KUSP Reports: Environment

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CCFRP Volunteer Coordinator and MLML graduate student Jennifer Chiu using standardized fishing protocols to sample near shore fishes along the central California coast. Photo Courtesy California Collaborative Fisheries Research Program

By Melissae Fellet | KUSP News

It’s been five years since a network of 29 marine protected areas were established along the Central Coast. During that time, volunteer anglers, divers and hikers have been collecting data that will help scientists and fisheries managers determine how the protections affect ocean ecosystems.

The goal of protecting parts of the ocean centers around fish known as BOFFFs.

“Those are big old, fat fecund females,” explains Cheryl Barnes , a graduate student studying fish biology at Moss Landing Marine Laboratory. “Those the ones you want around to feed into the population.”

For rockfishes, anyway, the older females produce more eggs than the younger fish. It’s thought that those extra baby fish will eventually spill out into the unprotected areas of the ocean and restock the fisheries. Barnes says monitoring the size, species and numbers of fish inside the marine protected areas (MPAs) helps ensure the protections are working.

Proving MPAs are More Than a Feel-Good Policy

“Without monitoring, we could be under this false sense of security and thinking that we’re protecting our fish stocks and not actually doing it because of the design of the MPA itself, the size, the placement,” she says. “MPAs are a tool for conservation, and we’re trying to make sure that’s actually happening.”

Together with Rick Starr, Barnes leads a group of volunteer anglers  who fish for rockfish, lingcod and cabezon in the protected areas in Point Lobos and Año Nuevo. “They know how to fish,” Barnes says. “You get a lot of what Rick would call “dorky scientists” out there trying to fish, we wouldn’t probably be doing as good of a job.”

The volunteers also fish in unprotected areas so the scientists can compare the catch there to that from the protected areas. Volunteer divers with the nonprofit group Reef Check California monitor the fish, algae and invertebrates living in the reefs and kelp forests in Monterey Bay and Carmel Bay.

Longer Lived Fish Need Longer Study

Scientists have enough data to determine the current status of the protected area ecosystems. But it’s still too early to say how the protections affect fish populations. That’s because some of the fish species, particularly rockfish, are so long-lived and slow growing that five years is too short a period for changes to appear. Based on the results Barnes and her colleagues have so far she says, “We’re pretty positive we will be able to see it when it happens, if it does or not.”

Another part of determining the effect of an MPA involves knowing how people use the protected areas. In a hypothetical circumstance after an area has been protected for a certain period of time, if the numbers of BOFFFs in and outside the MPA were similar, that could mean that the MPA had failed.

“Another interpretation would be, if you had the data, because of poaching, or lack of enforcement or mindless people, the use inside the MPA and out was actually the same because the MPA didn’t mean anything,” says Steve Shimek of the nonprofit Otter Project.

People Seem to Follow the Rules

Shimek’s group is one of several that organize volunteers(pdf) to monitor how people use the MPAs. The Otter Project’s volunteers note anglers, swimmers, divers and others using the MPAs between Half Moon Bay and Point Bouchon. They also visit a few unprotected areas too. Even in the areas, “from what we can tell are largely unenforced, people are still following the rules,” Shimek says. “People want to do the right thing.”

But still, he says the volunteers have witnessed fishing, and commercial fishing, in even in the most protected areas, like Point Lobos. “We have seen purse seiners in Point Lobos,” Shimek says. “So there is take happening everywhere. But the level of take is much less in protected areas.”

Even with a small amount of fishing, there are more BOFFFs, those big, old, fat fecund female fish, in that long-protected area of Point Lobos. With continued monitoring, researchers should be able to assess if those fish are thriving in the new marine protected areas too.

Ecologist Josh Adams (kneeling in white shirt) plants native plants in an area cleared of ice plant near the entrance to Natural Bridges State Park. Photo: Melissae Fellet

By Melissae Fellet | KUSP News

With its ocean views, walking path, and ice plant-covered cliffs, many in Santa Cruz consider West Cliff Drive to be a jewel of the community. Now a couple of scientists want the community to help them restore native habitat to the coastal bluffs.

