DRAFT 5/26/05

ElkhornSlough Tidal Wetland Plan

ElkhornSlough National Estuarine Research Reserve

Strategic Planning Team

Meeting Summary

Meeting Date and Time: May 5, 2005, 9:30 a.m. –4:00 p.m.

Meeting Location: ElkhornSlough National Estuarine Research Reserve

Prepared by: Jan Shriner, Kerstin Wasson, and Barb Peichel

Attendees: John Callaway, Trish Chapman, Becky Christensen, Kelly Cuffe, Sarah Fischer, Jim Harvey, Cheryl McGovern, Barb Peichel, Mark Silberstein, Charlie Wahle, Kerstin Wasson

Team members unable to attend included (primary members) Karen Berresford, Lou Calcagno, Jeff Cann, Ross Clark, Josh Collins, Andrew DeVogelaere, Kaitilin Gaffney, Scott Hennesey, Linda McIntyre, Julie Niceswanger, Larry Serpa, and (alternate members) Bill McIver, and Yvonne LeTellier

Purpose of Meeting:

Come to consensus on a vision statement and create a draft list of broad goals for tidal habitats in the Elkhorn Slough watershed.

Outcomes:

Understanding of draft science panel documents and outcomes of previous meetings; Consensus on a vision statement; Consensus on the content of the guiding principles statement; Agreement on a method to set broad goals; Draft list of broad goals; List of potential conservation and restoration opportunities

Next meeting dates

  • The next JOINT Strategic Planning Team and Science Panel meeting will be on Wednesday, June 8, 2005from 9:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. The main purpose of the meeting will be to discuss the feasibility of potential large-scale alternatives to reverse undesirable hydrological trends.
  • The next Strategic Planning Team meeting will be on Thursday, July 14, 2005 from 9:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve.

Consensus Decisions

  • Vision Statement
  • Content of Guiding Principles 1-4
  • Habitat Goals (extent of each tidal habitat type for the next 100 years)
  • The 50-year trends are not acceptable and therefore a no-action alternative is not an acceptable course of action.

Action items for Strategic Planning Team members

  • Send Barb your RSVP for the June 8th and July 14th meetings.
  • Read this meeting summary from May 5, 2005 and email any revisions to Barb by Friday, June 3rd.
  • If you have any strong disagreements with the consensus vision, guiding principles, or habitat goals statements, please email your comments to Barb as soon as possible so that she can forward them to all of the Strategic Planning Team members.
  • Read the summary from the April 13, 2005 Joint Strategic Planning Team and Science Panel meeting (

A. Update on planning process and status of draft documents; Review outcomes of last meetings

Barb Peichel, Elkhorn Slough Tidal Wetland Plan coordinator, provided brief project updates.

Planning Process

  1. So far, we are following along the timeline pretty well. The Science Panel is working on developing large-scale alternatives (proposed for January-August 2005) and the Strategic Planning Team is starting to create draft goals (proposed for January-August 2005).

Draft Documents

  1. All six of the draft documents are currently under review.
  2. A 60-page draft document entitled: “A Review of the Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrodynamics and Inlet Stability of Elkhorn Slough”was created by Sea Engineering Incorporated (Ken Israel and Steve Watt). The draft was completed on March 31, 2005 and is currently under review. The preliminary findings from the report arethat bank erosion and channel scour are expected to continue causing the tidal prism and tidal currents to increase because of a positive feedback loop and that both the Elkhorn and Parsons Slough inlets are unstable and could continue to erode and/or have increases in water currents.

April 13, 2005 Joint Science Panel and Strategic Planning Team Meeting

  1. The joint Science Panel and Strategic Planning Team:
  2. Crafted and agreed to seven consensus statements that predict tidal habitat (channel, mudflat, salt marsh, tidal creeks) trends for unrestricted flow areas in Elkhorn Slough for the next 50 years,
  3. Discussed the justification for reversing the 50-year trends, and
  4. Created a preliminary draft list of potential large-scale alternatives to reverse the undesirable trends.

Strategic Planning Team

  1. This Planning Team will be coming to consensus on a vision statement and guiding principles statement, agreeing on a method to set goals, and starting to draft goals.
  2. The current working definitions are as follows:
  • Vision – a short, compelling statement describing a desired future state that will be used to guide strategic planning
  • Goals - the purpose or objectives toward which an alternative or strategy is directed
  • Guiding Principles – general considerations that will be used to guide the development of goals
  • Strategic Planning Tenets – criteria that will be used to evaluate alternatives and strategies
  • Large-Scale Alternatives – possible management options that would have ecosystem-level effects

