Environmental Science ENSC 2800

1
Environmental Science ENSC 2800

• Spring 2003
• California Environmental Problems
• General Topic 3
• Habitat Restoration Obstacles and Opportunities
• (ES group hand in papers in class or before 115
  in Room 204 Friday, the rest Monday in class
  1040)

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CA critical habitat

• Over the last 150 years, California has lost the
  vast majority of its natural wetlands, prairies
  and old growth forests.
• For example, around 98 of the old growth giant
  redwoods have been cut down since 1850 and around
  98 of the wetlands in the San Francisco Bay have
  been eliminated.
• The recent legacies of this habitat destruction
  have been fierce environmental battles over how
  to best preserve species and the degree to which
  public domain issues take precedence, if at all,
  over private property concerns.
• A new and growing debate is occurring over
  military installations and whether, in the name
  of military readiness, training operations can
  ignore requirements for protection of sensitive
  species and habitat (a big battle is looming over
  Cam Pendleton, San Diego).

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Federal v State

• Another angle to the habitat debate is the degree
  to which federal and state attitudes toward
  endangered species and wild places differ as
  ideology changes.
• Federal agencies administer vast areas of
  California that are nationally owned (national
  parks, national wilderness, national forests) as
  well as holding jurisdiction over coastal waters.
• Federal policy and the interpretation and/or
  enforcement of regulations will change as
  ideologies change.
• When State policies differ from Federal ones,
  conflicts can occur over habitat conservation
  in all cases, public opinion, public watchdogs
  and public activists, both for and against
  environmental regulations, play key roles.

4
Bush v Clinton in CA

• Clinton vastly increased the areas designated as
  wilderness by changing definitions in the
  Wilderness Act concerning roadless areas to make
  sure more California land qualified.
• Clinton instructed the National Forest Service to
  prioritize recreation and habitat uses of
  national forests rather than emphasize logging
  values, minimizing the number of logging permits
  issues.
• Clinton authorized Dept. of Interior staff to
  renegotiate long-term water contracts to release
  water back to rivers in order to support
  endangered fisheries.
• Clinton upheld a moratorium on off-shore oil
  drilling and stopped the issuance of additional
  exploration permits and concessions.
• Clinton required all military bases to conduct
  inventories of endangered species and conduct
  full environmental impact reviews with respect to
  the effects of military operations.

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Bushs approach differs

• Bush appointees Todd-Whitman and Norton have
  different ideologies to Clintons Browner and
  Babbitt.
• EPA Director Todd-Whitman is more liberally
  interpreting the ESA and actively lobbying for
  relaxation of military obligations with respect
  to protection of endangered species.
• Interior Secretary Norton is expanding the
  issuance of permits and licenses for timber
  harvesting and for minerals exploration in
  national forest areas e.g. in national forests
  that are remaining critical habitat for the
  re-introduced California Condor.
• Bushs energy policy makers are looking closely
  at lifting the moratorium on active oil and gas
  exploration on existing leases on the California
  coastal shelf, although they are not pursuing the
  issuance of new leases at present.

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Preserving Biodiversity

• Preserving endangered species requires preserving
  habitat of a sufficient size, shape and degree of
  contiguity to allow species to maintain adequate
  populations and viable gene pools.
• If habitat does not exist of sufficient quality,
  efforts to preserve species in decline will
  ultimately prove futile and/or extremely
  expensive (we have spent well over 30 million on
  saving the California Condor for example).
• High profile species might motivate sufficient
  dollars but will lesser species like
  butterflies, rodents or insects garner as much
  support?
• We believe we have documented all of the species
  in California although there might be a few
  insects out there yet to be discovered.
• Should our goal be to preserve all of them? If
  not, why not?

