Tidal Exchange
On the Rise
Giving Coastal Salt Marsh a Fighting Chance
The Elkhorn Slough features California’s largest tidal salt marsh south of the San Francisco Bay, yet without restoration the slough’s remaining marshes are projected to vanish within 50 years. The Elkhorn Slough Reserve’s Tidal Wetland Program is taking action to give our salt marshes a fighting chance.
By adding soil to elevate the drowning wetlands, the Hester Marsh Restoration provides conditions to allow salt marsh plants to grow.
of 61 acres of these drowned wetlands to restore functional, At the Hester Marsh restoration site, Tidal Wetland resilient coastal salt marsh that keeps pace with projected sea Program Director Monique Fountain gestures across level rise.” the slough to a healthy tract of salt marsh — thick with Earth moving equipment rolls in a conga line to the pickleweed and other salt-tolerant plants that bind soils, filter growing edge of the new marsh. The movements are efficiently rainwater and runoff, and provide shelter for birds and wildlife choreographed: an excavator shovels enormous scoops of that rely on the estuary for survival. Then, she calls attention stockpiled soil (sourced from the Pajaro River Flood Control to the sparse patches of pickleweed dotting the site the Tidal Project) into the bed of a tracked dump truck that has just Wetland Program is working to restore. pulled up. Once full, an empty truck drives in to take its place, “Because this area was diked, drained, and farmed during and the full truck trundles its payload over what was mudflat the past century, Hester Marsh has dropped too low in tidal just minutes ago to the marsh edge, where a bulldozer awaits. elevation to sustain healthy vegetation. The existing plants The soil pours from the truck’s bed and the bulldozer begins are drowning under the tides, and new seedlings are unable to spread the mound forward onto the rising marsh plain, to take hold,” she explains. “Our goal is to raise the elevation preparing for the next load of dirt, already on its approach. Cover: Hester Marsh restoration in progress, photo by John Haskins, ESNERR
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