---

Chapter 9: Monitoring and Research

---

Contents

Considerations for Research and Monitoring

Fish and Wildlife Conditions

Habitat Conditions

Ecological Thresholds and Limiting Factors

Timeframe for Research and Monitoring

Pilot Projects

Information Management Systems

---

At many meetings during the past three years, Project participants discussed the need for an ongoing, comprehensive program of research and monitoring. As focus team members prepared their species narratives, including information regarding research needs, a strong consensus emerged: Successfully restoring the baylands ecosystem to a healthy condition can be accomplished only if we build into the process a way to understand the effects of restoration on habitats, fish, and wildlife, and the ability to track our progress in achieving the regional goals. This brief chapter is intended to describe some of the key elements that should be included in a comprehensive, regional wetlands research and monitoring program, the development of which should begin as soon as possible.

The science of wetlands restoration is still in its infancy and it is instructive to visualize how such a new field typically develops. We can obtain some historical perspective by looking at the rapid advances achieved in the areas of space exploration, electronics equipment and data processing, and even water resources engineering. In each case, we see that the advancement in these fields resulted from a nationally recognized public mandate, supported by government agencies and organized into a cohesive program for implementation. This resulted in an integrated program of fundamental research, extensive laboratory-scale experimentation, carefully monitored pilot projects, large-scale project implementation, and an active monitoring program to refine the process.

In comparison, the field of wetlands restoration evolved after extensive wetlands losses had already occurred. It also has been closely linked almost since its inception to the concept of wetland "mitigation," which involves restoring wetlands to compensate for other wetland losses. As a result, much of the funding for restoration has been provided by the development community for immediate implementation. Concurrently, the level of fundamental research and sequential, scientific experimentation has been minimal.

Despite this difficult beginning, the current state of the science of wetlands restoration is starting to resemble the early stages of advancement in other scientific fields there are national and state mandates to protect and restore wetlands, most governmental agencies concerned about the baylands recognize that a comprehensive program is needed, and the public broadly supports the idea of protecting and restoring wetlands as a part of larger movement to preserve the environment. It is now reasonable to envision that wetlands restoration might advance into a more sophisticated science, with appropriate levels of research, monitoring, and implementation.

Considerations for Research and Monitoring

The Goals Project provides a picture of how much of what kinds of baylands are needed where to sustain diverse and healthy natural communities of the baylands ecosystem. Already there are projects to restore or enhance the baylands, and more projects are being planned. These are collectively complex and expensive efforts of great importance to the overall health and vitality of the region. For reasons of accountability and basic understanding, a number of questions about these projects needs to be answered: are the restoration or enhancement projects successful; what should be done differently with the next projects, and what are the combined effects of many individual projects on regional conditions? These questions lead to others, such as: how do we define success for restoration or enhancement projects, what do we need to learn to improve project performance and management, and how do we measure progress toward the goals?

The Project participants recognize that obtaining the answer to these basic questions will require a comprehensive program of baylands monitoring and research. There must be coordinated efforts to measure conditions in the field, manage and interpret the data, and produce timely reports. The performance of restoration and enhancement projects must be evaluated relative to the natural variability of the baylands, and the effectiveness of the design, engineering, and management practices must be assessed. The monitoring and research program must inform the individual restoration efforts while concurrently tracking progress toward the regional habitat goals.

There is broad agreement within the community of baylands scientists and managers that the baylands should be managed in a coordinated and adaptive way. To facilitate this, appropriate information from monitoring and research should be made readily available to planners and designers of new projects. This would improve the new projects and enable adjustment of the regional goals according to new understanding.

The need for a regional program of baylands monitoring and research is already well recognized. Such a program is called for in the CCMP, the Regional Monitoring Strategy of the Estuary Project, the estuarine Research Recommendations compiled by SFEI from surveys of research teams and institutions in the Bay Area, the CalFed Bay Delta Program, and the proposed San Francisco Bay Estuarine Research Reserve System. As a result of these efforts and others, a plan of coordinated baylands monitoring and research is beginning to evolve. Further development and implementation of this plan will be a key part of future baylands management.

Several points regarding monitoring and research emerge from the discussions of Project participants. In synthesis, they indicate the need to:

• Address major gaps in understanding of baylands habitats and ecological functions. Our capability to restore or enhance the baylands is linked to our understanding of how they function as ecological systems. Much of their ecological function results from complex interactions among physical and biological factors that are not well understood. To compensate for this lack of knowledge, most wetland restoration projects attempt to mimic or reproduce the historical conditions. However, it is not always possible to restore the baylands with natural habitat controls. On-site constraints sometimes require creative engineering. There is a need therefore to test new engineering approaches, as well as to study the form and function of natural habitats.