VISION

GUIDING PRINCIPLES GOALS

STRATEGIC PLANNING TENETS ALTERNATIVES

General Comments and Questions

  1. What has been determined as potential impacts to biological systems? That item was from the April 13th agenda was postponed to a later date as some of these experts were not able to attend that meeting and the work may be more suitable for a smaller working group.
  2. It is possible to make some extrapolations about the biological communities based on what we know about specific species. I was wondering if we can go 50 years without coming to an end point. Assuming rates of loss to be constant then predictions for key groups of plants and animals, then maybe there would be a five-fold increase in shorebirds because of the increase of mudflats and then try to figure out what would factors would limit that increase. It would be a great discussion to figure out what the Slough would look like biologically in 50 years. Greg Cailliet has even suggested that there is a lag time for some of the biological communities to respond to changes in the system.
  3. The ecological working group could also use the water quality information that the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has been measuring such as salinity and dissolved oxygen to help with the biological predictions.
  4. The possible trends for biological communities under a no-action scenario might be hard to create because the different assemblages dependon different things and so you might just have to create a range of possibilities.
  5. But we really need to know how certain animal and plant species might change as there are legal issues for certain species.
  6. Consensus on the 50-year prediction statements represents a huge amount of work over the past months and a major milestone accomplished so we should consider that a success for this project.

B. Review justifications for reversing the trends

Barb Peichel reviewed the reasons to reverse the trends from the April 13, 2005 JOINT Science Panel and Strategic Planning Team meeting. Strategic Planning Team members were asked to expand the list.

Additional Reasons to Reverse the Trends

  1. Because humans caused the changes to the system.
  2. Increased instability to existing infrastructure that could cause flooding or failure of bridges, railroad, and roads.
  3. The invasive species trend due to the habitat changes indicate that Elkhorn Slough may act like an incubator that will inoculatecoastal waters.
  4. May impact human use in a negative way (reduce ecotourism uses).
  5. The current rate of habitat conversion vastly exceeds the rate of the last 5000 years so want to reverse that unnatural rate. Even arresting the rate of change or freezing it may work better than changing it back.
  6. Enhance the sustainability of the system.
  7. Loss and degradation of certain habitats such as salt marsh so those habitats deserve some protection.

General Comments

  1. We need to understand more about the causes of saltwater intrusion so that we know how manipulations to the system would change that trend. Currently Greg Schellenbarger, U.S. Geological Survey, who is serving on the Science Panel, is working on a draft document about groundwater for this project. Past work has been done by Jane Caffrey and her colleagues. Scott Wankel, the current Elkhorn Slough Reserve Graduate Research Fellow from Stanford is using radioisotopes to track nitrate inputs from different water sources, but doesn’t know if he will be able to track the net exchange of freshwater or saltwater moving in and out of the Slough through surface waters and the aquifer.
  2. It is hard to tell if boating would be enhanced with current trends. Larger vessels can get farther up Elkhorn Slough, but smaller boaters such as kayakers have to deal with increased current speeds.
  3. It seems that harbor seals might have larger numbers with the current trends. There is a confounding factor in that recovery though because the main reason the numbers have increased is due to the fact that people were excluded from the haul-out or resting sites. When the Slough was shallower, were harbor seals still coming in? Yes.
  4. There would be an increase in marine species diversity, but that is not necessarily a benefit of a no action scenario because there are very few estuarine communities.
  5. Sea otters might benefit from the current trends, but it is hard to tell since their numbers are increasing on a regional level. There food sources might also be threatened as more soft sediments are scoured away.
  6. Are we required to examine possibilities of a no action plan? No. Right now, we only have funding for planning efforts so if implementation funding is secured for different activities; it is likely that a more rigorous document with more detailed information would be needed for the permitting process. Our intent is to list the pros and cons of each action (including no action) to the best of our abilities under funding and time constraints.
  7. The high level of tidal flushing may be causing fewer impacts to the Slough as far as water quality is concerned, but the loss of marsh vegetation also means that there is less buffer capacity for filtering nutrients.
  8. What if we didn’t reverse the trends? Well, it would be cheaper to just let the habitat loss and degradation continue.
  9. Would the canyon have head-cut into the Slough even if the harbor wasn’t there?
  10. We have been focusing on tidal habitats with unrestricted flow. We also need to discuss areas with restricted flow.

C. Final review and approval of consensus vision statement

DRAFT Vision Statement

Restore the tidal, fluvial, and sedimentary processes in the ElkhornSlough watershed to provide for a sustainable mosaic and diversity of natural, ecologically functioning and connected tidal habitats.

FINAL DRAFT Vision Statement

“We envision a mosaic of historically representative estuarine communities that are sustained by tidal, fluvial, sedimentary, and biological process in the ElkhornSlough Watershed as a legacy for future generations.” – Strategic Planning Team, ElkhornSlough Tidal Wetland Plan

The draft vision statement was created using input from Strategic Planning Team members during the past meetings.

General Comments

  1. Is the vision idealistic or realistic? We know we are never going to be able to completely restore the system to what was there exactly, but we should say that we want to work towards that. A vision should be ideal.
  2. The vision needs to be compelling and the goals should be something that can actually be accomplished.
  3. Can we use the content from the project purpose? The purpose of the Elkhorn Slough Tidal Wetland Plan is to conserve, enhance, and restore tidal habitats in the Elkhorn Slough watershed by developing strategies to address hydrological management issues.
  4. We know there was a better mix of diverse estuarine habitats 100 years ago. Let’s figure out the steps we are going to take to get there, and then back-up and say what we want the endpoint to look like. The vision is not what we are going to do, but what we are going to see. A vision statement sets an outcome and then we need to figure out how to reach this vision.
  5. Then we should rearrange the sentence to start with the phrase, “we envision…”
  6. Do we need a timeframe for achieving this vision – say in 100 years from now?

