Conservation Sense and Nonsense

Spartina eradication: Herbicides are their dirty little secret

This is a good news/bad news story about the eradication of non-native Spartina marsh grass and the impact it has had on the population of endangered California Clapper Rail:

Spartina alterniflora, Smooth Cordgrass. USDA photo

The good news: US Fish & Wildlife has temporarily halted efforts to eradicate non-native Spartina (Spartina alterniflora) in the San Francisco Bay Area because the population of endangered California Clapper Rail has declined by 50% during the period of eradication efforts from 2005 to 2011. (1) This problem was identified several years ago and was attributed to the lack of cover for the rail as a result of eradication of non-native Spartina, which grows more densely, taller, and doesn’t die back in winter as the native Spartina does. (2)
The bad news: US Fish & Wildlife attributes this negative impact on the Clapper Rail population on the slow recovery of native Spartina (Spartina foliosa).
Spartina foliosa – USFWS

They do not acknowledge that non-native Spartina provides superior cover compared to the native species. Nor do they acknowledge that non-native Spartina was killed with herbicides. Therefore, they do not consider the possibility that the slow recovery of native Spartina may be attributable to the herbicides that were used to kill the non-native plant. They also continue to claim that the recovery of the endangered California Clapper Rail depends upon the return of native Spartina, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The California Clapper Rail is a sub-species of Clapper Rail; the Clapper Rail is abundant on the East and Gulf Coasts and not endangered perhaps because of the superior cover provided by Spartina alterniflora on those coasts. (3) Based on these fictions, US Fish & Wildlife proposes a new strategy that will simultaneously eradicate non-native Spartina while intensively planting native Spartina. (1)

We have been following the Spartina eradication project since 2011. For the benefit of new readers, we will review the issues with a few excerpts from previous posts on Million Trees.

Spartina alterniflora: Treasured on the East Coast, reviled on the West Coast

Spartina alterniflora (Smooth Cordgrass) is a species of marsh grass native to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States, where it is considered a valuable plant making important contributions to the coastal ecology:

Its dense growth provides protection against storm surge and “erosion control along shorelines, canal banks, levees, and other areas of soil-water interface.” (4)
It filters nutrients, sediments and toxins from the water that flows off the land before reaching the ocean, acting as a natural water treatment facility.
It provides cover and food for birds, mammals and marine animals that live in the coastal marsh.

Where Smooth Cordgrass has died back in its native range, the dieback has been considered a serious environmental threat:

In 2001 the Governor of Louisiana declared a “state of emergency” when Smooth Cordgrass declined and the state obtained $3 million of federal funding to study and hopefully reverse the decline. This study resulted in the development of a method of aerial seeding of Smooth Cordgrass to restore declining areas of marshland. (5)
A similar, but smaller dieback of Smooth Cordgrass in Georgia led to a collaborative research and on-going monitoring effort by 6 research institutions in Georgia.
Similar dieback of Smooth Cordgrass has been reported as far north as the coast of Maine. A researcher at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station is quoted in that report as saying, “In New Orleans, if their marshes were intact, the storm surge of Katrina would not have reached the levees.” (6)

The war on Smooth Cordgrass on the West Coast

Smooth Cordgrass is not native on the Pacific Coast of the United States. Therefore it is treated as an alien invader to be eradicated with herbicides:

$24 million was spent to eradicate Smooth Cordgrass in San Francisco Bay and Willapa Bay from 2000 to 2010 (7)
$16.3 million is projected to be spent on the entire West Coast from 2011 to 2020 (7)

Spartina is being eradicated with an herbicide, imazapyr. This is a new herbicide about which little is known. The analysis that was done to justify its use in the Spartina eradication project admits that no studies have been done on its effect on shorebirds, including the endangered Clapper Rail.

The Material Safety Data Sheet mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency tells us that imazapyr is “not readily biodegradable.” So, in the event that we eventually learn that this herbicide is harmful to shorebirds and/or to us, we probably should assume that it will still be in the environment in the nearly 200 sites in the San Francisco Estuary on which it has been sprayed. Imazapyr is also being sprayed–sometimes from helicopters–in hundreds of places along the West Coast, including Oregon and Washington.

Imazapyr is often mixed with glyphosate by the Spartina eradication project. Glyphosate is a non-selective herbicide. That is, it kills any plant it is sprayed on at the right stage of its growth. But imazapyr is far more insidious as a killer of plants because it is known to travel from the roots of the plant that has been sprayed to the roots of other plants. For that reason, the manufacturer cautions the user NOT to spray near the roots of any plant you don’t want to kill. For example, the manufacturer says explicitly that imazapyr should not be sprayed under trees, because that tree is likely to be killed, whether or not that was the intention.

Furthermore, no tests have been conducted on the toxicity of combining multiple pesticides in a single application. Therefore, we know nothing about the possible synergistic effects of combining imazapyr and glyphosate.

These facts about the herbicides used to eradicate non-native Spartina bear repeating. The main herbicide being used is known to be mobile in the soil and persistent in the environment. The herbicide with which it is often mixed is an indiscriminate killer of any plant on which it is sprayed. Therefore, the likelihood that these herbicides will prevent the establishment of the new plantings of native Spartina should be taken into consideration. The entire enterprise seems deeply flawed, both harmful and futile.

Bringing it home to the Bay Area

So, what does this have to do with you? If you are concerned about pesticide use, you might be interested in the fact the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD) used 203 gallons of imazapyr in 2009 and 121 gallons in 2010 for the sole purpose of eradicating Spartina on their properties. We don’t know how much imazapyr EBRPD used in 2011, 2012 and 2013, because they haven’t published a report of pesticide use since 2010. Since their properties are only on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, we should assume that at least that much imazapyr was used by land managers on the west side of the Bay.

Displacement of Clapper Rails in San Francisco

California Clapper Rail. British Wikipedia

In July 2011, a Clapper Rail was seen and photographed at Heron’s Head in southeastern San Francisco. There was quite a bit of excitement about this sighting because a Clapper Rail had not been seen in San Francisco for decades. That excitement dissipated when we learned more about where this bird came from, which provided a probable reason for its arrival.

The Clapper Rail was wearing a radio collar that had been put on him and 109 other rails by the USGS to track their movements. He had moved from Colma Creek, 11 km south of Heron’s Head, which is one of nearly 200 Spartina “control sites” in the San Francisco Estuary. The bird sighted at Heron’s Head is one of three Clapper Rails that have left Colma Creek since 2007, when the radio collars were placed. The Spartina control project has been going on for over 10 years, so we have no way of knowing how many Clapper Rails were displaced prior to 2007. In 2012, non-native Spartina at Heron’s Head was sprayed with herbicides. Where did the Clapper Rails go from there? Was there anywhere left for them to hide?

Pesticide Application Notice, Heron's Head, 2012 — Pesticide Application Notice, Heron’s Head, 2012

As our readers know, native plant advocates claim their “restoration” projects benefit wildlife. They can offer no evidence for this claim. But there is considerable evidence that proves them wrong. The endangered California Clapper Rail is one such case.

(1) Adam Lambert et.al., “Optimal approaches for balancing invasive species eradication and endangered species management,” Science, May 30, 2014, vol. 344 Issue 6187

(2) “West Coast Governors’ Agreement on Ocean Health, Spartina Eradication Action Coordination Team Work Plan,” Released May 2010, page 12

(3) Cornell Ornithology Lab: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/clapper_rail/id

(4) “Smooth Cordgrass,” USDA/NRCS Plant Fact Sheet.

(5) Dorset Hurley, “Geogia’s Marsh Die Back and Louisiana’s Marsh Browning,” Altamaha Riverkeeper

(6) “What’s killing off our salt marshes,” Going Coastal Magazine, September 15, 2008

(7) “West Coast Governor’s Agreement on Ocean Health,” May 2010, page 5-6

Krakatoa: A case study of species dispersal

Islands are intensively studied by ecologists because they are hothouses for evolution. Physical isolation results in the evolution of new species that are related to their mainland ancestors and the result is many endemic species of plants and animals which exist only on that island.

Some islands originated when continents broke up into smaller pieces as a result of continental drift. Madagascar and New Zealand are examples of islands that were originally attached to a continent. These islands brought some of the inhabitants of the continent with them. But many islands arose from the ocean as a result of volcanic activity and were therefore born bare as a newborn babe without vegetation or inhabitants. All subsequent life on these volcanic islands arrived by dispersal from elsewhere via ocean currents, winds, or carried by traveling animals, most recently by humans.

Krakatoa is such a volcanic island in the Indonesian archipelago. It has a long record of volcanic eruptions which both destroyed much of the island and created new islands. Many of these eruptions occurred during prehistoric periods, but many have been recorded by human history. These recent eruptions have created an evolutionary laboratory that enables us to answer the perplexing question of how quickly the dispersal of species occurs.

The cataclysm of 1883

In August 1883 a series of volcanic eruptions on Krakatoa produced one of the most cataclysmic events of recorded human history. The force of the blast was the equivalent of 13,000 times the nuclear bomb that devastated Hiroshima in 1945. The blast could be heard as far as 3,000 miles away. Shock waves from the blast reverberated around the planet 7 times. The blast sent an ash cloud 50 miles into the atmosphere. The weather of the entire planet was altered by the ash cloud. The temperature dropped by 1.2 Degrees Celsius in the year after the eruption and the climate did not return to normal until 1888. The blast and subsequent tsunami killed over 36,000 people and destroyed two-thirds of the island.