They’ve started the non-profit West Cliff Ecosystem Restoration project to help organize the restoration. Last winter, volunteers with the group ripped out ice plant in a small bed near the entrance to Natural Bridges State Park.

“Having the community participate in it is really important,” says Bill Henry, an ecologist at Moss Landing Marine Laboratory, who helped start the non-profit. “Oftentimes projects happen where people come into a community and do some point change and then leave. And a lot of times that model doesn’t really work. A lot of projects take some follow up.”

Locals Pitch In to Restore Local Habitat

On February 1, Henry was back with volunteers, working to widen the original bed and adding more native coastal bluff plants.

“This way we’re trying to get community members to help out and have a vested interest in their backyard,” Henry says. “That automatically sets the stage for care taking of our environment and of our backyard. And this is a perfect place because so many people from our community use the West Cliff corridor.”

Oikonos Ecosystem Knowledge, a small non-profit conservation organization, is one of the partners in this local habitat restoration effort. Ryan Carle, a project ecologist with the group, said that people were stopping all the time to ask about what they were planting. Some of those people wanted to know why they were removing ice plant, he says.

“A lot of people don’t realize that the ice plant is a non-native invasive species and don’t know about our local native species,” Carle says. So he stopped to talk to them about the difference between ice plant and a native habitat. “When they learn about our local native species, how beautiful they are and what they’re bringing to the ecosystem, then they’re excited.”

The yellow or pink flowers on plants like yarrow, gumweed and sea pink attract wintering monarch butterflies and other insects. They also shelter lizards and salamanders. Birds may nest in the grown shrubs.

The community helped bring these native plants from seed to seedling as well. California State Parks provided seeds from plants native to coastal bluffs and scrub. Ecologists at the University of California in Santa Cruz grew the seedlings in their greenhouses. The City of Santa Cruz helped the scientists figure out how to truck tons of removed ice plant to the dump. And on this work day, volunteers from the Patagonia store in Santa Cruz are helping to plant more seedlings.

Josh Adams, an ecologist with the United State Geological Survey who worked with Henry to start the restoration project, says that school groups, of all ages and class levels, can get involved too.

Restoration Project Provides Outdoor Education

In late January, students from the Gateway School helped to restore a site at Pelton and West Cliff across the street from the surfer statue. Adams says the project is a chance for students to learn about math, ecology and native species.

The junior high math class mapped out the site and calculated the area so that the workers could determine the density of the planting, he says. The fifth grade class was in charge of growing the seeds.

“They came in with their plants that had been growing since the fall and in one fell swoop they planted that little section out,” Adams says. “What could be funner than coming out, sticking your hands in the dirt and seeing a plant that you’ve shepherded along for nine months put into the ground and then to drive by that and see it in the future? It’s great.”

Community participation is important to their habitat restoration efforts, Henry says. “We all enjoy this, and most times we’re not active participants,” he says. “So you get out here, and you get people working and then they’re a part of the environment. And we are. We can’t take ourselves out of nature or ecology. We’re a part of it one way or another.”

And working as a community, we can return a human-influenced environment back to its native state.

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Mary Paul and Jonathan Pilch, both working at Watsonville Wetlands Watch, clean native grass and flower seeds so that they can be used for habitat restoration projects. Photo: Melissae Fellet

By Melissae Fellet
Standing on a hill at the heart of the Watsonville Slough system, Jonathan Pilch points out a small field covered with golden straw for the winter. This field is a little different from the nearby plots of greens and the strawberry fields visible around the Pajaro Valley. Its neat, rice-straw covered rows contain native grasses and wildflowers.

