Tidal Exchange, Spring 2023

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR CARBON?

Ross Robertson, ESF Communications & Development

WhenI was a kid in science class, carbon was black—or maybe the dark gray of graphite, as in the ubiquitous #2 pencil. In the era of climate change, however, we’ve got a whole rainbow to consider.

First, there are the kinds of carbon that contribute to global warming. Brown carbon, like black, is a byproduct of combustion (think smoke and soot) that adds to the heating caused by carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere. Red carbon, produced by algae growing on snow and ice, absorbs sunlight and causes melting.

Then, there are colors of carbon that refer to different kinds of “carbon sequestration,” which means taking carbon out of the air and storing it elsewhere. Green carbon is carbon sequestered by land ecosystems, like forests. Teal carbon means carbon sequestered by

inland, freshwater wetlands. Finally, there’s blue carbon: the carbon sequestered by coastal and marine habitats. Although the details are complicated, the basic idea of Earth’s carbon cycle is simple—carbon naturally moves back and forth between the atmosphere (air) and other parts of the planet (rocks, water, soil, organisms). The essential conundrum of climate change is simple, too—there’s too much carbon dioxide in the sky. The hard part is how to get it out again. Elkhorn Slough, it turns out, is a great place to study how blue carbon ecosystems can help us do this.

I first heard the words “blue carbon” last summer, when I started here at ESF. According to Tidal Wetland Program (TWP) Director Monique Fountain, the term wasn’t even coined until 2007. Ever since 2014, when

board of directors

Bruce Welden President

Robert Hartmann Vice President

Tara Trautsch Secretary

Anne Secker

Treasurer

Anne Olsen

Past President

Gary Bloom

Judith Connor

Terry Eckhardt

Sandy Hale

Emmett Linder

Kent Marshall

Hon. Susan Matcham

Laura Solorio, MD

David Warner

Mark Silberstein

Executive Director

The mission of the Elkhorn Slough Foundation is to conserve and restore Elkhorn Slough and its watershed.

We see Elkhorn Slough and its watershed protected forever— a working landscape where people, farming, industry, and nature thrive together. As one of California’s last great coastal wetlands, Elkhorn Slough will remain a wellspring of life and a source of inspiration for generations to come

During my twelve years at Elkorn Slough, I’ve seen many faces come through. Visitors, old friends, volunteers, staff, neighbors, and more. There’s also an endless list of people who have lived at this place.

I live on site in the old Lodge and wonder about such things. I think about the native people, the community of Kalendaruk, who made a living here at a time when pronghorn antelope roamed the grasslands of the Salinas Valley and tule elk walked the slough shore. I also wonder about the wood cutters, and I wonder about the dairy workers.

Through much of the mid-20th century, there was an active dairy operation on the site of the Reserve. This was a very different place. The wetlands we see every day were being managed as pastures, grasslands all the way to the railroad tracks. Cows were all over our hillsides, mostly denuded of trees.

Last summer, we got a glimpse of what it was like to live at the Elkhorn Dairy in the 1950s and early 60s when Teresa Molina (Aguilera) and her husband came to visit. Her father, Johnny Ochoa, worked for $1 an hour at the dairy, with housing included in the deal. Her mother, Emma, worked nearby in the packing houses and canneries.

Life for a kid on the Elkhorn Dairy sounded ideal—lots of room to play and adventures to pursue. Teresa and her family lived in a few different houses

Above: Collage of family photos courtesy of Teresa Molina. Below, from left: Teresa’s father, Johnny Ochoa; Elkhorn Dairy herdsman (ESF archives).

on the property, including two uphill from Cattail Pond. Those houses are long gone, but two flat areas in the forest remain. Another house she lived in was reportedly haunted by tapping sounds and footsteps; breathing felt on the neck; voices calling out names, with no one in sight.

She recalled her neighbors Johnny and Richard, who lived near the feeding and milking barns, part of a complex of buildings down by the two barns still left on the Reserve. Mr. Sunshine’s house was on top of the hill; he used to make popcorn balls for the kids.

Teresa also had a confession to make. One day, she was walking down the road near Lower Cattail Pond when her brother called out from a hay barn. He’d gotten ahold of some cigarettes and invited her inside for a smoke. Well, the cigarette got dropped. They couldn’t retrieve it, so they just hoped for the best and walked away. But that cigarette was still lit. Later that night, the building burned to the ground; nobody could figure out how it happened!

It’s fun to think about the adventures these kids had growing up on Elkhorn Farm. At this time, there aren’t any kids living at the Reserve, but countless adults still remember the freedom of growing up next to Elkhorn Slough. n

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR CARBON?

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Fountain and Reserve Research Coordinator Kerstin Wasson began working on TWP’s initial proposals for marsh restoration, scientists have been studying blue carbon at the slough.

Beth Watson, Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook, was part of that initial team. In a nutshell, she explains, salt marshes act as “carbon sinks” because they pull carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in plant materials and sediments. Marshlands are, in fact, quite good at this.