Scientists believe that nothing living survived the blast: “no plant, no animal, no seed, no spore.” (1) The first scientists visited Krakatoa nine months after the blast. They reported finding nothing alive except a single spider. Spiders are notoriously successful dispersers because the webs they weave can become sails on the wind.

Krakatoa is quickly repopulated

In 1886—three years after the eruption—the first botanical expedition arrived on Krakatoa. They found mosses, algae, flowering plants and eleven species of fern. They speculated that the arrival of algae enabled the spores of ferns to become established on the otherwise bare ground. Amongst the plants there were two species of grasses. Scientists assume that most of these plants arrived via wind, but some species could have arrived as seeds carried by the surf.

Further colonization of the barren island then began to accelerate. By 1887, young trees were found as well as dense grassland and many ferns. Butterflies, beetles, flies and a single monitor lizard were found in 1889. The species of monitor lizard found in 1889 is known to be a good swimmer and is a “versatile opportunist” on land, which means it’s not a fussy eater and it can eat less often than other lizards.

By 1906, there were a hundred species of vascular plants, covering the summit in green and a grove of trees along the shore, including tamarisk and coconut palm. The coconut is found on virtually any sunny beach in the Pacific because its seeds float in their large protective shell wherever the current carries them.

Fifty years after the eruptions of 1883, the island was home to 171 species of plants. One botanist estimated that 40% of the plants came on the wind, 30% floated on the sea and most of the remainder were brought by animals. The eruption of 1883 produced huge quantities of pumice–a lightweight, sponge-like volcanic glass—that floated on the ocean creating rafts that were observed for years after the eruption: “…a ship’s captain…who encountered pumice on the Indian Ocean, lowered a boat for a closer look, ‘It was curious and interesting to note how it had been utilized by animals and low types of life as habitations and breeding places.’” (1)

These early arrivals were effective dispersers, but they also had to be capable of surviving inhospitable conditions on arrival. The order of arrival is therefore an important factor in determining successful establishment. For example, animals won’t survive if they arrive before needed food resources. The plants most likely to survive are capable of self-pollinating, that is they don’t require a partner to reproduce.

San Francisco is not an island

How does this experience on Krakatoa compare to our experience in the San Francisco Bay Area? We’re so glad you asked!!

The many projects all over the Bay Area that destroy non-native vegetation are not isolated islands. They are surrounded by more non-native vegetation which quickly re-populates the bare ground created by these projects. Dispersal into small plots of land within San Francisco is much easier than onto isolated Krakatoa. The majority of these projects do not have the resources to replant the areas in which non-native vegetation is eradicated. The fiction is that native plants will magically reappear when non-natives are destroyed. But we can see that the result is the return of the hardiest non-native weeds such as hemlock, star thistle, oxalis, and broom. These hardy creatures don’t need to be planted. Their seeds are carried by the wind or remain dormant in the ground to germinate when someone foolishly destroys the trees that provide shade and suppress germination of weeds.

California Academy of Sciences, April 2011

Even when natives are planted, they are quickly out-competed by non-natives. The best local example of that hard, cold fact is the living roof on the California Academic of Sciences. When the California Academy of Sciences reopened in San Francisco in August 2008, its “living roof” was considered its most unique feature. Thirty species of native plants were candidates for planting on the roof. They were planted in test plots with conditions similar to the planned roof and monitored closely. Only nine species of native plants were selected for planting on the roof because they were the only plants that were capable of self-sowing from one season to another, implying that they were “sustainable.” A living demonstration of “sustainability” was said to be the purpose of the living roof.

Two of six of the predominant species on the roof after 2-1/2 years were native. Four of six of the predominant species were mosses that are “cosmopolitan,” which means they are found everywhere. They weren’t planted on the roof and were therefore “volunteers.”

The monitoring project divided the roof into four quadrants. In February 2011, non-natives outnumbered natives in two of the quadrants. Although natives outnumbered non-natives in the other two quadrants, non-natives were also growing in these quadrants.

The consultant who advised the Academy about what to plant on the roof would not be surprised by this monitoring report. He advised the Academy to walk the streets of San Francisco and identify the plants growing from the cracks in the sidewalks. These are the plants he advised the academy to plant because these are the plants that are adapted to current conditions in the city. The Academy rejected this advice because they were committed to planting exclusively natives on the roof.

The many projects that are destroying non-native vegetation are not sustainable. They are surrounded by non-native vegetation which is better adapted to current climate, soil, and atmospheric conditions. Non-native vegetation will out-compete the natives that are not adapted to current conditions. If these projects were merely futile, perhaps we could shrug and move on. But we can’t turn a blind eye because these projects are harmful to the environment. They use huge quantities of toxic herbicide and they are destroying healthy trees that are performing many valuable ecological functions. These are not harmless experiments.

(1) David Quammen, Song of the Dodo, Scribner, 1996.

(2) Some information for this post is from Wikipedia

The Monkey’s Voyage: How plants and animals are dispersed throughout our planet

The Monkey’s Voyage (1) is as much a history of the science of evolution and ecology as it is a report of the prevailing scientific opinion of the means by which plants and animals were dispersed around the world. Just as life has evolved, so too has the science that studies it.

In the beginning….

The story begins with Charles Darwin, the author of the first publications that identified natural selection as the mechanism that drives the evolution of life on the Earth. These ideas came to him as the result of a five-year voyage around the world in 1831-1836: down the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic, down the coast of South America, around the horn, to the Pacific Ocean to many islands—most famously the Galapagos—to New Zealand, Australia, islands in the Indian Ocean, round the horn of Africa to home.

Voyage of the HMS Beagle, 1831-1836. Creative Commons - Share Alide — Voyage of the HMS Beagle, 1831-1836. Creative Commons – Share Alike

He spent 3-1/2 of the 5 years on land, collecting plant and animal specimens, including many fossils. The fossils suggested to him the existence of animals no longer occupying the land. He also observed many similar plants and animals with slightly different forms around the world. The classic example of closely related, but widely dispersed animals is a family of large, flightless birds: the ratite family.

These similarities suggested a common ancestry to Darwin. Yet, their dispersal across oceans was puzzling to him because at that time the continents were considered fixed in place both going back in time and going forward into the future. Nothing was known at the time about the constant movement of continents, known as continental drift, because the movement was too slow to be observed by humans.

Darwin’s theory about the similarities he found in widely dispersed plants and animals was consistent with his perception of the fixed nature of the geography in which they were found. He theorized that the common ancestors of the similar plants and animals had been dispersed by wind, ocean currents, carried by birds, or other means of transportation.

He conducted experiments to determine how long seeds could survive in sea water to test his theory and he examined migrating birds for evidence of seeds and small animals in their feet and feathers. What he found supported his theory that it was physically possible for plants and animals to be dispersed across oceans to new ranges where subsequent evolution in a different environment would eventually result in alterations of form. When plants and animals are moved from their home ranges and are physically isolated, their genetic compositions diverge. Over time they are sufficiently genetically and morphologically distinct to be considered different species.

Continental Drift

Around the turn of the 20^th century, scientists began to theorize that Africa and South America may have been merged at one time because maps revealed that they fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Alfred Wegener is best known for his pursuit of this theory. He visited both sides of the Atlantic and observed that seams of rock and sediments lined up on the two shores, suggesting their past connections. Although Wegener’s theory gained considerable traction, he did not propose an equally compelling theory about the physical mechanism that would be capable of moving the continents apart.

The mechanism that moves the continents was identified about 50 years later when the ocean floor was studied as a result of developments in radar and sonar. These analytical tools eventually identified seams running the length of the oceans that separate the tectonic plates on which continents ride. Beneath the crust of the earth magma of molten material moves in a current, emerging through the seams of the Earth’s crust as volcanic activity. As molten material emerges from this seam between the tectonic plates, it cools on the ocean floor to form new sea floor. The expansion of the sea floor moves the plates away from the seams, which moves the continents. This is the engine that drives continental drift.

Tectonic Plates - USGS — Tectonic Plates – USGS

By the late 1960s there was scientific consensus about plate tectonics and consequent continental drift. That knowledge led to an understanding of the history of the continental configuations. About 300 million years ago, all continents were fused into one, called Pangaea. Pangaea began to break up about 100 million years later. However, South America, Africa, Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica remained fused in a continent called Gondwana until about 100 million years ago.

“The history of life is the history of the earth.”

This new understanding of the history of the earth’s geology resulted in a paradigm shift in scientific theories regarding dispersal of life forms. Very quickly, scientific consensus formed around the theory that life moved as a result of movements in the continents. This theory was succinctly expressed as “The history of life is the history of the earth.” That is, where life is found depends upon changes in the geology of the earth. For example, scientists assumed that life found on Madagascar originated in Africa before Madagascar separated from the African continent. Similarly, scientists assumed that life found in New Zealand originated in Australia before New Zealand separated from the Australian continent. In other words, life migrated from the continent along with the land, like Noah’s ark carrying the animal kingdom. Previous theories about trans-oceanic voyages of plants and animals were quickly abandoned in favor of this new, elegant theory which seemed so much more plausible than its predecessor.

DNA analysis trumps elegant theory

Although scientists were comfortable with their new theory of how life was dispersed, the inexorable forward movement of human knowledge intervened to disrupt their complacency. The new analytical tool that overturned this theory was DNA analysis which enabled scientists to study the genetic composition of life forms.

