riddle. “It just has higher elevations and supports different species.”

Instead of cordgrass and pickleweed, today Bracut supports three rare plant species—Humboldt Bay owl’s clover, Point Reyes bird’s beak, and Humboldt Bay gum plant—and nine other native plant species. “Most of these are high marsh plants,” said Anni Eicher, a botanist and local consultant who is monitoring Bracut’s progress. Along with these there is a profusion of Chilean cordgrass, which has invaded Humboldt Bay. “No way we can get rid of it,” said Eicher, tromping through it with a visitor.

The high marsh also attracts shorebirds moving in from the mud flats at high tide. “Thousands of them congregate on Bracut Marsh for the high ground,” said Chad Roberts, a wetland scientist in Eureka.

Standing above the old dike breach, Mark Wheetley, projects manager for the Conservancy on the north coast, sniffs the air. He leans down and sniffs again. “Rotten eggs,” he says. Beggiatoa lives. The tidal flush isn’t all it should be.

Muzzi Marsh is one of the earliest marsh restorations on San Francisco Bay. It was begun in 1974 on 130 acres in Corte Madera, Marin County, between Highway 101 and the Bay, with commercial development beside it and residential neighborhoods overlooking it. It was undertaken to mitigate wetland damage from the dredging of Corte Madera Creek to make a channel for the Golden Gate Bridge District’s ferry terminal in the adjacent town of Larkspur.

Muzzi had hard beginnings. Two opposing techniques were applied: one favored nature’s way, the other, engineering’s way. To complicate things, the Bridge District decided to dispose of dredge spoils on the new site, and that caused trouble later.

The first technique was simple. “Our idea was to breach the dike to bring the tide in, and then let nature take its course,” explained botanist Phyllis Faber, an environmental consultant to the Bridge District. Nature tried hard—wetland plants were sprouting on what had been a barren wasteland—but not hard enough for some observers. Among these were homeowners who looked down on the site and did not see the lush wetland they had expected to see.

The District received complaints, and the upshot, of course, was a committee. “We formed a committee of all the regulatory agencies plus the City and the Marin Conservation League,” said Gene Rexrode, then project engineer for the District, now retired. “Fifteen people. It took an enormous amount of time to get them to agree on what to do. We knew there was a problem—portions of the land (where the dredged materials had been put) were too high. The tide wasn’t getting there, and vegetation wouldn’t grow.” Finally, the committee decided to try engineering. New breaches and channels were dredged to increase tidal flow.

Now, 25 years after restoration began, how is Muzzi doing? “Stupendous!” Faber said, as she surveyed acres of pickleweed and native cordgrass with gum plant scattered throughout. The marsh is frequented by many birds, among them 15 nesting pairs of endangered clapper rail, as well as the salt marsh harvest mouse (whether it’s nesting is not known).

Did the engineering help speed the marsh’s recovery? Faber, who is monitoring progress for BCDC, said, “The new channels have improved tidal flow, but they were inappropriate in size. Now natural meandering channels are forming within them and correcting them.” Chalk one up for Mother Nature.

Would these results have been achieved had the first plan been let be? “Oh yes,” said Faber, “though more slowly. People don’t realize how much time it takes for a marsh to restore.”

Fred Botti, associate wildlife biologist with the Department of Fish and Game in the Bay Region, said, “Muzzi Marsh is coming along very well. Even though a restoration may not meet full expectations, that doesn’t mean it’s a failure. It’s arrogant to think we can go in and do a certain kind of marsh. We should just let it develop naturally.”

So the lesson here is that marsh restoration requires patience and a willingness to accept results that might differ from those intended.

BATIQUITOS LAGOON

Batiquitos Lagoon, a 160-acre tidal marsh restoration in Carlsbad, San Diego County, was begun in 1994 as mitigation for an expansion of Los Angeles Harbor that required extensive dredging and filling.

The lagoon lies between low bluffs, farm land, grasslands, and the ocean. A sub-division of luxurious homes views it from above. Two highway bridges and a railroad line span it at the ocean inlet.

The site was chosen by a team of wetland regulators and advisors, and they took some brickbats: Batiquitos is 50 miles from Los Angeles Harbor because an assiduous search failed to turn up a suitable site nearby. Also, it is a different habitat from what the harbor work destroyed.

Joy Zedler, then a professor of biology at San Diego State University, deplored the loss of 400 acres of shallow bay habitat that Batiquitos would not replace. “The effect upon the region is a net loss,” she wrote in the winter 1987 edition of this magazine.

“There was no net loss of in-kind habitat values,” countered Jack Fancher, a coastal restoration specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which played a major role in preparing the restoration plan. “Eelgrass and pickleweed are going gangbusters. And snowy plover and least tern are nesting on five islands.” The goal of the project was not to replace the shallow bay habitat, but to provide habitat for the same species. This was done.