• Build upon existing science and monitoring experience in the region. Although there is much to learn about baylands restoration and enhancement, past projects provide important lessons. There is a need to encourage the continuing exchange of ideas among local and regional experts. There is also a need for the senior experts to provide mentoring to newer members of the regional community of baylands scientists and managers.

• Have each restoration and enhancement project produce useful information, and use projects to test new ideas. The goals provide a new opportunity in the Bay Area for a regional approach to restoration that is more systematic and coordinated than ever before. We can learn much about baylands restoration and monitoring through local projects that are designed to help meet our research needs. As an additional benefit, it is probable that efficient gathering, interpretation, and dissemination of information from these projects will result in great overall cost savings.

• Assess the performance of local projects in the context of the regional goals. The Goals Project provides a specific regional vision of restored habitats and functions that should serve as a context for assessing the individual and combined performance of local projects. There should be comparisons between alternative conceptual designs, engineering, and management practices for local projects, in the context of what is needed locally, for subregions, and for the region as a whole.

• Make scientific information about the baylands readily available to agencies and the public. Policy makers and other planners can make better decisions based on up-to-date, accurate information on the health and status of restoration of the baylands.

• Develop and provide new scientific tools for baylands monitoring and research. There will always be the need to improve methods of data collection, management, and analysis. Local projects that are intended to implement the goals should accommodate the need to test new science and technology. There should be an on-going effort to keep up-to-date with the state-of-the-science of monitoring.

• Support a coordinated effort to develop and fund a regional research and monitoring program. While it may be unrealistic to expect any single entity or government agency to develop a comprehensive research and monitoring program, a program could be developed through a coordinated approach such as that used by the Goals Project. As a part of this effort, it may be necessary to determine an appropriate agency or independent institution to administer the program, and/or to provide consistent science support.

Following is an outline of priority research and monitoring topics based upon recommendations provided by the Project participants. This brief outline conveys a sense of the breadth and diversity of the priorities. It is important that the outline be open for revision. A more systematic approach to identifying monitoring and research priorities will be required as a part of developing a regional program, perhaps through development of a regional wetlands management plan. The priority topics are presented in six categories: fish and wildlife conditions, habitat conditions, ecological thresholds or limiting factors, timeframe for research and monitoring, pilot projects, and information systems.

Fish and Wildlife Conditions

There is an ongoing need to monitor the distribution, abundance, and health of the populations of key species. The status of endangered and threatened species may be of greatest concern, but this does not reduce the need for comprehensive and routine monitoring of other fish and wildlife populations. Monitoring and research for fish and wildlife should identify population centers and patterns of migration and dispersal, including how species distributions are affected by efforts to implement the goals. The basic understanding of species distribution and abundance should lead to studies of actual habitat use, habitat preference, and the observed and expected response of key species to biological invasions and different management practices. There will be a need to know how the key species use restored or enhanced habitats.

Habitat Conditions

There is a need to understand how baylands habitats change as a result of natural processes and human activities, including restoration and enhancement projects. The perspective of this understanding should include a range of spatial scales, from local projects to major subregions and the region as a whole. Maps of the distribution and abundance of the key habitats should be updated periodically to provide an accurate picture of progress towards the habitat goals. The Project's habitat typology will eventually need to be revised to reflect new information about the relationships among habitat types and the key species. The resolution of the maps may need to increase for habitats of some key species of plants and some animals that occupy small habitat patches. The regional maps of key habitats should show difference in habitat quality among different habitat patches, relative to the desired support functions for the key species.

Natural habitat controls and habitat engineering are very important topics for monitoring and research. The Project emphasizes baylands restoration and enhancement through natural processes. However, many of these processes are not well enough understood for baylands scientists to predict the rates of natural habitat development with the degree of accuracy required to manage the baylands ecosystem. There is also a need to map and understand the gradients of salinity and moisture within habitats, rates of accretion and erosion or subsidence, relationships between tidal prism and channel form, and contaminant loads or toxicity.

There is an immediate need to determine the tidal elevations of the diked baylands. This information is needed to estimate the amount of tidal prism and sediment that might be required to achieve the tidal marsh restoration called for by the goals.