Use of the words “Restore” and “Natural”

  1. We might not want to use the word “restore” unless we include some sort of historical timeframe. It seems that the harbor is going to stay in the near future so can we really restore the Slough to historical conditions? A historical timeframe might be better included in the guiding principles document.
  2. I think we are struggling with the word “restore” because it is hard to know to what level we should restore the system. Maybe we can use the word “manage” or “provide”.But managing can mean modifying and not reversing.
  3. We want to “restore” the processes to a natural rate. What is a “natural” rate? There are natural fluvial inputs that have a more appropriate sediment input. Creeks should be directly connected to tidal areas.
  4. We need to restore to a starting point. We might not agree on a starting point. There should be a broad encompassing starting point and if there were not constraints we would go back to before the harbor was constructed. We don’t want to create a system that is stagnant and freeze it in a certain time since there can be variability and still be in balance or equilibrium.
  5. We are missing a timeframe of what we want if we don’t use the word “restore”. Right now, the vision statement could address with or without management actions. The vision needs to go back to a more natural mosaic of the way things looked. The vision shouldn’t say that everything is fine with all the human impacts that have taken place.
  6. Maybe we can use “maintaining as functioning system” or “sustained by natural processes”?

Use of the words “tidal habitats”

  1. We need to expand the vision so that processes are understood to be in the whole watershed, not just within the tidal habitats. Yes, the tidal habitats need to include the areas above the tide line. Maybe former and current tidal habitats might be better description.
  2. It all comes back to salt marsh so we need to be more specific in the vision. How about “estuarine communities” since it was put on the map for both tidal flats and marsh in 1935?

Use of the word “diverse”

  1. The words “sustainable”,“mosaic”, and “diversity”, “natural”, “ecologically functioning”, and “connected”are more of a string of buzzwords so we need to shorten that, but the first part about processes actually says something more specific.

Use of the word “ecological”

  1. We can delete ecological if we use estuarine, but need to add biological to the process part.

*Consensus agreement occurred on the vision statement.

D. Come to consensus on the guiding principles statement content

Barb Peichel reviewed the purpose of Guiding Principles which are general considerations that will be used by the Strategic Planning Team to guide the development of Goals. She stated that the overall structure of the different planning components might still need some more work, but asked that Strategic Planning Team members provide comments only on the content of the guiding principles for today’s meeting.

DRAFT Guiding Principle 1

Conserve high quality estuarine habitats and native biodiversity.

FINAL DRAFT Guiding Principle 1

Conserve high quality estuarine habitats and native biodiversity.

  1. Is it assumed that high quality habitats would have good water quality? Yes.

*Consensus agreement occurred on this statement.

DRAFT Guiding Principle 2

Enhance and restore the extent and function of low quality estuarine habitats.

FINAL DRAFT Guiding Principle 2

Improve the function of degraded estuarine habitats.

  1. We don’t want to enhance and restore the extent of low quality estuarine habitats. Let’s drop the word “extent”.
  2. We could use the word “improve” then instead of “enhance and restore”.
  3. Should we say, “function and biological productivity?” No, biological productivity is implied.

*Consensus agreement occurred on this statement.

DRAFT Guiding Principle 3

Aim for a more historical composition of estuarine habitats using the time period just before major human impacts as a restoration goal including characteristics such as:

• the extent of various habitat types,

• features of estuarine geomorphology,

• levels of freshwater and sediment input, and

• the natural rate of habitat change.

FINAL DRAFT Guiding Principle 3

Aimfor a more historical condition of estuarine habitats in the Elkhorn Slough Watershed using the time period before major human impacts as a restoration target including characteristics such as:

  • the extent of various habitat types,
  • features of estuarine geomorphology,
  • levels of freshwater and sediment input,
  • the natural rate of habitat change, and
  • habitats that have suffered the greatest proportional losses in the region
  1. “Composition” might not be the right word for all of the bullets so maybe we could we use “condition”, “characteristics”, or “representation”?
  2. If we have an established a time period as a baseline, how do we make this occur with the constraints on the current system? Let’s not lay the constraints out at this time.
  3. But do we want to turn the clock back to exactly 1850?
  4. No, let’s drop the word “just” to get the idea across that it was prior to human influence, but not an exact point in time.
  5. We could use the word, “target” instead of “goal”.
  6. We still might want to use a different word than “condition”, because it doesn’t capture the whole structure, quality, and function of the system.

*Consensus agreement occurred on this statement but left the possibility to change the word “condition” open at this time if a better term is offered.

DRAFT Guiding Principle 4

Consider compatible needs of:

• species of special concern (state or federally listed as threatened or endangered)