Pilch is restoration director at Watsonville Wetlands Watch , a group that’s working to restore the wetlands of the Pajaro Valley. Three years ago, the group started a small farm to grow plants native to coastal prairies so that they could collect the seeds for their habitat restoration projects.

That first year, Pilch and his colleagues planted about 30,000 little plug plants grown from seed gathered around the area on a half-acre farm. Now the seed farm has grown to include 19 different species on 1.25 acres of land. Mary Paul, a restoration specialist with the group, says this farm generates quantities of seed that would otherwise be hard to find in the wild.

“It’s probably unlikely that we’d be able to get 100 pounds of wild seed without having it at a production level like this,” she says.

Few Sources of Native Seed Remain

That’s because there are few pockets of coastal prairies left in the Watsonville slough system. As agriculture moved into the Pajaro Valley, people drained the marshes of the Watsonville slough to reveal farming land. Now Watsonville Wetlands Watch returns native habitat to retired agriculture fields near the wetlands and restores land overrun with invasive weeds. It’s possible to buy native seeds for such work. But Pilch says the group’s goals for their projects meant it was easier to grow their own seeds than buy them.

“It was really important to us to have the genetic material that’s specific to our watershed,” he says. “We also grow native seed 100% organically and we don’t know of any other production place where you can purchase organically grown, locally sourced native seed.”

Their homegrown seed farm includes grasses like meadow barley, purple needle grass, and blue wild rye as well as flowers like yarrow, California poppy, and California buttercups.

Pilch says hiring local farm crews has been key to their high level production. The crews bring their expertise and equipment to the seed farm in the winter during their down season.

A Learning Process

That help helps, but come harvest time, it’s still hard work to separate the seeds from the rest of the plant. Paul shows me how they clean the seeds. She takes a handful of dried plant parts and chaff and places it atop a slotted metal screen resting on top of an open bucket. Then Paul rubs it over the screen so that the seeds fall through tiny slots in the screen.

Different screens have different sized slots depending on the seeds being processed. She swirls the material on top of the screen until most of the seed falls through. A peek in the bucket reveals tiny seeds mixed with less chaff than before.

“One of the unique things is that every native seed has its own very specific way of harvest, cleaning and processing,” Pilch says. “So we’re really learning as we go here in terms of how to efficiently clean and harvest. Over the last three years the speed at which we’re harvesting and processing has really increased. And so we’re optimistic that in three more years we’re going to be that much more efficient.”

He expects the need for native seed, and thus the farm, will grow as the public continues to appreciate native ecology restoration. “The end is not in sight,” Pilch says. “That’s the typical rule with ecological restoration. It’s the 50 year, 100 year time frame that we’re looking at in terms of our process.”

Even in the short term, their restoration projects are having an effect. That day ducks, red winged blackbirds, and red tailed hawks visited the farm, spending time in nearby Harkins Slough.

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UCSC students help others borrow heirloom seeds at a seed exchange last May. Credit: Melissae Fellet

By Melissae Fellet

Glass jars filled with speckled beans, tiny mustard seeds and dried corn kernels line tables in a cozy cottage at the UC Santa Cruz farm on a Saturday afternoon in mid-October. College students and some local gardeners rifle through the selection. UCSC student Elan Goldbart holds up a large jar of black beans, called Cherokee Trail of Tears, collected from plants grown over the summer.

“We planted about 15 to 20 plants,” he says weighing the jar in his hand. “Now this feels like probably 5, 6, 7 pounds of seed, which is a lot.”

Goldbart and other students run a seed bank on campus, called the Demeter Seed Library, to promote growing heirloom plants and saving the seeds. They hold these seed exchanges every quarter to share seeds with the community and give gardeners a chance to return seeds they’ve saved.

Andrew Whitman started the UCSC seed bank when he was a student at the university with the goal of creating a living seed library. “A lot of the seeds we have aren’t being grown out commercially anymore and are at risk of going extinct,” he says.