When there are two morphologically similar species in physically isolated locations, their common ancestry can now be determined by DNA analysis. And the genetic distance between the species can help scientists determine when those species became physically separated. When populations become separated their genetic pools become progressively more distant from one generation to another. This rate of genetic change is called the “molecular clock” and it can be used to determine when the physical separation occurred if the rate of change is known. Unfortunately, the molecular clock varies from one lineage to another, so first scientists must calibrate the clock and when they do they can estimate the arrival of a specific plant or animal in a new territory that is physically isolated from its former range and therefore its ancestors.

Genetic analysis has overturned former theories of how life was dispersed on the earth. In most cases, plants and animals arrived in their present locations long after the continents separated into their present configuration. Plants are more likely to have been dispersed by wind and ocean currents than animals. New ranges of plants are often on the receiving end of ocean currents and plumes from big rivers.

Also, new understanding (1980s) of the most recent mass extinction approximately 65 million years ago—when dinosaurs disappeared from the earth—would predict the same result. The mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period occurred after the separation of the continents. Therefore, most life forms that moved along with the separating continents were wiped out by the mass extinction about 65 million years ago. Life forms found now are more likely to have arrived after present continental configurations formed and therefore are more likely to have arrived by long-distance dispersal.

Evolutionary science comes full circle

Olive baboon, Old World monkey by Mohammad Mahdi Karim — Olive baboon, Old World Monkey by Mohammad Mahdi Karim

There are some die-hard scientists that have not made the transition from the “life-moves-with-the earth” theory. However, the molecular evidence that life has dispersed across vast expanses of ocean is mounting and most scientists have accepted the reality of the evidence. Science has come full circle, to return to Darwin’s original theory. As improbable as it may seem, monkeys made the voyage from Africa to South America, across the Atlantic Ocean.

Brown spider monkey, New World monkey. Creative Commons - Share Alike — Brown spider monkey, New World monkey. Creative Commons – Share Alike

But is that voyage really so improbable? Within the past decade, we have witnessed two massive earthquakes that caused massive tsunamis. In December 2004, a tsunami following an earthquake in Asia killed approximately 200,000 people. A few survivors tell harrowing stories of clinging to rafts of debris at sea to arrive many days later on a foreign shore. And less than 10 years later, in March 2011, an earthquake and tsunami in Japan killed tens of thousands of people. Over a year later, huge rafts of debris washed ashore on the West Coast of America, encrusted with sea life that accumulated on that long trip. They were called “invasive species” when they arrived. But were they really? After all they arrived as the result of a natural occurrence with no assistance from humans.

These may seem rare events to us because of our short time perspective. Multiply those two catastrophic disasters by the millions of years of life on earth to arrive at the conclusion that these events are routine when put into the context of the lifespan of the earth rather than the lifespan of humans.

Bringing it home

What we learn from The Monkey’s Voyage is relevant to the concerns of Million Trees:

Life is constantly in motion whether we are capable of perceiving it or not. To choose some specific landscape that existed in the distant past as an ideal to be re-created is to deny the reality of nature. The concept of “native plants” is meaningless. Native to where? Native to when?
Change in nature is random and therefore unpredictable. Cataclysmic events render humans impotent to manipulate complex ecosystems. Human attempts to “manage” nature are arrogant at best and harmful at worst. For example, when we kill one animal based on a belief that it will benefit another animal, we haven’t sufficient knowledge to predict the outcome with certainty.
Science is constantly evolving, just as nature is evolving. Invasion biology is stuck in a cul-de-sac that is contradicted by the reality of the dynamism and complexity of nature. There is little scientific evidence that supports the assumptions of invasion biology.

(1) Alan de Queiroz, The Monkey’s Voyage: The improbable journeys that shared the history of life, Basic Books, New York, 2014

“Gardening for Climate Change”

The White House recently released the National Climate Assessment which was prepared by a panel of scientists convened by the federal government. This report informed us that average temperature increase of only 2° Fahrenheit over the entire country in the past century has produced these changes in the environment:

“Summers are longer and hotter, and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced.”
“Winters are generally shorter and warmer.”
“Rain comes in heavier downpours.”

If greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at the same pace, the report predicts an increase in average temperature of as much as 10 degrees by the end of the century. If an increase of only 2 degrees is capable of producing the extreme weather we are experiencing, it is difficult to imagine what we can expect if the temperature increases 10 degrees.

President Obama announced the report: “This is not some distant problem of the future. This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now. Whether it means increased flooding, greater vulnerability to drought, more severe wildfires—all these things are having an impact on Americans as we speak.”

The impact of climate change on plant life (1)

Henry David Thoreau recorded the arrival of spring at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1850s. His data has been incorporated into the records of his successors, creating a continuous record across 160 years. Spring arrives in Concord, Massachusetts about three weeks earlier than it did in the 1850s. This pattern mirrors the changes occurring around the planet according to field studies and satellite images taken from space.

The response of plants to this change in seasons has varied, according to a study published recently by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Some species of plants reach their flowering peak earlier in the year, while other species are extending their flowering into later in the fall.

Another study speculates that increased temperature isn’t the only factor influencing these changes in flowering patterns. Increased levels of carbon dioxide also may be affecting plants. Earlier snow melt may be another trigger for changes in timing of flowering. The availability of pollinators at the time of flowering is assumed to influence the long term survival of flowering plants. In other words, the affects of climate change on plants are complex and imperfectly understood.

The implications for gardeners who care about wildlife

The New York Times recently published an op-ed which offered an answer to this question: “How do we garden in a time of climate change?” There are probably many answers to that question, so we should understand the perspective of the author of the op-ed, James Barilla. He describes his background on his website: “… James Barilla held a variety of posts in wildlife research and management, crossing paths with wolves and mountain lions in remote wilderness and promoting “mini-beast” habitat in urban schoolyards. He first became intrigued by backyard wildlife while working in England for a land trust, where his job was to create wildlife habitat on the outskirts of a city.” He has a Master’s Degree in Environmental Science from University of Montana and a Ph.D. in English from UC Davis. He now teaches creative and environmental writing at University of South Carolina. He has written a book about gardening to support urban wildlife and articles published by Atlantic and National Geographic Magazine.

One of Mr. Barilla’s goals as a gardener is to provide habitat for wildlife. Million Trees is therefore very interested in his answer to the question, “How do we garden in a time of climate change?” because we are always responding to the perception of native plant advocates that the eradication of non-native plants will benefit wildlife. Mr. Barilla shares our view that, particularly at a time of a rapidly changing climate, it no longer makes sense to limit ourselves to native plants if we are to provide useful habitat to wildlife:

“In [the] microclimate [of our backyards], extreme gardening means making the yard hospitable for as many species as possible, without worrying so much about whether they originally belonged here or not. I used to think that tearing out turf and making room for native species like purple coneflower and switchgrass was the best thing I could do. But things aren’t that simple anymore. It doesn’t make sense to think in terms of native and nonnative when the local weather vacillates so abruptly. A resilient garden is a diverse garden.” (emphasis added)

Mr. Barilla also acknowledges the changing ranges of plants and animals in response to climate change and the need to accommodate those changes if species are to survive: “…species are disappearing across their native range but flourishing outside it…This phenomenon of species movement and adaptation is likely to become commonplace as the climate changes.”

Monarch butterflies roosting in eucalyptus tree.

Finally, Mr. Barilla appeals to us on moral grounds: “…we humans are responsible for the current changes. So we must also be responsible for helping other species survive them.” He uses the needs of the monarch butterfly as an example of a species that has been particularly hard hit by both climate change and the agricultural practices of humans. He urges gardeners to plant milkweed—the host plant of monarchs—in their yards.

Scientists in Ohio have concluded that episodes of extreme heat have reduced the population of native butterflies. Here in California, we can help monarchs by stopping the many projects that are destroying eucalyptus because monarchs use eucalyptus in several hundred locations along the coast of California as their overwintering roost.

Native plant advocates are putting their heads in the sand

We (and thousands of people with whom we have collaborated in the past 15 years) have made every effort to inform native plant advocates that they are mistaken in their assumption that native plants provide habitat superior to non-native plants. We have provided them with the many empirical studies that prove otherwise, including one cited by Mr. Barilla in his op-ed: “One study in Davis, California, found that 29 of 32 native butterflies in that city breed on nonnative plants. Thirteen of these butterfly species have no native host plants in the city; they persist there because nonnative plants support them.” This study by Professor Arthur Shapiro and his graduate student was published over 10 years ago. (1) It is only one of 5 local studies that report similar findings for every taxon of wildlife: benthic microorganisms, insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals.

Anise Swallowtail butterfly in non-native fennel

There are similar studies elsewhere in the country and around the world that also find equal numbers of insects in native and non-native vegetation. The British Royal Horticultural Society is conducting a 4-year study of insect use of plants. Their preliminary findings are that insects are equally likely to use native and non-native plants. Even Doug Tallamy was unable to find evidence to support his mistaken assumption that more insects use native plants than non-native plants.

Yet, native plant advocates refuse to consider the damage they are doing to both the environment and wildlife that is struggling to survive the destruction of their habitat. They demand the destruction of thousands of healthy trees, storing millions of tons of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere when the trees are destroyed, thereby contributing to climate change. They demand that herbicides be used to eradicate non-native vegetation and kill the roots of the trees that are destroyed to prevent them from resprouting.

