wetlands restoration – Enviro Updates

Making room for coho to grow in the Atascadero watershed

October 15, 2026

Dewey Watson, SEBASTOPOL TIMES

The heavy equipment is back on Green Valley Creek. Just upstream from last year’s salmon restoration at Iron Horse Vineyards, three excavators, dump trucks, a water truck, and a crew of hand laborers are reshaping another stretch of the floodplain so that juvenile coho and steelhead have a place to go when winter storms turn the creek into a torrent.

The work is the second phase of a long-running effort led by the Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District (Gold Ridge) and funded by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Restoration Center. PCI Ecological, the Sebastopol firm that designed the Iron Horse project, again provided the engineering design and is overseeing construction.

“What we’re doing here is not that different,” says John Green, Gold Ridge’s self-effacing lead scientist and program manager, standing at the edge of a freshly carved side channel. “The goals are very similar. It’s just that the configuration of the project fits what was already here.”

The two projects sit side by side, both immediately downstream of where Atascadero Creek meets Green Valley Creek. That location is no accident. As Green describes it, it is one of the richest feeding grounds for young salmon anywhere in the Russian River watershed. This project is known as the Lower Green Valley Creek Confluence Reach project.

Habitats, Water, WildlifeAtascadero Creek, CDFW, coho salmon, Gold Ridge RCD, Green Valley Creek, habitat restoration, NOAA, wetlands restoration

State grant gives Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation chance to restore 175 acres of wetlands

March 10, 2026

Anna Armstrong, PRESS DEMOCRAT

A stretch of farmland along the Laguna de Santa Rosa floodplain could become a new home for steelhead, coho salmon and wading birds as part of a major wetland restoration effort now backed by more than $1 million in state funding.

The Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation was awarded a $1.05 million grant in late February from the California Wildlife Conservation Board to begin planning restoring 175 acres of farmland between Sebastopol and Forestville back into riparian and wetland habitats.

The grant marks a major turning point for the foundation, which will now be able to take on its largest singular project in the foundation’s 37-year history.

The site sits along the laguna just north of Gravenstein Highway on land owned by the Lafranchi family ranch, a property that has been farmed for multiple generations. In 2024, Sonoma County Ag + Open Space purchased a conservation easement on a portion of the ranch to ensure it would be permanently protected.

The state funding will cover the costs of the design work, which includes environmental and hydrology studies, engineering plans and habitat assessments.

Habitats, Water, Wildlifecoho salmon, endangered species, Laguna de Santa Rosa, native plants, Russian River, steelhead, streams, wetlands restoration

Wetlands advocates work to raise Highway 37

August 11, 2022

Dan Ashley & Tom Didion, ABC7 NEWS

There’s a vocal debate over building a better Bay Area, by building a better highway. At stake is not just traffic, but potentially vast stretches of restored wetlands.

When Kendall Webster gazes across the levees and farmland in southern Sonoma County, she can envision the tidal marshes that once flushed water back and forth from meandering waterways to San Pablo Bay.

“And so this whole flatland here was a mosaic of tidal wetlands,” she explains.

It’s a vast expanse of wetlands that the Sonoma Land Trust and their partners are working to restore.

“And you know, California is investing in climate, the way no other state in the country is right now. So we think that this is the natural infrastructure project that the state should be highlighting,” Webster maintains.

To make that vision a reality, the Trust has joined with Save the Bay and more than a dozen environmental and land management groups, urging Cal/Trans and the state to remove the one barrier that could open up natural marshland across the entire North Bay.

Land Use, Transportationflooding, habitat restoration, Highway 37, levees, sea level rise, tidal ecosystem, tidal flow, wetlands migration, wetlands restoration

‘Damtastic!’ Newsom calls for Beaver Restoration Program

May 25, 2022

Jason Walsh, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Sonoma wildlife conservationists had one word to describe Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed new Beaver Restoration program: “Damtastic!”

Newsom floated the program as part of a May 13 presentation of his revised 2022-2023 fiscal budget. Pledging $1.67 million this year and $1.44 million in years thereafter, Newsom said the funds would go toward the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s efforts in developing “a comprehensive beaver management plan.”

The North American Beaver is considered a “keystone species” by Fish and Wildlife, which estimates its current population in the state to be between 10 million to 15 million. “Historically, beavers used to live in nearly every stream in North America with an estimated population of 100-200 million,” DFW officials state at wildlife.ca.gov.

In the budget proposal, Newsom described beaver as “an untapped, creative climate solving hero” that helps prevent the loss of biodiversity.

“Beavers are remarkable at creating more resilient ecosystems,” said Newsom. “And therefore thinking through approaches to maximize their unique skills throughout California will benefit our landscapes and help drive more cost-efficient restoration.”

Sonoma County beaver advocates have been “working hard in Sacramento” the past year to lobby for investment into just such a program, said Brock Dolman, of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, in an email. Dolman said the next step is to continue to advocate for its inclusion in the final budget, which goes into effect July 1.

Water, Wildlifeaquifer recharge, beavers, habitat restoration, wetlands restoration

Reimagining coastal cities as sponges to help protect them from the ravages of climate change

November 8, 2021

Elena Shao, INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS

Infrastructure experts in the San Francisco Bay Area have begun replacing impermeable roads and stormwater drains with water gardens and restored marshlands.