Seed banks, like the Demeter Seed Library, aim to preserve the genetic diversity found in plants adapted to a particular region – be it the cold weather in Alaska or the heat in Florida. Those genes are protection against a changing climate or pest invasions.

But it’s not clear how much crop genetic diversity we need to protect – or how much we’ve lost. Fewer varieties of crops are grown in fields today, but the amount of genetic diversity lost with those varieties is unknown.

Nonetheless, preserving plant genetic diversity through seed saving is a growing trend. There’s a global seed vault  on an island in Norway. Closer to home, seed banks in Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond are part of the eleven  that serve the San Francisco Bay Area. Monterey Bay area residents can also pick up seeds in Santa Cruz from the Museum of Art and History and a branch of the county library.

Whitman estimates the UCSC collection contains about 250 different grains, vegetables, and flowers, including the seashell-like seeds of teosinte, the ancestor of corn, and an Ethiopian grain called teff.

People borrowing from the library can take as many seeds from as many varieties of plants as they want at no cost. They plant them and collect the seeds from the healthiest plants in their crop.

In return, Whitman says the library asks that gardeners return 20 times amount of seeds that you borrow for two varieties of plants. That’s pretty easy to do, he says, because one seed produces hundreds of seeds.

For beginning seed savers, the easiest plants to grow include beans, lettuce, tomatoes and peppers. These plants pollinate themselves and their seeds reliably grow plants that are genetic clones of their parents.

Plants like kale, squash or melons are pollinated by insects or the wind. Experienced seed savers separate varieties of these plants to prevent an accidental gene swap. Cross pollination is a problem when plants grow too close together – even for beans.

Goldbart explains what happened to a recent crop of scarlet runner beans, typically a black seed with purple and magenta mottles on it. “This year we got some seeds that had white mottles on it,” he says. “Some white colored bean must have gotten into the genome and now we have some white scarlet runner beans.”

Goldbart welcomes these spontaneous crosses as a chance to find plants with more vigor or perhaps more drought tolerance. But he says it’s also important to prevent crosses to preserve the genes already in these seeds.

“Each year that the seeds are grown out, it’s receiving all this information from the outside, all the weather conditions, the soil types,” he says. “It’s adapting, changing every single year. These seeds are living, breathing, evolving. And so, over the hundreds of thousands of years that seeds travel around the world, through wind pollination and people migrating and bringing their seeds to different places, things change. And it’s just this diversity that’s created.”

By planting, saving and sharing seeds these students are protecting a future for cultivating heirloom plants adapted to the Monterey Bay area.

More information: Seed Library Social Network at seedlibraries.org.
Highlight photo courtesy of: demeterseedsproject.org.

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This otter, by controlling the urchin population, may be reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Source NOAA

By Melissae Fellet

At Steamer Lane, a popular surf spot in Santa Cruz, people lean against a metal railing, peering over the cliffs to watch surfers catch waves. You need binoculars to see the other aquatic attraction there: Sea otters rest in a kelp forest nearby.

“This is a real good feeding area for them,” says Dave Francis, a former Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary volunteer from Santa Cruz. “It’s a fairly large kelp bed, fairly long, so they can move around and not deplete the food source.”

Otters eat sea urchins that would otherwise eat kelp. So kelp forests grow larger when otters are around. A 75 pound sea otter — that’s a little larger than an average male — can eat about 1500 urchins in one day. Any remaining urchins hide in the rocks and munch on kelp scraps that fall to the bottom.

Urchin barrens

The environment changes without otters living in an area. “If you get rid of sea otters, the sea urchins will come of the rocks,” says Chris Wilmers , a wildlife ecologist at the University of California in Santa Cruz. “They’ll increase in number and they’ll graze down the kelp until there’s almost none left.”

That creates areas called urchin barrens. For about 40 years, researchers at UC Santa Cruz have worked along the Pacific coast of North America studying this relationship between otters, urchins and kelp. Wilmers and his colleagues took a second look at some of that information to see if they could connect the relationship between predators, prey and plants to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“For a long time, animals haven’t really been considered in how carbon cycles through ecosystems,” Wilmers says. “What this indicates is animals can actually have a big effect.”