Here are a few specific examples of native plant advocates– and the environmental organizations that support them– refusing to consider the damage being done to the environment and wildlife:

Neighbors of Mount Davidson in San Francisco have been trying for several years to discuss plans of the Natural Areas Program to destroy 1,600 trees on Mount Davidson with the Bay Area Chapter of the Sierra Club, which supports those plans. The Chapter Sierra Club leadership has repeatedly refused to even discuss the issue with the neighbors who are members of the Sierra Club. The final response came from the Sierra Club Executive Director, Michael Brune who supports the refusal of Chapter leadership to discuss the issue with Club members.
The Sierra Club recently announced in its newsletter, The Yodeler, that it has asked the East Bay Regional Park District to destroy 100% of all eucalyptus trees on over 1,200 acres of park land. East Bay Regional Park District has estimated the average density of the eucalyptus forest on their properties at 650 trees per acre, which means that the Sierra Club is demanding that over 780,000 trees be destroyed in the East Bay.
The Sierra Club recently announced that it has asked UC San Francisco to implement its original plan to destroy over 30,000 trees on Mount Sutro in San Francisco. In making this request, they claim that such destruction will benefit native plants, although the original plan did not propose to plant any native plants. (These plans are presently on hold, although UCSF is now in the process of destroying about 180 trees they consider hazardous, in the height of nesting season.)
San Francisco’s Department of the Environment has submitted an application for funding to create a Biodiversity and Ecology Master Plan which proposes to treat all open space in San Francisco as “natural areas” using the Natural Areas Program as its model. The Natural Areas Program is presently restricted to 1,100 acres of city-managed park land. If implemented, this plan could eradicate non-native plants on all city-owned open space as well as private backyards.

The changing climate requires that we reconsider the commitment to native plants in historic ranges because they are probably no longer adapted to those ranges. They must move if they are to survive and we must accommodate that movement if we want them to survive. Likewise, we must reconsider everything we are doing to contribute to climate change, including our use of fossil fuels and deforestation.

Taking action

If you are a member of the Sierra Club, please tell them your opinion of their recent demands to destroy more trees in San Francisco and the East Bay than is presently planned by the owners of those properties. Also, urge them to listen to the concerns of their members regarding the plans for tree removals by San Francisco’s Natural Areas Program. Their address is: San Francisco Bay Chapter Sierra Club, 2530 San Pablo Ave. Suite I, Berkeley, CA 94702-2000

If you live in San Francisco and don’t want all open space in the city to be treated as native plant museums, please write to Polly Escovedo (who is considering the grant application to create a Biodiversity and Ecology Master Plan) by May 14, 2014: polly.escovedo@resources.ca.gov

(1) This section is from: Carl Zimmer, “Springing Forward, and Its Consequences,” New York Times, April 23, 2014

(2) SD Graves and AM Shapiro, “Exotics as host plants of the California butterfly fauna,” Biological Conservation, 110 (2003) 413-433

Dr. Arthur Shapiro: Composition of ecological communities is dynamic

We are republishing an article from the San Francisco Forest Alliance with permission. This excellent summary of Professor Shapiro’s presentation was approved by him. Professor Shapiro is an expert on the butterflies of California. We have had the great pleasure of attending some of his lectures at UC Davis. He is a gifted educator with a deep and profound knowledge of ecology.

Recently, UC Davis Professor Art Shapiro gave a talk at the Commonwealth Club. It was a tour-de-force. He described it as a very quick resume of a course he’s been teaching for 40 years at UC Davis.

The takeaway: The conventional wisdom about ecology is often wrong.

[You can listen to the one-hour audio recording of his talk HERE.]

SPECIES THROWN TOGETHER

Nativists idealize an ecosystem as a community of plants, animals, fungi, and other organisms that have evolved together over many thousands of years in a particular place so that they fit like a complicated jigsaw – the balance of Nature. (We’ve heard them use phrases such as “lock and key” to describe the effect of this co-evolution.) When non-native and invasive species enter, nativists believe, they destroy this intricate mechanism, resulting in an impoverished and simplified ecosystem with fewer species and no natural balance – and even the dire possibility of ecosystem collapse. They talk in terms of plants and animals that “shouldn’t be there” – usually, immigrant species brought in by humans.

But it’s not often true. What the scientific data show is that “communities” of that interdependent kind are unusual. Instead, most ecosystems are groups of plants and animals that happen to be in a place where they can thrive. When they interact, it’s usually because of “ecological fitting” – they can use the other plants and animals in that area to help them survive. Depending on how ancient they are, communities may include tightly co-evolved mutually interdependent multispecies systems. But these make up only a fraction of the community as a whole.

Anise swallowtail butterfly breeds on fennel

Here’s the evidence against the concept of tight-knit interdependent “communities”:

1. There’s no functional difference between a heritage ecosystem and one with exotic species. If there was, scientists should be able to tell an undisturbed “community” from an invaded one without knowing its history. In fact, they can’t. There are no consistent functional differences once an “invading” species has been established. Some ‘invaders’ can drastically transform the systems they enter – an example is cheatgrass in the Western deserts, which greatly amplified fire risk there. But most do nothing of the sort.

2. Species recolonize open land at different rates. “Species move, communities don’t.” If a landscape is wiped clean – say by glaciers or a volcanic eruption – nature begins to move back in almost immediately. The pollen record allows scientists to understand which species of trees arrived at which time. It shows that tree-species move individually, not as communities.

3. Species that now don’t exist in the same place did so in the past, which would not be true if plants and animals normally lived in fixed communities. One example: the wood turtle and the southern toad are not found in the same areas now – but the fossil record shows that in the past, the ranges did overlap. This couldn’t have happened if they needed to be part of different communities. Vast areas were occupied in the past by “no-analogue” communities – ones that simply don’t exist anywhere at all today.

He ended by pointing out that we – humans – are an invasive species. So are most things, at least at one time.

Read on for detailed notes from Professor Shapiro’s talk at the Commonwealth Club.

Again, you can listen to an audio-recording of the whole talk HERE (on the Commonwealth Club website).

————————————————————————

NOTES FROM ART SHAPIRO’S TALK:

ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITIES AND THE MARCH OF TIME

(The talk was dedicated to Prof Shapiro’s late neighbor, Steven Warnock.)

commonwealth club motto — Commonwealth Club motto

The talk was in three parts: The first laid out the historic context for two opposing schools of thought about ecology. The second examined the data, and concluded that the evidence supports Gleason. The third part looked at the future, which includes climate change.

ECOLOGICAL “COMMUNITIES” OR “ASSEMBLAGES” ?

Here’s the conventional wisdom about ecology, associated with Frederic Clements: Plants, animals, insects, fungi and microscopic creatures form interdependent groups, or “communities.” The process by which this happens is “co-evolution” (sometimes described as evolving a “lock and key”), leading to an ecology where all the species fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. (“Co-evolution” is associated with Peter Raven and Paul Ehrlich, who described it in butterflies and plants that evolved together.) If an area is disturbed, it will go through a predictable process of “natural succession” that will lead to a stable “climax” situation, with all its species again interacting as a community.

This stable ecosystem is sometimes called “the balance of nature.” Tamper with it, this theory says, and you could destabilize the whole community, even leading to ecological collapse.

The opposing view, associated with Henry Gleason, is that plants and animals do not necessarily form ecological communities. Instead, groupings or “assemblages” of plants and animals occur mainly by accident. They happen to arrive in that space at that time, and find conditions that allow them to survive and thrive. The species in such an assemblage will interact, not because they co-evolved, but because they find an opportunity to do so.

These theories about how species fit within an ecosystem were quantified when several ecologists – including the famous Robert McArthur – introduced mathematical models that looked at populations of plants and animals and their interactions. They used these models to look at Species Packing – i.e., how many different species of plants and animals could live in a particular ecosystem. Assembly rules says that the distribution of plant and animals species in a given area isn’t random: both competition and cooperation between plants and animals affect what you find. Competing species can’t all live in the same area, but their niches can overlap. Where they do overlap, the two species may evolve more differences (“character displacement“) so they compete less. These mathematical models assumed a condition of equilibrium, i.e. stability. Opponents have argued that ecological niches are seldom stable because the physical environment is not stable for very long.

R.H. Whittaker introduced the idea that the levels of dependency could vary within communities. For any two species, you could assign a number: +1 meant that the species needed each other to survive; -1 meant that they could not live in the same space. He speculated that these relationships tended to be distributed in a bell curve – meaning that most species in a group didn’t depend on the presence or absence of another species. But some subsets of the community were tightly integrated.

How adaptable are living things? They can evolve, but only in certain ways. Niche conservatism is the idea that most species cannot change very much or very fast in response to changes in their ecological niches.

The idea of co-evolution was fine-tuned with John Thompson’s concept of Geographic Mosaics. Co-evolution between two species can happen differently in different geographic areas. So, for example, a plant in one place might depend totally on one insect for pollination, but elsewhere, the same species of plant might find alternative pollinators available. Such Fine-Tuning is the opposite of Niche Conservatism – and both occur in Nature.

TESTING THESE IDEAS

Cladistics (i.e., the system of showing how related species evolved from common ancestors) provided a way to test the Ehrlich-Raven co-evolution hypothesis. If one kind of animal or plant developed into a separate species (“speciation”) then did the plants and animals depending on it also co-evolve into a separate species? There was no evidence that this happened. Co-evolution was a lot sloppier and more unpredictable than that!

Every time you see two organisms working together, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are co-evolved. Dan Janzen, a great tropical ecologis, pointed out that organisms could be taking advantage of niches and resources that appear through Ecological fitting, with no history of coevolution at all. We see this happen when introduced pests attack native plants, and native insects attack introduced plants, forming brand-new associations. It happens all the time.

pacific reed grass under eucalyptus — Pacific reed grass thrives in eucalyptus fog drip

Is there really a difference between “intact” ecosystems and ones that are disturbed or invaded? Mark Sagoff pointed out that if there really is a functional difference between “invaded” and “co-evolved” ecosystems, then scientists should be able to tell them apart without knowing their history.

