Resilience: A New Conservation Strategy for a Warming World
As climate change puts ecosystems and species at risk, conservationists are turning to a new approach: preserving those landscapes that are most likely to endure as the world warms.
The San Francisco Bay was once one of the richest estuaries in North America. Almost completely enclosed and protected from the open ocean, and with more than 200 freshwater creeks feeding into it, it was a fertile refuge for young salmon, halibut, sturgeon, anchovy, and smelt. It was lined with some 200,000 acres of tidal marsh, and the connected Sacramento Delta doubled that, creating a region so rich and productive it was known as the Everglades of the West.
By the middle of the 20th century, infill for development and diking had shrunk the bay’s tidal marshes to just 40,000 acres. In 1999, the San Francisco Estuary Institute set a goal of bringing the acreage of tidal lands in the bay back to 100,000. Several thousand acres have been rebuilt since then, and the replacement of nearly 30,000 more is in the planning stage.
Then came the specter of climate change.
Environmentalists realized that hard won gains could be undone as the sea level rises and claims the marshes — new and old — which are home to the clapper rail, a shorebird, and the salt marsh harvest mouse, endangered species both. “So the question isn’t just how do you restore tidal marshes,” says Robin Grossinger, senior scientist with the San Francisco Estuary Institute. “But how do you increase resilience as you restore them at the same time?”
Conservation is a moving target and growing more that way, in ways both predictable and not.
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