The researchers compared the amount of kelp growing in areas where otters were present to the amount growing where otters were absent. They also calculated how much atmospheric carbon dioxide the kelp plants converted into plant matter as they grew. The result: Sea otters reduced carbon dioxide by six to eleven percent in the portion of the atmosphere over the kelp forests.

“I was actually quite stunned when all these numbers came together and so I think it’s a big deal,” says James Estes, a biologist at UCSC who pioneered the otter, urchin and kelp studies. These new results are published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Studying the link between predators, plants and atmospheric carbon

This removal of atmospheric carbon dioxide was evident in the region they studied, from the US-Canadian border to the tip of the Aleutian Islands. Sea otters don’t live in enough places around the world for their effect on kelp forests to influence global climate change, Wilmers says. The real question then, he adds, is whether this kind of activity is happening in other ecosystems.

If so, the collective presence of predators around the world might influence global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Scientists know that predators increase plant growth in ecosystems around the world. But in some ecosystems, the connections between predators, prey and plants actually decrease plant growth, which increases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over those areas. That makes it hard to predict how animal predators around the world could influence global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, Estes says.

“I think what we’ve seen in the otter system is that there’s reason to believe that this is going to have a pretty significant effect on the carbon cycle in one way or another,” he adds.

Recognizing how otters influence the carbon cycle gives them another role in nature beyond being a cute animal that people emotionally connect with or being a hungry animal that fisherman compete with for catch, Estes says. “They have an impact that very much relates to things that people are worried about on a global scale, that is global warming and atmospheric carbon.”

Otters’ effect on the atmosphere should also be considered when trying to figure out how best to manage otter populations, he says.

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By Melissae Fellet

Part 2 (see part 1)

Ned Conwell and his former business partner moved to old cattle ranch in Pescadero about seven years ago.

“It had basically fallen into a state of disrepair,” Conwell says. “It was pretty derelict. Some of the outbuildings, a barn, are still falling over. But there was a house and fields and a creek.”

Ned Conwell hopes creative lease agreements will help open space remain in agriculture for future generations of farmers Photo: Melissae Fellet

Now he lives there with his wife. The couple leases the land from the Peninsula Open Space Trust, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit organization that protects land from being developed. Besides leasing land directly to their partners, the land trust also holds conservation rights on other properties to prevent people from building on that land.

While conserving land for agriculture is important, Conwell says, it’s more important to ensure farming continues on these lands through lease agreements that are favorable to the farmer for the long term.

Land trusts conserve land in the public’s interest, so some groups refer to it as public land even though some of that land is not publically accessible like a state park.

“Public lands can be a really good option for farmers,” says Reggie Knox, executive director for California FarmLink, a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit that helps beginning farmers statewide find land and develop business plans. “Where land values are really high, like in California and coastal California in particular, it may be really more strategically wise for the business to lease than to own.”

Farmers often have other expenses to consider when leasing too. Conwell says that his barn is falling over and probably needs to be rebuilt.

“It’s central to our packing and our washing and our cooling and where we house equipment,” he says. “There’s really no incentive for us to fix it up if we don’t have some way to actually build equity in these investments.”

Land trusts are starting to address the issue.

“We have had a shift recently in our thinking about what it means to protect agriculture and what is necessary to protect agriculture,” says Paul Ringgold, vice president for Stewardship at POST.

The land trust has always worked to protect agricultural land from development, but not worked to ensure that farming continues on protected lands, he adds. Now that’s becoming more of a concern. More people are able to purchase conserved land, though they may not have the intention to farm it, Ringgold says.

“We would like to address that and somehow increase the level of protection so that we can be assured that productive row crop farmland remains in farming and available to farmers for use,” he says.