“The theory that evolutionary processes structure ecosystems and endow them with a mathematical organization (e.g., rule-governed patterns that ecologists can study) has the following implication….scientists should be able to tell by observation whether a given ecosystem is heavily invaded or remains in mint condition…

“In fact, once non-native species have become established, which may take only a short time, ecologists are unable by observing a system to tell whether or not a given site has been heavily invaded. Invaded and heirloom systems do not differ in pattern or process, structure or function, in any general ways.”

There’s more evidence against the idea of stable interdependent communities as the norm in nature. For example: pollen core data shows that trees recolonizing lands after glaciation don’t move in “communities.” The tree species migrate at different rates. Only those species that have mutualistic relationships move together (for example, mycorrhizae and trees).

“Communities” are like still shots from a movie. They show a set of relationships at a particular point in time. That doesn’t mean the relationships are stable or unchanging. Many species show different sets of relationships in the past. For instance: at present, the wood turtle and the southern toad have completely different ranges – but in the past, those ranges overlapped in places. In the UK, workers building Hadrian’s Wall nearly 2000 years ago left middens that have remains of beetles of species now found only in Lapland. When an event that wipes out an ecosystem and recolonization starts, it takes trees 50-100 years to leave a pollen signature. Bufo_terrestris public domain Norman Benton sm Beetles that can fly get there in months to a few years.

If communities were stable groupings of interdependent co-evolved species, then we would expect to see the same communities repeated in similar conditions. But in fact, we often see different groupings in similar conditions.

THE FUTURE

Decisions about what ecosystems should look like are subject to human preferences. For most people, what they grew up with is “normal.” But the world has changed. The climate is changing. The pool of available species has increased enormously. In terms of trying to “restore” an earlier ecosystem – there’s no going back.

Dr. Scott Carroll: Ecological communities rapidly adapt to new species

We are republishing an article from the San Francisco Forest Alliance with permission. This excellent summary of Dr. Carroll’s presentation was approved by Dr. Carroll. Dr. Carroll is a leader in the scientific community in identifying rapid evolution as a mechanism which enables introduced species to rapidly adapt to their new environment as well as the ability of their new neighbors to adapt to them.

Dr. Scott Carroll of UC Davis, and the founder of the Institute for Contemporary Evolution in Davis, spoke at the Commonwealth Club as part of the series “The Science of Conservation and Biodiversity in the 21st Century.” His main message:

Mixed communities, consisting of non-native and native species of plants, animals and other organisms, are here to stay. We need to find ways to live with these new neighbors. Once they are introduced, they will evolve, and so will the species that were already there. Trying to eradicate “invasive” and non-native species is expensive, likely to cause unforeseen problems, and have uncertain success – in part because evolution will make a moving target of an introduced species.

Read on for notes from Dr. Carroll’s talk. (There are also links to his Powerpoint presentation, and to the audio recording from the Commonwealth Club.)

CONCILIATION BIOLOGY:
THE ECO-EVOLUTIONARY MANAGEMENT OF PERMANENTLY INVADED BIOTIC SYSTEMS

(Notes from a talk by Dr Scott Carroll)

Plants and animals have always moved around the planet, but gradually enough that the world had distinct bio-regions with their own indigenous species. About 500 years ago, shipping greatly increased the pace – people deliberately or inadvertently introduced species into new places. It’s what people do.

“Invasion biology” as a discipline originated with Charles Elton’s 1958 book. The response to Invasion Biology is a deeply emotional one, coming from a sense of how an ecosystem should look and how species should interact. The transfer of species around the globe has been called the greatest ecological spasm since the extinction of the dinosaurs. But is it?

In fact, there’s been a much more important change. The amount of wilderness on the earth’s surface has fallen sharply, from around 50% in the 1700s, to around 20% by the year 2000. The rest is cultivated or range lands or built-up. We need to look at invasion biology – permanently mixed communities of native and introduced organisms – in the context of that land use change.

These land use changes drastically altered the environment for all species, with a major impact on all species and ecological relationships. Natural selection picks new winners: Changed environments have different fitness criteria, so plants or animals that were successful before may become losers. If populations decline, it reduces their chances of evolving to meet the new environment: fewer individuals mean a smaller gene pool, fewer potentially beneficial random mutations, and fewer offspring. Some species go extinct.

But others don’t. They adapt and evolve and use the resources the new environment or new introduced species provide. Some players in these novel interactions have the capacity to solve their own problems, restoring more balanced kinds of ecological interactions than one would expect from the terms “invasion” and “takeover” and “destruction.”

DEFINING “INVASIVE SPECIES”

How do we define an “Invasive Species”?

It’s a species not native to a bio-region that are:

Introduced
Reproducing independent of our assistance (naturalized, in the case of plants) and
Very specifically, they are doing something that we do not like.

This means that it has to be defined with reference to who “we” are. The definition of “invasive” must include who is doing the defining.

In some cases there’s broad agreement. Nearly everyone agrees on fighting invasive disease-causing insects, for instance. In the case of plants and trees and animals, people may diverge sharply in their opinions. Eucalyptus is an example; those who dislike it make consider it invasive; others would disagree vehemently.

The ‘eradication’ arm of Invasion Biology – i.e. those looking to destroy introduced species, perhaps 90% of invasion biologists – is fighting a very difficult battle. It’s extremely expensive, and risks doing much more harm than good.

THE RISKS OF “ERADICATION”

What are the problems of Eradication policies? Here are 8 issues:

1. It’s extremely expensive, both in time and effort.
Even in cases that seem possible – eliminating rats on an island, for instance, it may be an uphill battle. The first 75% are easy to kill. The next 20% are more difficult. By the time you’re down to the last 5%, your team is exhausted and you’ve “spent $3.2 mn of your $2.7 mn budget.” You haven’t seen a rat recently, so you leave. And then – the 2% of the rats that remain reproduce and repopulate the entire island in five years.

2. It doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.
Even if you succeed in killing off the invader, it won’t necessarily bring back the ecosystem that existed before. For instance, soil conditions may have changed so instead of native plants returning, other non-native plants – or nothing at all – grows.

3. It can disrupt ecological systems.
For instance, an introduced predator may have been keeping an introduced plant-feeding prey species in check. Once the predator is eliminated, the prey may destroy vegetation and the ecosystem as it exists.

4. It can disrupt replacement ecological relationships that existing plants and animals may have developed with the “invaders.” They may be providing food, seed dispersal, pollination, cover and other ecosystem services. For instance, if a native plant species is declining because of climate change, an introduced species can provide food for birds, animals and insects.

5. Sometimes, the new species provide a new ecosystem service to existing species, and destroying them would hurt the native species too. For instance, beachside non-native trees may protect turtle hatchlings from artificial lights that can disorient them, and so improve their survival rates. Or the non-native species may be controlling a different non-native species that might otherwise become a pest.

6. Trying to kill off non-natives can drive them to evolve resistance to the agent used to kill them. This is a common problem when herbicides are widely used to kill “invasive” plants.

7. Killing non-natives may reduce biodiversity of the area by reducing the pressure on native species to diversify and become new species.

8. The new species may directly increase biodiversity in the area, and eradicating them reduces this biodiversity.

THE CAUTIONARY TALE OF THE MYXOMATOSIS VIRUS

A story that illustrates many of these problems is that of the myxoma virus, used to control Australia’s huge rabbit population.

The Iberian (or European) rabbit was introduced into Australia by Europeans in the 19th century, and eventually bred so prolifically that it started to destroy the environment. In the 1950s, the Australian government introduced the myxoma virus, a New World rabbit disease lethal to European rabbits. Initially, that killed 99.5% of infected rabbits, and the population plummeted.

But the surviving rabbits continued to breed until the next time the disease went around. With each successive outbreak, the mortality declined. Frank Fenner, the scientist overseeing the project, found that the virus was attenuating – becoming less lethal – while the rabbits were developing resistance to it. Eventually, each outbreak killed only 20% of the rabbits in the area.

In 1952, a landowner in France introduced the virus on his farm to control rabbits. Soon it spread across that country, and then to Britain, where it killed 95% of the rabbit population.

This led to the extinction of the British population of the Large Blue Butterfly. The butterfly is an unusual species whose caterpillars mimic larvae of the ant species Myrmica sabuleti, so they get carried into the ant’s nests where they eat the larvae. Rabbits cropping meadow-grasses had kept them short, providing ideal conditions for the ants. With the rabbits gone, the grass grew, ants declined, and the Large Blue Butterflies vanished.

Meanwhile, the myxoma virus also reached the Iberian peninsula, where it devastated the native rabbit population. The rare Iberian lynx, which depends solely on rabbits as a food source, became critically endangered, and the Iberian eagle – which also preyed on rabbits – declined sharply. Aquila_adalberti wikimedia commons cca3 Officials are looking to vaccinate the wild rabbit population against myxomatosis.

Another unforeseen consequence occurred on Macquarie Island. This desolate Australian island was a breeding place for seals and sea-birds. Human introductions of rats (inadvertently), rabbits (for food), and cats (to combat the rats) impacted the sea-bird populations. The eradicators first introduced fleas to the island as a vector for the myxoma virus, and then the actual virus in 1978. Then they eradicated the cats. However, the cats had been hunting the rabbits, and now the rabbits multiplied out of control reversing years of conservation efforts. The myxoma virus had likely attenuated, and failed to control the rabbit numbers. The rabbits grazing destroyed the hillsides where the penguins nested, causing landslides that harmed their breeding success.

