If you lookup the Arrowhead Marsh alongside the Oakland shoreline on Google Maps, the arrowhead form is placing. If you look nearer, you see that the jap half of the marsh is noticeably darker in colour than the western half; there appears to be an imaginary line bisecting the marsh, and there may as nicely be.
In the Seventies, the Army Corps of Engineers launched a species of Atlantic cordgrass from the East Coast, known as Spartina Alterniflora, to the Alameda shoreline. The East Coast Spartina interbred with the native species of Pacific cordgrass, Spartina foliosa, spawning the hybrid Spartina alterniflora x foliosa.
The hybrid species – and its additional hybridized types — reproduced at a a lot sooner price than the native Spartina foliosa and within the ensuing many years unfold throughout Bay Area marshes, together with Arrowhead. As it unfold, the non-native Spartina drastically altered tidal marshes to the detriment of the wildlife they assist. It grew throughout once-open mudflats, that are essential foraging habitat for shorebirds. It edged out Spartina foliosa and different native vegetation like pickleweed, that are essential for the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse.
In 2000, the California State Coastal Conservancy, the East Bay Regional Park District, and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service based the Invasive Spartina Project (ISP) to systematically eradicate the hybrid Spartina from wetlands within the Bay Area. Over the final 20 years their efforts have helped scale back the unfold of the hybrid Spartina considerably within the Bay Area’s 70,000 acres of tidal wetlands. At a price of $45 million, the realm lined by hybrid spartina has shrunk from 805 acres to 38 acres. But as they labored, they discovered a catch that has prevented them from eliminating it fully.
As the Spartina receded, the inhabitants of Ridgway’s rails — a species protected by the Endangered Species Act — dwindled as nicely, as a result of the hybrid Spartina was a extra favorable nesting web site for them than the native Spartina. To preserve the inhabitants of rails within the Bay Area, the ISP held off on full eradication of the hybrid Spartina in some marshes just like the Arrowhead Marsh, the place the prevalence of rails was particularly excessive.
“The hybrid Spartina was eradicated from one half of the marsh, but it was allowed to persist in the other half, because eliminating it completely would severely impact the Ridgway’s rails,” mentioned Doug Bell, a wildlife program supervisor with the EBRPD.
For now, the ISP clears as a lot hybrid Spartina as potential from the handled half of the marsh each summer season. The marsh, like many different Bay marshes, exists in a state Bell described as a “dynamic equilibrium,” its cautious administration seen as traces on a satellite tv for pc map.
Now that it’s clear the hybrid can’t be totally eradicated, although, UC Berkeley affiliate professor Kristina Hill says she thinks it ought to be embraced. Hill, a sea stage rise and coastal adaptation knowledgeable who’s a part of a Bay restoration group created by the town of Alameda, says the Spartina could possibly be a strong ally in opposition to the specter of rising sea ranges.
In many Bay Area marshes, restoration groups depend on synthetic sediment to make sure sea stage rise doesn’t submerge marshes. Hill believes that the fast-growing and dense hybrid Spartina might assist maintain the floor of Arrowhead Marsh above sea stage naturally, and supply safety in opposition to flooding. “A vigorous plant like the hybrid Spartina is perfect for the biggest problem we have now, which is sea levels rising faster than the marshes,” she mentioned.
The ISP doesn’t agree, and says it is going to proceed to eradicate hybrid Spartina in all however small, fastidiously managed habitat areas. In an e-mail, Marilyn Latta, a venture supervisor on the State Coastal Conservancy, cited the numerous unfavourable impacts of the hybrids on native wetland species as one of many important causes driving the ISP’s efforts.
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Hill counters that the magnitude of the ocean stage rise drawback is such that there’s no time left for a give attention to particular person species. “Sea level rise is going to create winners and losers of its own in the biological world and alter the mix of species residing in the Bay Area,” she mentioned. Instead, she advocates for the safety of the underlying processes of panorama formation, and on this case, the vigorous vertical progress of the marsh as the specified end result to fight sea stage rise.