“On an acre by acre basis,” Watson writes, “coastal marshes typically sequester more carbon than forests.” Up to five times more, as reported by NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management.1 And marshes store carbon ten times faster than forests do. That’s what happens when you combine fast growing plants with plenty of sun, water, and soil nutrition.

Compared to green carbon stored by forests, blue carbon stored in coastal ecosystems may also be more secure. Trees, as we know all too well in California, are vulnerable to fire. When forests burn, they release their carbon right back into the air. Wetland plants, on the other hand, move carbon down into the soil. “In a salt marsh,” Watson says, “you generally have a water table very near the surface, and the soils are anoxic (low oxygen) because they are flooded. This lack of oxygen means that carbon in the soil isn’t necessarily broken down, or is broken down much more slowly. So these soils tend to become more and more ‘carbony’ over time.”

On a recent visit to Hester marsh, Watson and PhD student Lena Champlin were out measuring rates of biomass production and decomposition in the soil. They’re working to develop a comprehensive carbon picture for the TWP restoration site at Hester so that they can compare

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PARTNERS PROTECTING ELKHORN SLOUGH

Adina Paytan and researchers next to eddy covariance tower, Porter marsh. Cover: Beth Watson and Lena Champlin measure carbon sequestration in Elkhorn Slough. Photos by Juan Ramirez.

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR CARBON?

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it to other wetlands. Gas fluxes, which Watson has also measured extensively, are another crucial piece of the puzzle. That’s because emissions of greenhouse gases from the marsh (especially methane and nitrous oxide) counteract the benefits of carbon stored in the mud.

Like I said, complicated. Since marshes typically “breathe” like this, giving off greenhouse gases at the same time they sequester carbon, researchers have to add up all the inputs and outputs to calculate the net result. “We understand why carbon is sequestered or buried in wetland soils,” says Adina Paytan of the UCSC Institute of Marine Sciences, “but it’s much harder to measure it. It’s not as easy as just measuring the diameter of a tree trunk. Here, we need these fancy towers to quantify it a bit more.”

Paytan is lead researcher on a large, collaborative project that aims to increase our understanding of total “net carbon burial” in coastal wetlands. On a cold, bright day this spring, she and a group of students and technicians from UCSC and UC Berkeley showed me one of the eddy covariance towers they’ve installed at Porter Marsh. Powered by solar panels, its instruments measure CO2, methane, water vapor, wind speed, temperature, rainfall, and more. The flux of gases between ground and air changes constantly, following cycles of plant activity from day to night, summer to winter, year to year, and place to place.

“All wetlands are different,” Paytan says. That’s why they’ve installed three such towers in wetlands around the slough with varying degrees of salinity, disturbance, pollution, and tidal influence. To help translate their results into policy action, her team—made up of scientists from five UC campuses and three national laboratories—also includes economists, social scientists, ecosystem modelers, and experts in environmental justice.

This kind of science takes time. A recent article in

the journal Nature Communications with 36 authors in its byline calls blue carbon science “a vibrant field that is still far away from reaching maturity.”2

Nevertheless, researchers at Elkhorn Slough have learned a lot in fifteen years. They’ve shown that, in addition to vegetated marshes, open mudflats can also sequester substantial amounts of carbon. Yet without plants to knit the soil together, mudflat sediments are more vulnerable to erosion, making them less stable sites for long-term carbon storage. “It may take decades,” Wasson says, “but when the restored marsh plain is fully vegetated with a lush canopy, we believe that it will be a significant sink for carbon in Elkhorn Slough.”

Another takeaway from research here to date is that reducing nitrogen inputs into the slough also reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Agricultural runoff can contain dissolved nitrates from fertilizer, Watson explains, and dissolved nitrogen “fuels nitrous oxide production, a potent greenhouse gas.” This is one of many reasons ESF works not just with lands adjacent to the slough itself, but across the watershed, to support sustainable farming practices and restore ecosystem functions that mitigate water pollution.

In a warming world, we need ways not just to reduce emissions, but counteract them. Just like my teacher said in kindergarten, we should use all the crayons in the box. “It’s all important,” Paytan tells me. “Embracing renewable energy, reducing our carbon footprint, planting trees. But to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius and get to net zero by 2045, like the State of California wants to do, it’s not going to be enough for all of us just to drive electric cars. We need to actually suck some of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Wetlands can help us do that.” n

Left: A chamber used to measure methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide at Hester marsh (photo by Beth Watson). Right: Instruments on the tower at Porter marsh measure wind speed, methane, carbon dioxide, and water vapor (photo by Juan Ramirez).

1 fisheries.noaa.gov/national/habitat-conservation/protectingcoastal-blue-carbon-through-habitat-conservation

2 Macreadie, P.I., Anton, A., Raven, J.A. et al. The future of Blue Carbon science. Nat Commun 10, 3998 (2019).

Juan Ramirez is Outreach Coordinator at ESF. He runs our community programs at the Carneros Creek Outdoor Classroom, coordinates our volunteer projects, and hosts our new Slough Cast Podcast. If you’d like to participate, reach out to:

juan@elkhornslough.org

What brought you to Elkhorn Slough?