CONCILIATION WITH SOAPBERRY BUGS

The story of the soapberry bug is more encouraging.

Soapberries are a plant family with a number of separate species, two of which are invasive vines in Australia. They invade along water-courses, and grow over trees in those areas. One vine species reached Northern Australia around 1680; the other, much taller species arrived in Eastern Australia around in the 1920s and has become particularly damaging to the forests there.

soapberry bug sm Soapberry plants have fruit of varying sizes with nutritious (to insects) seeds at the center. Soapberry bugs are specialized soapberry eaters, with long beaks to pierce the fruit and reach the seed. The beak-lengths of these bugs are evolved to fit the particular species of soapberry they prey on.

When the introduced soapberry plants arrived in Australia, the native soapberry bugs had beaks too small to use the new food source. But with time, they started to evolve.

In Eastern Australia, it took 30 years for the soapberry bug’s beak to evolve from 7 mm to 7.5 mm. That doesn’t sound like much, but an increase of 0.5 mm doubles the number of seeds the bug can reach.

In Northern Australia, where the bugs have had over 300 years to evolve, their beaks have grown from about 5.5 mm in length to around 8 mm – exactly the length they need to attack the introduced soapberry plant. They match as well as if the soapberry plant was native.

It’s the same species of bug.

One interesting experiment would be to see if breeding the two strains would help the Eastern bugs grow a longer beak and control the soapberry vines better. Dr. Carroll recommended stopping the plant eradication program in Northern Australia to protect the long-beaked soapberry bugs there while evaluating whether interbreeding the two bug strains could accelerate the evolution to slow the spread of the large vine in Eastern Australia.

MORE INFORMATION

Dr. Carroll stopped his presentation there because time ran out. But if you would like to see his PowerPoint slides, they are here (in ppt and pptx formats). The Commonwealth Club’s Audio recording of his talk is also linked here. (There’s a lively question and answer session at the end, which isn’t included in these notes.)

Powerpoint presentation in ppt format: S Carroll Commonwealth Club Jan 2014

Powerpoint presentation in pptx format:S Carroll Commonwealth Club Jan 2014 (2)

Audio recording from Dr Carroll’s Commonwealth Club talk: http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/scott-carroll-conciliation-biology-13014

Destroying trees causes erosion and landslide risk

We are republishing with permission a post from the Save Mount Sutro Forest blog. At the end of the Save Sutro post we add an example of erosion in the East Bay caused by tree removals by UC Berkeley.

When UCSF (or SF Recreation and Parks Department) discusses “Safety” in the forests on Mt Sutro and Mt Davidson, they generally focus on fire hazard (relatively low in these damp cloud forests), or on the risk of being hit by a falling tree (about half the risk of being hit by lightning). Tree removal could actually increase both those risks, by drying out the forest and by increasing windthrow – the risk of the remaining trees being blown over.

But what we want to talk about in this post is landslide risk.

Two weeks ago, a horrible mudslide in Washington State engulfed homes and took lives. Some scientists think logging trees in the area contributed to the tragedy. This has implications for Sutro Forest, which grows on a steep hill – and also for the other San Francisco forest, Mount Davidson. Tree removal, ongoing and planned, could destabilize the mountainsides.

LOGGING AND LANDSLIDES

On March 22, 2014, a huge landslide destroyed the small Washington community of Oso. Rain was of course a factor, as was erosion at the base of the slope. But it’s probable that tree-cutting above the slide area was an important factor too. An article in the Seattle Times quotes a report from Lee Benda, a University of Washington geologist. It said tree removal could increase soil water “on the order of 20 to 35 percent” — and that the impact could last 16-27 years, until new trees matured. Benda looked at past slides on the hill and found they occurred within five to 10 years of harvests [i.e. felling trees for timber].

There had been red flags before. The area was second growth forest, grown back from logging in the 1920s/30s. Over 300 acres were again logged in the late 1980s.

The first time regulators tried to stop logging on the hill was in 1988. But the owner of the timber successfully argued that measures could be taken to mitigate the risk. Eventually, the state only blocked it from logging some 48 acres, and the owners gave in on that.
In 2004, new owners applied to cut 15 acres; when the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) objected, they halved the area and re-located the cut. DNR gave approval, subject to no work during heavy rain and for a day afterward. The tree-cutting finished in August 2005.
In January 2006, there was a major landslide 600 feet from the cut zone. The state built a log wall to shore up the slope.
The owners continued logging. In 2009, they removed 20% of the trees. In 2011, they removed another 15%. In 2014, the hillside collapsed.

The regulators were aware of the risk; they thought they were mitigating it with their restrictions and reaching a compromise with the owners. But it wasn’t enough. Destabilizing the mountainside is a long-term thing; the effects can show up in months, but it’s more likely to take years.

THE LESSON FOR SAN FRANCISCO

We know our hills are prone to slides. Here’s a geological map of Mt Sutro and surrounding areas. The blue zones show where there’s a potential landslide risk:

Blue areas show "potential for permanent ground displacements..." — Blue areas show “potential for permanent ground displacements…”

This next map is from a UCSF document. The pink areas and wiggly arrows indicate landslide risk. The double-arrows show where actual landslides seem to have occurred in the past.

Pink areas and wiggly arrows show landslide risk; double line arrows show past landslides.

Landslide under blue tarp. South Ridge at top left.

This slope in the Forest Knolls neighborhood was covered in a blue tarp for months after the slope became destabilized by tree removal…

This other blue tarp is on the hillside above Medical Center Way. It was installed soon after some extensive work on the trail in that area, with undergrowth being cleared and trails realigned. When we enquired why it was there, UCSF said there had been some rock slides, and this was a temporary solution.

This photograph was taken in March 2013. A year later, the blue tarp is still there.

For more evidence, there’s the ongoing situation in Twin Peaks, where erosion and rockfalls in rainy weather are ongoing. There, it matters less, because it’s not falling on homes. Landslides on Mt Sutro or Mt Davidson have the potential to damage homes.

YEARS OF INCREASED RISK

While it’s possible that a slide could happen within months of the tree-felling, it could also happen 6-8 years later as the root systems rot away. It could happen in any year until the trees grow back and conditions are right for water-logging. On that fateful Washington slope, the average was 5-10 years. No one wants to find out the average for San Francisco slopes.

We ask the land managers for these forests to stop removing trees and large shrubs that have successfully stabilized our hillsides for decades.

Addendum: About 10 years ago, UC Berkeley removed about 18,000 trees on 150 acres of its property. This is a photo of erosion that resulted from that tree removal on Grizzly Peak Blvd close to the intersection with Claremont Ave. This erosion has been getting steadily worse for at least 5 years. The only remediation has been plastic and sandbags, which are clearly not capable of preventing further erosion.

Grizzly Peak Blvd, south of Claremont Ave. Berkeley, California

Californian-Australian Exchange

With a little help from our friends, we have discovered a new resource to help us understand why Blue Gum eucalyptus was brought to California from Australia. True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform 1860-1920 was written by an Australian historian, Ian Tyrrell. Although we have read other accounts of the introduction of eucalyptus to California (most recently Jared Farmer’s Trees in Paradise), the perspective of an Australian on this history was new to us.

Those who despise eucalyptus often portray its introduction to California as a horrible mistake to be regretted and reversed. Ian Tyrrell helps us to understand that there are actually good reasons for the introduction of eucalyptus that make sense in the context of the geographic and cultural realities of the historical period in which it was introduced.

Historical geography of eucalyptus introduction

The gold rush in California and Australia occurred nearly simultaneously in 1849. As these gold rushes played out, there was considerable travel of hopeful miners and their support structures between the two continents. Naturally, they brought things with them that they considered useful to their enterprises and seeds of the Blue Gum were amongst their baggage from Australia to California. Although there is speculation about the precise time and means of initial introduction, they remain theories.

Presently we think of Australia as being far away because our primary means of transportation is air travel and that trip is much longer than the trip to the East Coast of the US. However, at the time of the gold rush, travel by ship was the primary means of transportation and the trip to Australia by ship was much shorter than the trip to our East Coast. The trip around the horn of South America was both long and extremely dangerous. In Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, we share his terror during that voyage in the 1830s.

This shared experience of a gold rush meant that California and Australia also shared the environmental damage caused by the methods used to extract gold from the land. Hydraulic mining was the primary method of extraction. This method uses high-powered water pumps to erode riparian corridors to expose the gold in the soil. Erosion is the result of this method of mining.

Ian Tyrrell tells us that the initial motivation for planting eucalyptus in California was to heal environmental damage caused by the gold rush. Eucalyptus was an attractive choice for this task because it grows quickly and is well adapted to California which shares the same Mediterranean climate as much of Australia. It seems ironic that the initial motivation for planting eucalyptus in California was to repair environmental damage, given that today the same trees are blamed for environmental damage by native plant advocates and mainstream environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club.

Our East Coast remained inaccessible to California until the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. The Panama Canal (completed in 1914) accommodated movement of large shipments of goods between the West and East coasts.

