Long-term tidal marsh restoration in central California wetlands is bringing back important breeding habitat for birds.
Wetlands along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers have been strictly controlled for more than a century by a series of levees that drained wetlands. But while some more recent changes seem to encourage the presence and diversity of marsh-breeding songbirds and waterbirds, blanket changes discouraged the presence of a few open-water and mudflat species.
“In the delta landscapes, if the goal is trying to recover this larger suite of species, including shorebirds, maintaining open areas of water and tidal mudflats is an important restoration consideration,” said Jason Riggio, an ecologist at the Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology at the University of California, Davis.
Starting in the late 1800s, land managers began making large-scale changes to the tidal marshes formed upstream of the meeting of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers between the cities of Sacramento and San Francisco. Most tidal marshes around the area were leveed, drained and converted to agriculture…