Ecological Thresholds and Limiting Factors

Long-term monitoring and research should attempt to discover and quantify the ecological thresholds or limiting factors in relationships between time, habitat condition, and ecological function. There are many kinds of ecological thresholds or limiting factors that need to be quantified. Some of the regional or subregional thresholds are the amount of time to restore habitats to stable conditions, the amount of suspended sediment needed to achieve the goals for tidal marsh restoration, the amount of management needed to achieve the goals for managed shallow ponds, the amount of tidal marsh needed to recover any or all of the associated endangered species, the amount of managed marsh required to support all the migratory waterfowl, the required acreage of managed saline pond to replace the salt ponds as shorebird habitat, the optimal patch size of habitats and the optimal distance between the patches, the critical levels of tolerance of fish and wildlife to contaminants and other kinds of perturbation, and the amount of filtration or nutrients provided to bay waters by baylands habitats.

Timeframe for Research and Monitoring

It is important to assess the long term changes in the baylands ecosystem, and to understand how individual wetlands restoration sites evolve. Restored sites may continue to evolve for 25 to 100 years before they reach a state of equilibrium. At that point, they continue to change only in response to natural, external variables such as sea level rise. The typical five-year monitoring requirement for wetlands projects may only provide an initial picture of changing conditions. Three points emerge from this awareness:

Restoring a site establishes an initial template which will evolve over time. A design objective should be to create this template to efficiently evolve to a mature condition that will provide the desired level of ecological functions.

Monitoring periods must be long enough to accurately quantify the equilibrium state and ecological functions. Some projects and their reference sites should be monitored over a longer period of time, even several decades, to determine the rates of change for various physical and biological parameters and the rate of evolution to equilibrium. It will also be necessary to compare restoration or enhancement projects to reference sites or conditions to account for natural variability.

The appropriate time frames for research and monitoring may depend on habitat type. For example, low tidal marsh restoration projects that experience frequent inundation and high sediment loading may evolve quite rapidly compared with higher elevation tidal sites. The appropriate monitoring schedule and timeframe for other wetlands such as managed shallow ponds and seasonal wetlands may be quite different.

Pilot Projects

The Project participants recommend a cautious and measured approach to implementing the Project's restoration recommendations. There are enough unknowns about the important thresholds and limiting factors that baylands restoration could proceed too rapidly or at too large of a scale. A coordinated network of carefully planned pilot projects is required to address the important monitoring and research topics. The size and complexity of the pilot projects will depend upon the suite of topics to be addressed. For some topics, the research may be distributed among a number of pilot projects. Compared to other projects to achieve the goals, the pilot projects should focus more on the monitoring and research topics. One of the most important uses of pilot projects will be to test alternative methods of baylands restoration or enhancement. There is a need to compare approaches to construct unnatural or artificial habitats such as managed saline ponds, to construct the templates for natural habitats, and to nurture natural habitat controls. There is also a need to develop, calibrate, and validate conceptual and numerical models of habitat creation and evolution.

Information Management Systems

The results of baylands research and monitoring are distributed among many documents and libraries. For example, there are scientific journals, Environmental Impact Reports and Statements, and monitoring reports for compensatory mitigation projects. There may also be a substantial number of professional studies that have never been reported. Very few organizations subscribe to more than a few of the dozens of scientific journals that are likely to contain information relating to baylands restoration or enhancement. Most of the existing reports for Bay Area projects are located in either government agencies, universities and other research institutions, private companies, or non-profit environmental organizations. Very few reports are widely distributed among the baylands interest groups. It is also expected that a large amount of valuable information exists in the form of casual observations of local conditions by land owners, scientists, and other resource managers.

There will always be more information pertaining to the baylands than is readily accessible by any one organization or person. The challenge is to provide as much useful information to as many people as possible. In this age of information technologies, the best approach to information sharing tends to change rapidly.

There are several ways, from fairly simple to quite sophisticated, that monitoring and research information could be made more accessible. The first approach would involve producing a comprehensive bibliography of research and monitoring information (data, analyses, reports, and journal articles) for the Bay Area. This could be accomplished with relatively minimal resources, but it would require significant effort to obtain information from the "gray literature," which includes consultants' reports, unpublished research, and agency documents and files. Portions of such a bibliography already exist in various offices and could be assembled fairly readily. An alternative approach would i nvolve establishing a central location such as a library or internet site for storing research and monitoring information, and could include preparing a bibliography. This would be more difficult than simply creating a bibliography, but would provide more benefits.

The most sophisticated approach, and the one that would provide the most benefits, would involve establishing and maintaining a dedicated on-line computer as a central server that could access other sources of information. Monitoring and research results could be input into the system directly from their sources. The information could be in the form of relational data bases that are linked to an interactive map, such that anyone using the system could query the data bases for information about places, habitat types, habitat controls, species, or information sources. The system could provide information electronically through the internet or on CD-ROM, or in paper reports.