Restoring tidal flow to Batiquitos was a daunting task. The ocean inlet, long sealed off, had to be recreated. The highway bridges and the railroad right-of-way had to be reconstructed to let the tide in. “The engineers used state-of-the-art models, but they don’t always work,” said Fancher. “A sand bar has appeared at the inlet. We may have to dredge more often.”

To this writer, a recent visitor, the lagoon looked very good. It exhibited a sequence of mud flat, salt marsh, shallow ponds, nesting islands. Tides are flowing, and there are many birds—avocets, egrets, blue herons, terns, widgeons, pintails, ruddy ducks, and others. Merkel and Associates, the firm monitoring restoration progress, reported in 1997 that the count of bird species had jumped from 94 before construction to 127. Fish species, particularly ocean species, were also increasing. Clearly, Batiquitos has profited from the increasing store of scientific knowledge about wetlands.

REVELATIONS

Were Bracut Marsh and Muzzi Marsh and Batiquitos Lagoon successes or failures? “That is in the eye of the beholder,” said Josselyn. “Environmentalists are inclined to say if every function is not performed perfectly, it’s a failure.” Josselyn measures success function by function. Is vegetation cover ample? Are birds nesting? Is tidal action adequate? Do the results meet the goals set forth in the project design? “If 60 percent perform, that’s success,” he said. “If 35 percent, partial success. If five percent, failure.”

By this measure Bracut and Muzzi and Batiquitos are not failures. They have not sunk to that dreadful five percent. They’re not perfect recreations of nature—that doesn’t happen—but they’re functioning wetlands.

But the process needs considerable improvement, particularly as regards monitoring and enforcement of permit requirements. These are all too often absent, said Paul Jones, San Francisco North Bay coordinator for the EPA: “The agencies only do the front end—the permits. [For want of staff], the back end—monitoring for compliance with permit requirements—gets shortchanged.”

Jones, in collaboration with others, has devised a monitoring program for north San Francisco Bay, which could become a model for elsewhere. It will assess wetland failures and successes, and seek ways to improve the science of wetland restoration. That effort may ease some of the wetland controversies, but not all. There remains the question of whether wetlands that retain habitat values should ever be destroyed. Some environmentalists say no, never. Others accept public but not private developments. In practice, that distinction is hard to make. The Coastal Commission allows private industries that are “coastal-dependent”; BCDC allows private businesses that are water-oriented and serve the public. It’s a matter of interpretation on both sides.

Will Travis, executive director of BCDC, offered this comment: “There are two ways to look at mitigation. One, there are vast areas in the Bay Area with a potential to be restored. It would take 50 years to buy them all. Bringing in private capital makes it faster. Two, the loss of even a square inch of wetland is a defeat. So hold them all in reserve until there’s enough money to restore them all.”

It’s unrealistic to expect that all remaining degraded wetlands in the Bay Area can be restored. The San Francisco Bay Area Wetlands Ecosystem Goals Project, authors of the impressive Baylands Ecosystem Habitat Goals, acknowledges that such a visionary goal may be beyond reach. “Certain considerations—economic constraints, landowner desires, zoning, and societal interests—might make it difficult or impossible to implement [all the goals set in the report],” they wrote. Add to these the high cost of restoration, which, for a hypothetical “medium-sized” wetland with “moderate site constraints,” was estimated at $7 million.

It seems inevitable that some wetlands will be lost to development. And what of those remaining? For want of funding, many could languish, unrestored and unproductive, for years. Or they could be restored as compensation for those lost, thus providing more healthy marshes than would otherwise be realized. That is what mitigation is meant to do. A wetland restored as mitigation is, so to speak, a wetland bird in the hand.

Margaret Azevedo served on the North Central Coast Regional Coastal Commission from 1972 to 1976 and has been a member of the Coastal Conservancy since it was established in 1976.

Batiquitos Lagoon:

From I-5, exit at Poinsettia Lane in Carlsbad and go east to Batiquitos Drive. Turn right, then right again onto Gabbiano Lane. The Information Center is at 7380 Gabbiano Lane; the only public trail starts nearby and runs along the north shore of the lagoon. There are other parking lots with trail access along Batiquitos Drive.

The Batiquitos Lagoon Foundation offers nature talks and guided trail walks. For schedules and information contact the Foundation at P.O. Box 130491, Carlsbad, CA 92013; (760) 943-7583 or (760) 845-3501; or see their web site: sdcc12.ucsd.edu/
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Muzzi Marsh:

From Highway 101 at Corte Madera, take the Paradise Drive exit, go east to Frontage Road. Park in the first parking area you see, walk across the street. You can walk on the dike. No dogs are allowed.

Bracut Marsh:

See drawing below