Other scientists say Hill understates the specter of the hybrid grass. Peter Baye, a coastal ecologist who was concerned with the ISP in its early days, recalled an awesome influence of earlier waves of invasive hybrids on the Hayward shoreline earlier than the institution of the ISP.
“I actually saw them marching out into the mudflats and filling up the tidal ponds, colonizing them and capturing creek beds,” he mentioned. “I’m just hoping that we don’t lose that larger, long-term perspective and the memory of what it was like in the early days of the invasion.”

Baye identified that hybrids and new species unfold at an alarming price, particularly after droughts, when tidal marshes turn into extra saline. With extra frequent droughts projected in California’s close to future, he thinks all different choices have to be thought of earlier than permitting the hybrid to persist.
“It’s an oversized tool with noxious side effects,” he mentioned. If the cordgrass is allowed to persist, he mentioned, “You will be writing off the future biological diversity of almost all other plant species and most other wildlife species, including the potential of something else.”
Bell agreed, saying that unchecked hybrid Spartina wouldn’t solely alter tidal marsh ecosystem but additionally scale back future organic range considerably, making a monoculture. “If we brought back the invasive Spartina, it would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” he mentioned.
Hill says it’s her perception that the disturbance attributable to rising sea ranges and human intervention to lift the floor of the marsh will maintain the hybrid Spartina from colonizing total marshes and forming monocultures. Instead, she says, she thinks it’s likelier that the hybrid Spartina will develop into distinct clumps or patches throughout the wetlands, an ecological function known as patchiness.
“The idea is that if you’d throw 50 snowballs at the side of a barn, then you get patches of white against the barn door,” she mentioned. “And the idea is that you see these patches [of hybrid Spartina] emerge as a mosaic, and that promotes habitat diversity, which in turn promotes species diversity.”
With a lot of the work to remove the hybrid executed, the ISP has been clear that it’s going to not change course now. “The impacts of invasive Spartina are well recognized,” mentioned Latta in an e-mail. “This work is fully permitted, consistent with local, state, and federal environmental protections; and has the support of more than 150 baywide landowning partners, regulatory agencies, natural resource agencies, academic institutions, consultants, and non-profit partners.”
Despite the institutional and scientific assist behind the ISP, Hill says it’s a job that may by no means be full – as a result of regardless of the ISP’s efforts, the hybrid spartina will return ultimately.
“So the question is, what will they do when it comes back?” she mentioned. “It’s really difficult to keep it out forever.”
The divide between Hill and the ISP and different coastal ecologists illustrates a number of the new pressures local weather change locations on conservation science. In a world that’s already altering quickly, scientists and conservation organizations more and more need to navigate a number of, generally competing threats, and search for options whereas navigating legal guidelines written many years in the past on the idea of a steady local weather.

Katharyn Boyer, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University who has labored on Bay restoration for many years, believes that the ship has sailed for the hybrid Spartina – provided that the ISP’s efforts have already eradicated it from a lot of the Bay, it is not sensible to alter methods now, she mentioned. But she advocates for extra severe dialogue about out-of-the-box alternate options like Hill’s, even ones that don’t conform to traditional ecological follow.
Boyer mentioned she has confronted resistance from land administration companies on the subject of interventions that aren’t traditionally a part of the San Francisco Bay, equivalent to a proposal to deposit coarse sediment on the fringes of eroding marshes to mitigate wind and wave power, and the introduction of concrete oyster reefs to assist create a dwelling shoreline. But for her, the truth that the substitute oyster reef venture was greenlit in the long run is an indicator that companies are actually extra open to “non-natural” interventions.
“I am a big proponent of native species,” Boyer mentioned, “but I do think there is merit in the idea that we do not have to manage for species that have historically been in the Bay, because we have a very different Bay than we did in the past.”
Echoing Boyer, Hill argues that useful resource managers ought to change the way in which they consider wetland restoration within the Bay Area and adapt their technique to the revised projections of sea stage rise.
“When they started restoring wetlands in the 1970s, there was an assumption of a very slow rise in the sea level, and that assumption is out the window now,” she mentioned. “A vigorous Spartina is our friend, thinking about how we are going to raise the surface of our marshes so that they can persist in the next hundred or two hundred years.”