San Francisco Bay is the
largest estuary on the Pacific coast of the United States; its wetlands
provide numerous ecosystem services.
The wetlands here are a complex patchwork of remaining historic wetlands,
centennial marshes, and recent restoration. Thus, the wetland
landscape in the area has a mix of natural
and restored
sites and potentially
restorable diked bayland sites (farms, former salt ponds, and managed
and unmanaged seasonal and perennial wetlands). A
landscape ecology approach
is useful for monitoring wetlands in the Bay and Delta; it incorporates
multiple scales
and considers
interactions between
patches and flows between and across ecotones and patches. We have several projects investigating this wetland landscape - restoration progress in tidal wetlands, peatland linkages to greenhouse gasses, linkages between watershed sediment delivery and wetland habitat, and possible impacts to tidal and fresh/brackish wetlands from sea level rise.
Greenhouse
gasses and peatlands. A
new NSF funded project, looking at the methane contributions from diked former wetlands that are periodically flooded, and might be likely candidates for restoration to tidal marsh. See this
summary.
Climate change and tidal wetlands. The health of pelagic systems and wetlands are ecologically linked through a variety of mechanisms, but the extent of that linkage appears to vary geographically, and is not well understood in Pacific Coast sites. Wetlands are the most vulnerable habitats in CA under a variety of climate change scenarios. With funding from CalFed, we will: 1) evaluate the potential impacts of climate change on SF Bay-Delta tidal wetlands, 2) improve our understanding of the linkage between these wetlands and the pelagic food web, especially fish populations, and 3) use this information to make predictions about potential effects of climate change on Bay-Delta fish populations. Lisa Schile will be working on this project for her dissertation research. See this summary.
Tidal
wetland restoration.Graduate
student Karin Tuxen and I were involved in a collaborative effort to
1) provide a backdrop of multi-scale marsh structure
(through landscape
ecology theory and mapped products), and
2) monitor changes
in marsh structure at multiple
scales. We aim to link these structural changes to wetland function
(vegetation productivity, avian habitat, nutrient cycling). This work comprised much of Karin's dissertation.
Watershed-wetland
linkages. Another project recently completed is Kristin
Byrd's PhD
dissertation project,
in which she looked at changes to tidal wetlands in Elkhorn Slough,
CA. She examined watershed influences on the creation of sediment
fans in the tidal wetlands that fringe the slough, decadal-scale
vegetation succession on these fans, and the changes to the soil
in the tidal wetlands as a result of these fans.
Wetland Research Collaborators and Graduate Students: Drew Talley, Dennis Baldocchi, Tom Parker, John Calloway, Stuart Siegel, Mike Vasey, Diana Stralberg, Kristin
Byrd,
Karin
Tuxen,
Lisa Schile and numerous
members of the SFEI Wetlands Integrated
Regional
Monitoring Program.>
Links:
San
Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI)
Wetland
Restoration Monitoring Project (WRMP)
Integrated Regional Wetland Monitoring Program