I was born and raised in Salinas, and we used to visit family in Mexico every winter break. Whether I was herding cows or working in the meadow with my aunts and uncles and cousins, I was aware of the gifts the land gave us. We harvested corn, weeded fields, and planted chickpeas, and the land gave us space to connect with each other. Some of my favorite memories are of cooking meals outside and eating together, sharing stories.

I grew up visiting many places around Monterey County on school field trips, including Elkhorn Slough. But it wasn’t until I graduated from CSU Monterey Bay that I explored natural places on my own. I completely fell in love with the redwoods. They felt familiar to me, welcoming, just like I felt visiting Mexico. I’d never felt that anywhere else. I love how redwoods communicate—that two trees can “marry” and become one, roots connected, supporting each other. I admire them, not

just for their resilience, but because of how much they nurture the life around them.

My parents were the first to model how much vulnerability it takes to be in a good relationship—being open with people about who we are to our core, what our values are, and how we can show up for others. I’m still inspired by how they work as a team to make others feel seen, heard, and loved.

What kind of work did your parents do?

They were farmworkers. My dad came to this country as a Bracero in the early 1950s and worked intimately with the land for almost fifty years. When I started here at ESF, I talked to him about how grounded I felt going into this position because of him, and he said something that really resonated in me.

As much as he loved being outside and working the (continued on page 6)

north marsh main channel

Carneros Creek Outdoor Classroom. Photo by Evan Peers.

Welcome!

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soil, it never felt the same to him as it did back home in Mexico. “De la tierra vivimos, porque de la tierra vinimos todos,” he said. “We live off the land because we all come from the land. Here, I only worked on caring for a product. I always appreciated the land for giving us the life it did, but I didn’t have time to listen to it like I did in Mexico. I didn’t belong to the land like I did before.”

I can relate to some of what he’s saying. There were places we visited as a family where I didn’t feel welcome, especially outdoors. I used to have friends say things like, “I don’t go hiking or camping, because that’s what white people do.” Fear of feeling unwelcome is real for a lot of families, and I think it does become a barrier to access.

How do these experiences shape your work here?

My parents never felt the embrace of nature here like I did, and my programs are rooted in meeting that need. I want to help people overcome the discomfort they might feel being in nature and create healing-centered spaces for building relationships with each other. We do this through restorative practices that foster our sense of

Tune Into Our Podcast!

with host Juan Ramirez

safety and belonging. Most of these programs serve communities directly around the slough, rural communities at the edges of the counties, where fewer resources tend to be available. People in these communities sometimes don’t feel seen, heard, or valued; I want to make sure everyone knows they are welcome here.

Before coming to the slough, I taught film and video production at high schools throughout Monterey County. I also coordinated a youth program at Oakland Emiliano Zapata Street Academy, where I was fortunate to be trained in these restorative practices. My goal was always to hold spaces in which young people could share their stories, collaborate, and develop their voices, their art, and their leadership. I ended up facilitating a group called Culture Keepers where students implemented those same practices with their teachers in order to deepen their relationships—and mend them when needed.

I try to think about my work with people in the community here the same way I think about a thriving ecosystem. We are alive together. How can I create the kind of feeling or perspective where participants can thrive? Where they can nurture themselves, nurture each other, and feel like they can be stewards of the land for generations to come? n

Fourth grade students at Carneros Creek Outdoor Classroom (above, facing page). Photos by Juan Ramirez.

SLOUGH VIEW ESF’s Financial Outlook

Anne Secker, Treasurer, ESF Board of Directors

Even though Elkhorn Slough Foundation’s Fiscal Year 2022 included challenges from rising inflation and lingering uncertainties related to COVID, our conservation work continued unimpeded. Thanks to the ongoing investment of our community and our funding partners, ESF is well-positioned to grow into the future.

Conservation work requires planning, patience, and the diligent management of financial resources. We always strive to employ best practices in our financial management so that we can continue to protect and restore our watershed for years to come. Serving on the ESF Board is a joy in part because our community enables this organization to have such a transformative impact. In turn, the organization treats the trust our community invests in us with the highest respect and gratitude. Shared here is the annual summary of ESF’s financial position for Fiscal Year 2022. I am pleased to report that your gifts to slough conservation continue to be stewarded responsibly.

We recognize that there are several fine organizations doing important conservation work throughout the Monterey Bay region, and we are grateful that you chose to support Elkhorn Slough Foundation in 2022. Thank you!

Elkhorn Slough Foundation

P.O. Box 267

Moss Landing, CA 95039

Making Conservation Possible

Thank you for renewing your membership, making a special year-end gift, signing up as a monthly member, or supporting our Monterey County Gives campaign. When you read Tidal Exchange, listen to our new podcast, or hear about all the good work taking place throughout the watershed, please know that it is because you and your friends care enough to make conservation possible.

We would also like to thank the Community Foundation for Monterey County, the MC Weekly, and the Monterey Peninsula Foundation for once again hosting Monterey County Gives. During the final two months of 2022, this partnership raised $11,191,951 for more than 200 nonprofits in Monterey Bay, including the Elkhorn Slough Foundation. We couldn’t do it without you!

elkhornslough.org/stay-connected

Photo by Juan Ramirez