Wetlands California Birds  -California Birdwatching

California wetlands

If you have visited some of California's great eco-tourism sites--its wetlands, you know that they are entertaining places at minimum. But they serve a larger purpose in the scheme of things. While cities and regions tout their wetlands as attractions and points of interest to get tourists to visit and spend money on hotel rooms, only 9% of wetlands remain that encompassed California no more than 200 years ago.

Wetlands, a part of ecotourism, is now bundled into a package called "green" that includes green hotels, green festivals, recycling, and many other causes. The word "ecotourism" once was the most popular buzzword equating to wetlands, bird watching, and other similar activities. It has been replaced to some extent, but hopefully the diminishing wetlands in California will not.
 

Historically five million acres of wetlands existed in California, mostly in the Central Valley. Today less than 450,00 acres remain. The surviving wetlands support more than 60% of the Pacific Flyway's waterfowl. About 55% of California's wetlands are one and maintained by private interests.  California has lost over 90% of its wetlands in a 200 year period, and 60%  of wetlands have been destroyed internationally in the past century.
 

Recent conferences surrounding the themes of wetlands  include a meeting last year comprised of 700 scientists from 28 nations. They  met for the INTECOL International Wetlands Conference.  One of the more alarming presentations and data pointed to what could amount to a carbon bomb released into the atmosphere as wetlands disappear.

Wetlands contain 771 billion tons of greenhouse gases, one-fifth of all the carbon on Earth and about the same amount of carbon as is now in the atmosphere. If all the wetlands on the planet released the carbon they hold, it would contribute powerfully to a climate-warming greenhouse effect that would amount to a carbon bomb. Accounting  for 6 percent of Earth's land surface and 20% of its carbon, wetlands produce 25% of the world's food, purify water, and act as buffers against coastal storms.

In California, one of the most critical problems confronting waterfowl in the Pacific Flyway occurs on the winterering grounds with conversion of wetlands to agricultural uses. Approx. 200,000 acres of land are protected in California as National Wildlife Refuges and State Wildlife Management Areas. State and federal areas account for nearly 45% of the wetlands in California, with the balance maintained by private landowners.
 

The good news is that wetlands are one of the cheapest, most important investments acting as natural buffers to coastal cities. It's cheaper to maintain them than to try to re-introduce them.

The bad news is that recent studies of wetlands replacement in California examined efforts to mitigate wetlands loss and found that often the lands set aside provided diminished or little value over a five year period of examination.  In San Francisco Bay - Delta region, of the 29 mitigation projects evaluated, only one was judged to have very high value. 13 projects were judged average or slightly above or below average. Six projects were judged well below average, two were judged to have low value, and two projects were judged to have no habitat value. Although the goal of  “no net loss of acreage” was being met in the Bay-Delta region, the mitigation projects were not replacing in-kind habitat values.

In Orange County the riparian habitat losses caused by 40 projects were more than compensated for, with 256 acres of mitigation required for 240 acres of impacts. Based on acres alone, all 256 acres of required mitigation were considered successful. Based on permit conditions, only 143 acres (just over half) successfully met their permit conditions, and 41 acres failed to comply with any of the permit conditions. Sites that achieved compliance success did not attain ecological success, however. From a functional perspective, 0 acres were successful, 15 acres were partially successful, and 241 acres were a failure. While requirements for replacement of wetlands land with equal parcels look good on the books, they don't necessarily offer the value of providing functioning wetlands.