As an environmental officer in Samoa, Violet Wulf-Saena worked with the Lano and Saoluafata Indigenous peoples to restore coastline mangrove ecosystems that could slow incoming waves and protect communities from storm and flood damage.

Two decades later, in California’s San Francisco Bay Area, she’s the director of a nonprofit called Climate Resilient Communities that works on the same issue: restoring marshlands and wetlands to better protect vulnerable neighborhoods in low-lying areas from sea level rise.

Some areas of the Pacific Islands, where Wulf-Saena grew up, are projected by conservative estimates to see the sea level rise 10 inches by mid-century. By then, East Palo Alto, about 30 miles south of San Francisco, where Wulf-Saena works now, may also be frequently underwater during high tide events.

“Nature is the best protection to sea level rise, and if we restore these ecosystems we can mimic a lot of that protection,” she said. “It can be like a sponge.”

Most aspects of the built environment in the modern city are designed to drain away water as quickly as possible. Rain slides off of roofs, over concrete and asphalt and down into sewers, where it’s then redirected to the sea, lakes or rivers. The traditional approach to large water events like floods and storm surges has been to engineer the water out of the way, using seawalls, levees and flood barriers.

This means that cities like San Francisco could face billions of dollars in flood and storm damage as climate change worsens and overwhelms that infrastructure, all without capturing and reusing a lot of that water, which could ease some of California’s periods of drought.

Now, infrastructure experts are pushing for urban spaces to be reimagined as sponges—not just by restoring marshlands, but also with more parks and gardens soaking up stormwater, pebbles underneath surfaces acting as natural filtering systems and a more porous type of concrete absorbing water and slowing it down.

Climate Change & Energy, Land Use, Waterpermeable surfaces, sea level rise, stormwater, swales, wetlands restoration

Sonoma Land Trust builds ‘living shoreline’ to thwart erosion at Sears Point

October 10, 2021

Guy Kovner, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Julian Meisler stood on a human-made levee at low tide along the shore of San Pablo Bay, surveying 1,000 acres of a dark brown, mostly barren mud flat.

“That’s exactly what we want to see,” said Meisler.

He is the project manager of Sonoma Land Trust’s 15-year campaign to restore wetlands intended to protect the Highway 37 corridor — with both a roadway and rail line — from flooding exacerbated by sea level rise.

And now the levee, a victim of erosion from wind waves, is being fortified by an unprecedented restoration project using hundreds of trees — some salvaged from wildfire burn areas — to blunt the waves and promote wildlife habitat.

It’s been six years since the Santa Rosa nonprofit’s Sears Point project breached the levee built 140 years ago to create farmland, and tides have since deposited two to four feet of sediment in the nascent wetlands.

At high tide, the mud flat becomes a lagoon up to two and a half feet deep, harboring shorebirds, waterfowl, river otters, bat rays and leopard sharks. People ply the water with canoes, kayaks and standup paddleboards, while hiking trails lead along the shore in what is now the San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge.

The project’s ultimate goal remains years away, when six feet of sediment gives root to vegetation transforming the wetlands into a verdant marsh, teeming with wildlife and absorbing high tides.

Habitats, Land Use, Local Organizations, Water, WildlifeSan Pablo Bay, Sears Point, Sonoma Land Trust, wetlands, wetlands restoration

How beavers became North America’s best firefighter

September 22, 2020

Ben Goldfarb, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

The American West is ablaze with fires fueled by climate change and a century of misguided fire suppression. In California, wildfire has blackened more than three million acres; in Oregon, a once-in-a-generation crisis has forced half a million people to flee their homes. All the while, one of our most valuable firefighting allies has remained overlooked: The beaver.

A new study concludes that, by building dams, forming ponds, and digging canals, beavers irrigate vast stream corridors and create fireproof refuges in which plants and animals can shelter. In some cases, the rodents’ engineering can even stop fire in its tracks.

“It doesn’t matter if there’s a wildfire right next door,” says study leader Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands. “Beaver-dammed areas are green and happy and healthy-looking.”

For decades, scientists have recognized that the North American beaver, Castor canadensis, provides a litany of ecological benefits throughout its range from northern Mexico to Alaska. Beaver ponds and wetlands have been shown to filter out water pollution, support salmon, sequester carbon, and attenuate floods. Researchers have long suspected that these paddle-tailed architects offer yet another crucial service: slowing the spread of wildfire.

This beaver-dammed wetland in Baugh Creek, Idaho, is a so-called “emerald refuge” that can serve as a firebreak and refuge for other species during wildfires. Source: Joe Wheaton, Utah State University.

“It’s really not complicated: water doesn’t burn,” says Joe Wheaton, a geomorphologist at Utah State University. After the Sharps Fire charred 65,000 acres in Idaho in 2018, for instance, Wheaton stumbled upon a lush pocket of green glistening within the burn zone—a beaver wetland that had withstood the flames. Yet no scientist had ever rigorously studied the phenomenon.

Water, Wildlifebeaver, fire prevention, wetlands, wetlands restoration