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Reasons for preserving species

• Wildlife and the habitat they occupy provide
  recreational, scientific, commercial, educational
  and aesthetic values to humans (note that these
  can lead to abuse/over-exploitation).
• Habitats provide ecosystem services that we would
  otherwise have to pay to reproduce should they be
  eliminated like flood control, water
  filtration, etc.
• Many people believe in the intrinsic rights of
  other species to exist, extending this to its
  logical conclusion that habitat must be preserved
  for its own sake.
• Wildlife have received protective status in one
  form or another in America since the
  administration of Teddy Roosevelt and the
  regulation over harvesting of species instituted
  by the Lacey Act (1900)

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Reasons for allowing species to become extinct

• Nothing is gained by the extinction itself but in
  the execution of the causal factors.
• Profit is the usual motive both in terms of
  increased revenues (e.g. from farming a single
  crop of houses instead of grazing a herd of cows
  each year) and decreased costs (e.g. from having
  to avoid costly modifications to operations to
  avoid a particular impact).
• With direct acts, i.e. illegal poaching, the
  taking of specimens does yield revenue although
  usually, the objective of the poacher is not to
  eliminate the species for example, a ring of
  white sturgeon poachers has just been broken up
  in the Delta linked to Russian mafia whos
  European sources dried up and who can sell the
  rare caviar harvested for 1,000/.

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Losing Species

• Most species are not lost by deliberate actions
  by humans but have been victims of indirect,
  piecemeal actions that often amount to benign
  neglect.
• Individual landowners in individual jurisdictions
  make decisions about specific parcels without
  seeing their larger relevance.
• The result is frequently fragmentation and edge
  effects that can be much more significant than a
  layperson, unaware of such ecological stressors,
  might realize.
• Only by viewing parcel-by-parcel actions within
  an overall ecosystem framework, an approach now
  required by NEPA/CEQA whenever state or federal
  funds or agencies are involved as parties or
  overseers, can the true significance of piecemeal
  actions be determined.
• Collection of the necessary scientific data at a
  level defensible in court is a slow process,
  usually slower than the economic forces of growth
  clamoring for action.

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Pragmatism - restoration swaps

• Habitat restoration swaps certain environmental
  laws, for example, the Clean Water Act, allow for
  the destruction of habitat if a greater area of
  habitat is created in an appropriate
  geographically proximal area.
• Landowners must purchase or pay for the
  restoration of an area greater than or equal the
  area being lost and capable of supporting
  equivalent biodiversity and functions.
• Problem is, the jury is still out on if a
  restored habitat such as wetlands can recreate
  the biodiversity and equivalent ecosystem
  functions that the original habitat had.
• These concerns notwithstanding, such approaches
  will have most value if the restoration results
  in adding increased contiguity (providing a
  larger area and deeper buffer) or connectivity
  (adding corridors) between remaining habitat.

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Pragmatism trading off

• Partial destruction has been allowed under ESA
  legislation in exchange for guaranteed
  protections on remaining private lands.
• Land owners of old-growth redwoods, desert
  tortoise habitat, checkerspot butterfly meadow
  and other critical areas in CA have been
  permitted to destroy sections of habitat of an
  endangered species if a) they offer to develop
  habitat management plans and provide effective
  protection for the remaining area and b)
  scientific evidence shows that this will be
  sufficient to preserve the population/species all
  be it in a reduced state (the idea being that
  active management for the benefit of the species
  on a reduced area will be better for its
  long-term survival).

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Incentivising Protection

• An effective approach to protecting critical
  habitat is to make it worth a private landowners
  while to maintain his/her land in its undisturbed
  state.
• Land trusts private monies are offered to
  landowners that put their land into a public
  trust, retaining the rights to live on and/or
  farm the land for one or more generations the
  landowner is paid the difference between the
  amortized income from developing the land and
  keeping it as is.
• Conservation easements landowners agree to
  designated restrictions on land-use (a zoning
  change to greenspace only) foregoing benefits
  from development in return for reduced or zero
  property taxes.