The land trust is looking at two ways to do that. They could continue to own the land and write long-term leases to farmers. These new leases would separate the value of the land from the value of the improvements to the land.

When farmers lease land, it’s hard for them to build equity when they build a fence, water system or repair a barn. This new way to write a lease transfers the value of these improvements to the farmer while assuring that the land remains protected from development.

The land trust could also add additional restrictions to the land requiring it to be used for agriculture. Some of these ideas have been tested in Massachusetts, Vermont, and New York. And, farmer Ned Conwell says: “There’s good work now starting to happen in California. We’re starting to see open space trust organizations and other entities that own this land really looking at new models to allow for long term security, affordability, and agricultural land staying in farming in perpetuity.”

And using these new models, Conwell hopes leasing conserved land will be sustainable for the next generation of family farmers and beyond. “So that when we leave this earth, so that our family or whoever the next generation is takes over, they have access to a farm, they can afford it and the community knows that this farm will continue to produce food for the population,” he says.

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By Melissae Fellet

Part 1 (see part 2)

Nestled in a forested valley in Pescadero and surrounded by 20,000 acres of open space and parkland, Ned Conwell’s farm looks more like a park than agricultural land.

“We don’t have many agricultural neighbors,” Conwell says. “We’re certified organic, so we don’t haven any drift issues or contamination issues. It’s a very, very clean place to grow food, which is pretty cool.”

Much of the land along the coast of the San Francisco Peninsula is protected as state parks and open spaces. Often this land is conserved by private nonprofit organizations called land trusts.

Ned Conwell's farm in Pescadero is surrounded by open space and parkland. Photo by Melissae Fellet

It’s common to think of these land trusts as preserving natural resources like habitats, pristine rivers and endangered species. But many groups also conserve land for another purpose: agriculture. And in doing so, these organizations are creating new ways for humans to interact with nature.

“The food that we eat is a natural resource,” says Paul Ringold, vice president for stewardship at Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST). “It’s something that comes from the land.”

POST, a land trust based in Palo Alto, has protected more than 70,000 acres of land along the San Francisco Peninsula and Santa Cruz Mountains since 1977.

“We think that keeping local farms in business is part and parcel of a smart conservation ethic,” Ringgold says. “For that reason, we’ve always had agriculture as part of our mission and now are looking to really bolster that and to make it a real active part of our mission.”

Peninsula Open Space Trust currently leases land to seven farmers, including Conwell, and four ranchers. The organization also holds conservation rights to other agricultural land that prevents the fields from being covered with condos or other development.

Looking back at the history of Silicon Valley, we can see how agricultural land ended up in the hands of these conservation organizations. Before it earned the nickname Silicon Valley, the rich agricultural region was known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Orchards there were paved over to support the growing population, and conservation organizations rushed to purchase remaining undeveloped land along the coast. Some of those parcels were wilderness, others were historic grazing lands or farming lands.

Fast forward to the local and organic food movement today, says Conwell. There’s a resurgence of farming as a viable lifestyle, and a recognition that local food systems can feed adjacent urban populations, he adds.

Conservation organizations are welcoming farmers onto their land. Some state parks, like Wilder Ranch in Santa Cruz, have leased land to farmers for more than a decade. And Conwell says that increasingly land trusts and other state organizations are doing the same.

They are beginning to recognize that their conservation goals and maybe even their recreation goals are compatible with, and possibly enhance, their agricultural goals, he says.

And the land trusts that are doing this well are able to engage the public in a whole new way, says Jessy Beckett, who serves on the board of Sacred Community Land Trust, a new land trust in Silicon Valley. If you think of a park as a fenced off area, she says, people only experience wilderness based on what they see from a hiking trail.

“But when you have agriculture, you have people who are intimately working with that landscape everyday,” Beckett says. “I think that’s a much bigger teaching moment, when you can have people go out and taste part of what that land is, or have a dinner that overlooks a field.”