The cultural context

Tyrrell also introduces us to the intellectuals on both continents who were the environmentalists of the era of the gold rush. George Perkins Marsh in America and Baron Ferdinand von Mueller in Australia were the environmental leaders of that period. They were both committed to introducing species to their respective countries to improve the environment by creating “gardens of the gods”: “These were pragmatic thinkers who leaned toward afforestation rather than preservation when the opportunity presented itself. Early conservationists were, at bottom, advocates of a constructed landscape that would improve nature, not preserve. In short, they were advocates for the garden concept.” (1)

In California, the desire to import tree species from outside California was supported by the fact that much of California is naturally treeless. Many species of trees that are native to California are not well adapted to many microclimates. For example, if you want trees on a windward facing hill along the coast of California, you must plant a non-native. So, cultural preference for introduced trees was supported by horticultural requirements of native tree species.

Timber famine

A second phase of afforestation with eucalyptus occurred towards the end of the 19^th century when there was widespread fear in America that we had severely depleted our timber resources and would soon experience a shortage of timber needed to build our new communities. Eucalyptus was considered an attractive substitute for native timber sources because it grew quickly. Plantations of eucalyptus were planted throughout California based on the belief that a valuable market for the timber was just around the corner.

This period of speculative investment in eucalyptus came to an abrupt end around 1914 for several reasons:

Young eucalyptus does not make suitable lumber for building purposes. We have since learned that eucalyptus makes valuable lumber at about 80 years of age. We have also perfected kiln-drying techniques that produce high-quality eucalyptus lumber.
The economic value of eucalyptus forest for timber was also reduced because of the limited ability of eucalyptus to regenerate naturally: “The eucalyptus bore ‘seeds abundantly, but apparently the latter does not find, as a rule, the proper conditions for germination…Except with the aid of the hand of man, therefore, the eucalyptus will not sensibly encroach upon the treeless area’” (1) (This is yet more evidence that eucalyptus is NOT invasive, as native plant advocates claim.)
The demand for timber declined precipitously when alternative building materials were developed such as iron and cement.

Australia on the receiving end

Australian eucalyptus forest (Eucalyptus regnans). Victoria, Australia

As eucalyptus was introduced to California, Australians were importing the Monterey pine for timber. Monterey pine is planted all over the world for timber. It is the predominant timber species in New Zealand, but it never became as popular in Australia because it is softwood. Eucalyptus is a hardwood and Australian’s developed a preference for hardwood that could not be satisfied with Monterey pine. Unfortunately, that preference for hardwood has decimated the old-growth eucalyptus forests of Australia.

There is a lesson in this for us. One of the advantages of introducing non-native trees is to protect native forests. If we use our non-native trees to fulfill practical needs such as lumber and firewood, we are taking the pressure off the need to destroy our native forests. Eucalyptus is still planted in many developing countries where firewood is still needed for fuel. Wouldn’t we rather that these countries burn fast-growing eucalyptus than their native forests?

What can we learn from the Californian-Australian exchange?

Environmentalism is a cultural construct. Its meaning has changed and will undoubtedly continue to change because culture is dynamic, just as nature is dynamic. Mid-Nineteenth Century environmentalism was not wedded to native species, as is contemporary environmentalism. Fifty years ago, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published, pesticide use was considered harmful to the environment. Now we find that mainstream environmental organizations are actively promoting the use of pesticides to support their demands for eradication of non-native plants and trees.

We tend to look back at historical ways of doing things—such as planting eucalyptus—with a condescending attitude: “How could they be so stupid?” Another way to look at the past is to look at the historical context in which those choices were made. If we had sufficient knowledge of the historical context, perhaps those choices would make good sense.

Finally, if we look around the world at what is being planted today, we must acknowledge that planting non-native tree species often has practical advantages. Non-native tree species might grow where native species won’t grow and where we need trees for windbreaks, visual and sound screens, erosion and pollution control, carbon sequestration, etc. Or non-native tree species might protect native species by fulfilling specific needs that would otherwise require the use of native species.

As we often do on Million Trees, we reach the conclusion that more knowledge often results in more tolerance. Thanks to Ian Tyrrell for these insights and to our friends for alerting us to this valuable resource.

(1) Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930, University of California Press, 1999

“In Jeopardy: The Future of Organic, Biodynamic, Transitional Agriculture”

We are publishing a guest post by Virginia Daley and Fritzi Cohen of the Fearless Fund. They explain that pesticides used by ecological “restorations” are having a negative impact on organic agriculture.

The ever expanding war on “invasive species” is giving “green cover” to the widespread use of inadequately tested pesticides that threaten the health of the very soil and water that sustain all life.

Wherever man migrated he brought plants prized for food, fiber, medicine and ornament. With world exploration and trade, the exchange of flora and fauna became ever wider, and after 1492, the ecosystems of the continents were transformed.

Importation was encouraged by presidents and agencies such as the United States Office of Plant Introduction. The US Department of Agriculture planted the now vilified kudzu, and tamarisk for erosion control, fodder and other useful purposes. Today, 98% of our crops and many plants we think of as American as apple pie are actually from somewhere else –including the apples in that pie.

At the beginning of the 20th century, however, laws were passed “to protect crops and livestock from the wilds of Nature.” Mid-century, in a climate of war and fear of foreign attack, the theory of invasion biology branded alien species “invaders.”

But all-out war was declared on “invasive species” in 1999 with Executive Order 13112, which authorized billion dollar funds and a massive network of agencies to “rapidly respond” to “alien species whose introduction does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” The National Invasive Species Council was created, whose co-chairs include the secretaries of Interior, Agriculture, and Commerce, State, Defense and Homeland Security, Treasury, Transportation, Health and Human Services as well as Administrators of the EPA, USAID, and the US Trade Representative. Programs coordinate and collaborate with federal, state, county and environmental organizations with a variety of funding sources. Washington State has one of the most sophisticated invasive species networks, and has cannibalized the commission on biodiversity.

More often than not, this war employs chemical weapons. Mike Ludwig exposes the very cozy relationship among government, conservationists and the biotech industry that manufacture herbicides in the Truthout Special Investigation: The Pesticides and Politics of America’s Eco-War. Pesticide profiteers have been involved in this offensive from the beginning. One might question whether the chemicals are merely a method of combat or motive for the war.

Ecologists have begun to raise objections to this approach. Some point out it is ideology rather than sound science that drives the targeting of certain species. Some reveal that many of these demonized species are not inherently harmful and in fact provide environmental services as water filters, soil cleansers, stabilizers, enhancers, protectors, and air purifiers. Others remind us the real drivers of plant “invasions” are frequently man made: climate change, nitrogen eutrophication, increased ubanization and other land-use changes. Evolutionary biologists warn against shortsightedness: ecosystems are constantly changing. Species and communities naturally come and go.

And, of course, there is the warning against the use of dangerous compounds as a solution to perceived problems. As Timothy Scott writes in Invasive Plant Medicine, “[E]ven if the poisons are carefully applied (and they aren’t most of the time) they eventually contaminate the water, soil and air and enter the food chain, affecting microorganisms up through to our dinner plates.” Furthermore, these costly eradication efforts often fail, affect unintended species, (including nearby plants and bees) and actually create superweeds that then require more and stronger herbicides.

Non-native species have been intentionally introduced to hundreds of millions of acres in the US:

Wheat [from the Near East and Ethiopia] 58 million acres
Soybeans [from East Asia] 76.6 million acres
Sorghum [from Africa] 5.6 million acres
Corn [mostly genetically engineered and therefore from nowhere] 92 million acres.

Yet no one calls these monocultures, pesticide-purged of biodiversity, “invasive.”

Thus the label of “invasive species” is political, not ecological. It masks complex issues of land usage and legal questions. And it is exploited to justify an arsenal of control methods that may indeed cause-not prevent-economic, environmental and harm to plant, animal and human health.

Let’s examine some of the featured invasive non-natives in Washington State:

In his paper, Should we care about purple loosestrife?, Claude LaVoie, professor of Environmental Management at Université Laval, Canada describes a massive media campaign to condemn purple loosestrife and refutes the “science” behind it. He calls the depiction of purple loosestrife in scientific studies “(lacking definition) far removed from that in newspapers (alarming)” describing this plant’s negative impacts on wetlands as “probably exaggerated” and pointing out that of the studies done most were somewhat biased, relied on anecdotal information and were not formally reviewed. He considers only one review to be really impartial, “and this one painted an inconclusive picture of the species.”

Though Washington State requires its eradication, edible garlic mustard contains more vitamin C than orange juice, more A than spinach, and shares the medicinal benefits of both garlic and mustard.

On the Hoh River, Japanese knotweed is injected and/or sprayed with glyphosate and imazapyr in the name of salmon restoration. Despite this righteous intent, we have been unable to find any scientific support for Japanese knotweed’s interference with salmon. There is also an assumption that water quality and the water community are unaffected by chemically laced vegetation decaying on waterbanks. The impact of glyphosate and imazapyr on phytoplankton and marine organisms has never been scientifically examined. On the other hand, the virtues of Japanese knotweed have been ignored. Long planted a along riverbanks for stability and shade, beekeepers value the flowers as an important nectar source when little else is flowering. This plant has been used for centuries as a gentle laxative and is an excellent source of the potent antioxidant resveratrol, and it is now used in treating Lyme disease. It exemplifies Tim Scott’s caution that in attacking “invasives,” we may be “destroying potent medicinal remedies.”