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Mandating Preservation

• Private property rights can be overruled by
  governmental actions - there are two common
  mechanisms
• Urban growth boundaries setting geographic
  limits within which urban land uses are allowed
  prevents landowners outside the limit from
  developing their land due to zoning restrictions
  (the threat of establishing a UBG will often be
  an incentive for cooperation with conservation
  easements).
• Public trust/eminent domain state or federal
  agencies can, backed by the courts, require
  private landowners to sell their land, at fair
  market value, to the government to achieve goals
  that are deemed to be in the greater public
  interest.
• The former requires political will, which is
  often difficult to marshal since developers and
  landowners use the campaign contribution process
  to influence decisions, and the latter requires
  taxpayer financing, which is often difficult to
  generate due to public apathy.

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Ecosystem Restoration and Recovery

• The San Joaquin Valley has gone through enormous
  change as land conversion and water diversions
  have eliminated and fragmented habitat.
• To counter the effects of the Federal Central
  Valley Project (CVP) water diversions on
  endangered species, in July 1992 the U.S. Fish
  and Wildlife Service joined with the U.S. Bureau
  of Reclamation and the CSU (through CSU
  Stanislaus) to establish the San Joaquin Valley
  Endangered Species Recovery Program.

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Whats left to preserve?

• The Recovery Plan for the San Joaquin Valley
  implemented detailed scientific research which
  revealed that almost 200 listed or candidate
  species live in the valley, 34 of which are
  specifically targeted in the restoration plan.
• The other 145 TEs, plus hundreds of other
  species native to the area but not yet troubled,
  would also benefit from overall biological
  improvement and protection.
• The task is enormous - of the four natural
  communities that originally covered most of the
  San Joaquin ValleyValley Grassland, Freshwater
  Marsh, Riparian Woodland, and Saltbush Scrubless
  than five percent remains in fragmented,
  scattered, disconnected parcels.
• The San Joaquin Valley now has a greater number
  of endangered and threatened species than any
  other region of the United States outside of
  Hawaii.

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Vegetation GIS map shows decreased heterogeneity
in lowland valley dominated by agriculture(source
CSU Stanislaus)
17
Some keystone species
San Joaquin kit fox Vulpes macrotis mutica
giant kangaroo rat Dipodomys ingens
Source http//arnica.csustan.edu/esrpp/
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Restoring keystone species

• Many of the 34 species considered are keystone
  species within the ecosystem of the valley and
  the various habitats they occupy.
• Giant kangaroo rat (Dipodomys ingens) - digs
  shallow, branching burrows, cuts seed heads and
  stores them underground in more than 20 densely
  packed 1-10 liter chambers.
• Increases and enriches plant productivity by
  collecting and storing seeds and fertilizing
  burrow areas (they have 3-5 times more biomass
  and predominantly natives with big seeds).
• Are the base of the food chain for most predatory
  vertebrates in the ecosystem.
• Provide sheltering burrows for the endangered
  blunt-nosed leopard lizard (Gambelia sila),
  threatened antelope squirrel, and other animals.
• Provides favorable microhabitats for several
  endangered plants.

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Restoring the predators

• San Joaquin kit fox (Vulpes macrotis mutica).
• Inhabits grasslands and scrublands, as well as
  Oak woodland, vernal pools and alkali meadow
  communities, many of which have been extensively
  modified.
• Prior to 1930, kit foxes inhabited most of the
  San Joaquin Valley from southern Kern County
  north to eastern Contra Costa County and eastern
  Stanislaus County.
• Only lives 7 years on average and like many
  predators, reproductive frequency depends on
  abundance of prey.
• Has a very wide prey selection, adjusting diet to
  temporal abundance in prey populations and is
  therefore very important in ecosystem population
  dynamics.
• The balance of rodents and other herbivores is
  controlled by the presence of kit foxes, actually
  helping farmers.

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The recovery plan requires a).edge areas of
contiguous natural habitat characteristics to be
maintained (grey dots) b). linking areas known
as corridors must be established (bright yellow
dots) c). special reserves must be created to
preserve remnant communities (orange dots)
(source CSU Stanislaus)