Fritzi Cohen owns Moby Dick Hotel and Oyster Farm on Willapa Bay in Nahcotta, WA. For 20 years, she has been fighting the use of insufficiently studied pesticide combinations sprayed by the state and county that have contaminated her tidal flats and oyster beds in order to eliminate a non-native grass, Spartina alterniflora. This eradication project was based on politics, not science. Dr. James Morris, Director of Baruch Institute of Marine and Coastal Science, has demonstrated that contrary to the claims that this grass harms the ecosystem, it provides economic benefits that outweigh the costs of controlling it. This purge has cost taxpayers well over 25 million dollars, degrading Willapa Bay and certainly not helping the health of the ocean.

Chemical warfare campaigns are being waged against so-called “invasive species” on vast tracts of public, tribal, and conservancy land throughout the country which add to the proliferation of pesticides accompanying agricultural GMOs and habitat restoration.

Whether by drift, seepage, runoff or court order, it is an invasion of chemicals, not plants, we should be worried about. The escalating use of pesticides is putting the future of organic, biodynamic, and transitional agriculture in jeopardy. It looks to us as if this is a war on everything ORGANIC.

It is time to reexamine the underlying assumptions and motivations for the ‘war on invasive species’, consider its collateral damage, and explore creative rather than destructive responses to changes in our environment.

We must rely on science not self-interest in distinguishing harm from hype. And realize that the term ‘invasive’ can be arbitrary, ‘harm’ subjective and ‘safety’ unproven. We must abandon eco-illogical practices that throw precaution to the wind and water and soil and if controls are judged -based on fact not fear-to be necessary, we must use methods that safeguard the environment and all creatures in the food chain.

Short of stopping global trade and travel, preventing new introductions will be difficult at best and without reversing global warming species will be migrating and mutating to adapt to climate change. And we are not returning to some imaginary ‘pristine’ Eden. The genie is not going back in the bottle.

Shouldn’t we embrace the possible benefit of these newcomers: as food, fiber, medicine, biofuel, carbon sequestration, erosion control, coastline protection, new industry?

Before embracing “invasiveness” as a claim to virtue that justifies all means of extermination, perhaps we should reflect on the catastrophic changes following the invasion of the Americas by our own European culture.

Visit fearlessfund.info for details For color pictures of the plants described see: http://www.nwcb.wa.gov/

Virginia Daley, Acting Executive Director, Fearless Fund

Fritzi Cohen, President

We have added bold for emphasis, photos, and links to articles about some of the specific issues. Thanks to Ms. Daley and Ms. Cohen for sharing their concerns with the readers of Million Trees.

What is “biodiversity?”

We are republishing an article from the San Francisco Forest Alliance with their permission and the permission of the author of the article, Professor Arthur Shapiro, UC Davis.

There’s been a lot of talk of ‘biodiversity’ in San Francisco recently. The city’s ‘Recreation and Open Space Element’ (ROSE) mentions it without clearly defining it. The Natural Areas Program claims to preserve it. There’s a new position, the Biodiversity Coordinator (currently Peter Brastow, formerly of Nature in the City) within San Francisco’s Department of the Environment.

One of our readers, puzzled by all the discussion, asked a simple question of UC Davis Professor Arthur Shapiro, who gave a talk at the Commonwealth Club a few days ago. Instead of the two-line answer they expected, he sent this detailed response — which he kindly permitted us to publish.

WHAT IS BIODIVERSITY? BY ARTHUR M.SHAPIRO
A buzzword. Biodiversity means whatever you want it to mean. I hate the word. Here’s why.

The following is from the introductory biology textbook we use at U.C. Davis, Life: The Science of Biology, (10th edition, Sadava et al., p.1229 — yes, I said p. 1229!):

“…the term BIODIVERSITY, a contraction of ‘biological diversity,’ has multiple definitions. We may speak of biodiversity as the degree of genetic variation within a species….Biodiversity can also be defined in terms of species richness in a particular community. At a larger scale, biodiversity also embraces ecosystem diversity–particularly the complex interactions within and between ecosystems….One conspicuous manifestation of biodiversity loss is species extinction…”

Got that?

The glossary at the back of the book defines “biodiversity hot spot” (itself ambiguous, conflating numbers of species and degree of endemism), but NOT biodiversity itself. One can see why.

Where did this verbal monstrosity come from?

Heliconius mimicry. Creative Commons Generic 2.0

The raw number of species in a defined area or system – what many of us call “species richness“–is a useful number. There are more species of butterflies in Brazil than in California, and more in California than in Alaska. That is true even if we pro-rate species number by area, and it is not trivial to ask why.

But there is more to biodiversity than mere numbers of species. Ecologists are also interested in how individuals are divided among species, that is, the distribution of commonness and rarity among species. You can have a “community” consisting of exactly two species. It could have, say, 50 individuals of each species, or it could have 99 of one and 1 of the other–or any ratio in between. Does this matter? Why? What can those numbers tell us?

QUANTIFYING DIVERSITY – A DIVERSITY INDEX

A century ago a Danish plant ecologist named Christen Raunkiaer observed that there was a statistical regularity to this; he called it the “law of frequency.” In subsequent years it was found to hold for bird censuses and moths collected at lights, as well as for old-field plants. A whole series of mathematical models developed over the years attempted to account for this regularity by means of assumptions about how species interacted–competing for resources, for example. These exercises were at the core of community ecology for several decades, and were seen as immensely important.

During World War II an applied mathematician named Claude Shannon, working on war-related communications problems at Bell Labs, developed a formula that concisely expressed the information content of a message. Ecologists discovered the Shannon formula in the 1960s and realized it could easily be adapted to give a single number that combined the number of species in a community and their relative abundances.

Thus whole communities could be compared efficiently, a potentially informative and useful tactic in trying to understand how multispecies systems worked. The number generated by the Shannon formula came to be called diversity, and the formula became the first and most widely-used of several diversity indices. I learned it in high school and I still use it in teaching. Diversity had two components, then:

Species richness and
“Equitability,” (the difference between a 50:50 and a 99:1 community).

And we were off and running. Now everything could be quantified with a diversity index: “foliage height diversity” in a forest canopy, or “aspect diversity” in moth faunas (how many wing shape-pattern themes could be recognized?). The number of uses and abuses of the term multiplied like rabbits. By 1971 things had gotten so bad that a paper was published caustically titled “The nonconcept of species diversity.” It was widely applauded for its candor. Unfortunately, the author ended up inventing his own new measure of diversity–one he thought was better than the old ones.

MORE LEVELS OF ‘BIODIVERSITY’

But things could get worse. And they did. With the passage of the Endangered Species Act, which opened the door to protection of endangered subspecies (keep in mind that there is no concept of the subspecies; a subspecies is whatever some taxonomist says it is) and even “distinct population segments” (no one knows what that means), genetics got in on the diversity game. Now we would not be content with diversity at the species level; we needed to
get inside species.

In the scramble to define what might be protectable, a search was launched for “evolutionarily significant units.” With modern molecular-genetic tools, we quickly learned that taxonomic subspecies may be genomically nearly identical, while organisms indistinguishable by the naked eye may be wildly different. Defining diversity at the genetic level is still, well, challenging.

One very useful dimension of biodiversity is known as alpha, beta and gamma diversity:

Alpha diversity is species richness at the local level.
Beta diversity is a measure of how much the biota of different localities within a region differ among themselves–that is, how quickly species composition “turns over” in space [i.e. when you have many different little ecosystems next to each other].
Gamma diversity is at a large spatial scale.

The Bay Area has phenomenally high beta diversity in almost everything.

THE BOTTOM LINE

So what is biodiversity? It’s species richness, plus the distribution of abundance and rarity, plus the geography of all that, plus the amount of genetic variation in selected species of interest, plus whatever you please.

Somehow or other concepts of “quality” have gotten mixed in, too. When you clear-cut a redwood forest (which has very low species richness), the early-successional communities that develop on the site, which may be dominated by “invasive weeds,” will have both much higher species numbers and a richer distribution of species abundances than the forest they replaced. But early-successional communities don’t get any respect despite being more diverse and despite the supposition that biodiversity is good. Because they’re made up of the ‘wrong’ species–whatever that means.

Because biodiversity, after all, is only a buzzword.

Dunnigan Test Plot, Augusst 2011. The result of an eight-year effort to restore native grassland. Does it look "biodiverse?" ecoseed.com. — Dunnigan Test Plot, August 2011. The result of an eight-year effort to restore native grassland. Does it look “biodiverse?” ecoseed.com.

Addendum: We have recently learned that Peter Brastow, San Francisco’s Biodiversity Program Coordinator, has applied for an Urban Greening Planning Grant for the City of San Francisco to fund the creation of a Biodiversity and Ecology Master Plan. This grant application was submitted to the State of California’s Strategic Growth Council for $250,000.

This Master Plan would “identify land owners at the parcel level” (including your backyard; see below*) for “consolidating ownership and/or management of wild lands and natural areas into as few departments as possible in order to facilitate coherent and higher quality habitat restoration and management.” The Natural Areas Program “serves as a model for extending this work beyond Recreation and Park Department lands.” (Quotes are directly from the grant application.) In other words, the Biodiversity and Ecology Master Plan will extend the work of the Natural Areas Program to all open space in San Francisco, regardless of the current ownership of the land.

The complete document is available here: Biodiversity Action Plan – grant application questions.final. We find this a horrifying prospect. The Natural Areas Program is extremely controversial because it destroys existing habitat, uses large quantities of toxic herbicides, and restricts access to designated trails. Applying these policies into all open space in the city is a bad idea

– Million Trees

*The grant application says, “We will review the potential of rear yard open space, green roofs, green walls, landscaping, street trees, mini and pocket parks, and other urban design potential to enhance biodiversity in the urban landscape.”