News article in the Orange County Register. Content pasted here:
BY AARON ORLOWSKI / STAFF WRITER
Published: Sept. 27, 2014 Updated: Sept. 29, 2014 3:44 p.m.
Sara Briley, the marine restoration coordinator for the nonprofit Orange County Coastkeeper, lowers a Secchi disk into the back bay of Newport Harbor while checking the water's quality and depth.
KEVIN SULLIVAN , STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
What is eel grass?
• Eel grass: An underwater plant that grows about 2 feet tall in seawater less than 10 feet deep. It grows in intertidal areas and is a habitat for small fish.
• Other benefits: Reduces erosion by stabilizing sediment; increases water clarity by removing nutrients and particulates.
With the tide coming in, a paddleboarder makes his way across rising waters in Newport Back Bay.
Within hours, the tide will rise by 4 feet. But in 15 years, high tide will jump up an additional foot – and an extra 2 feet by 2050, experts warn. And by the end of this century, climate change could mean seawater 5 feet higher.
With ocean levels rising, United States Geological Survey scientists predict the grassy wetlands growing on either side of the channel – rife with a variety of plants, land animals and birds – will drown in the coming decades and become lifeless mudflats.
But underwater and unseen grows evidence of one of the bay’s few defenses against rising seas.
And maybe, just maybe, if the habitat is healthy enough, the Back Bay will survive.
Rising seas, drowning wetlands
Researchers have yet to release their official study of the effect of rising seas on the wetlands in Newport’s Back Bay. But preliminary results are stark.
Best case: By the end of the century, 60 percent of the wetlands will disappear.
Worst case: All the wetlands will be gone.
“Under mid to high rates of sea level rise, Newport’s Back Bay is flooded out by 2100. So it’s pretty much gone,” said Karen Thorne, a research ecologist at USGS.
How much sea levels will rise in the coming century isn’t settled because scientists only know the broad strokes of how climate change will impact the Earth. The details of how many degrees the temperature will rise and where remain hazy. There are several unknown factors, including whether greenhouse gases will be reduced.
If there is no reduction, sea levels are predicted to rise nearly 5.5 feet. Under midlevel scenarios, scientists predict a rise of 3 feet.
In both cases, however, Back Bay’s wetlands perish. Higher water levels will prevent the grasses and reeds from growing.
“It’s no longer wetland. It’s inundated by sea. It’s open water. It’s drowned,” Thorne said. “As the water gets higher and higher, the plants die back and you get more water and mud.”
In many areas, scientists say, encroaching seas will push habitat further inland, converting it into wetlands.
But Back Bay is different. Surrounded for the most part by cliffs and bluffs, the wetlands have few places to retreat to. The wetlands definitely can’t retreat up the sides of the bluffs, but maybe they can retreat upstream. If not, losing the wetlands could mean the death of some species in the area.
Many bird species rely on the wetlands, such as the light-footed clapper rail, an endangered hen-sized marsh bird, and Belding’s Savannah sparrow, a small, rare brown bird. Other uncommon species such as peregrine falcons and brown pelicans also depend on the wetlands.
“The endangered species that Newport currently has all rely on the vegetation. That’s their habitat. That’s the only place they live. So once that’s gone, so are they,” Thorne said.
Complicating matters, the wetlands aren’t threatened just by sea level rise. A host of other factors already have damaged them. Development around Back Bay has fragmented habitat, and fertilizers and pollutants washing off lawns and streets have harmed plant and animal life.
That’s where restoration comes in.
One last stand
An Orange County Coastkeeper boat cuts across the waters of Back Bay and pulls up to the DeAnza Peninsula, a spit of land north of the Pacific Coast Highway Bridge. Earlier this summer, volunteer divers planted more than 300 square meters of eel grass here, some of the only eel grass in Upper Newport Bay.
On a recent day, staffers and several Coastkeeper volunteers are back to check the restoration site, a task they do once a month. Has the eel grass taken root? Will it survive?
Salt marsh grasses poke out from the surface of the water and cover the sliver of land. Beneath the murky water is the eel grass, nearly invisible. Eel grass grows only in shallow water less than 10 feet deep.
The eel grass restoration and other habitat restoration projects offer some of the few defenses local wetlands have against sea level rise.
Make the habitat healthier, the logic goes, and it will have a better chance of surviving. Reduce the man-made threats to the habitat and birds may still have a place to nest and the fish. Add eel grass, which secures sediment, and maybe the wetlands can rise with sea levels
“The more that we restore now, the better chance that these habitats will survive during climate change,” said Sarah Briley, marine restoration coordinator at Orange County Coastkeeper.
The boat stops and the engine cuts off. A bird squawks. Quiet descends.
Briley, a marine biology master’s student at Cal State Fullerton, pulls her wetsuit up and over her shoulders, hefts on an air tank and slips diving goggles on her face. She hunkers down on the gunwale, leans backward and splashes into the water.
She paddles away from the boat, then drops below the surface of the water.
Coastkeeper project manager Austin Brown, who pilots the Coastkeeper boat, watches as every couple minutes a column of bubbles appears, further and further from the boat.
Restoring eel grass is no easy task, Brown said. Divers in scuba gear must carefully uproot baby bundles of eel grass from existing beds, makingsure to keep the root structures intact. They pass the seedlings from water to boat, one bundle at a time.
Brown stows the plants in buckets for transport to the Coastkeeper dock, where other volunteers separate the bundles into plugs that they wrap around Popsicle sticks with biodegradable string.
Divers then take the plugs out to the restoration site and plant them in a grid, a few feet between each plug. It’s just like seeding a lawn, one plug at a time.
The back of Briley’s head appears in the water and she turns to find the boat. She must be in the wrong spot, she says, because there’s a thick eel grass bed underneath and the plants can’t have grown this much since the restoration planting just a couple of months ago.
Brown says it’s the right bed.
Briley allows, “It looked too nice to be what we just planted.”
She clambers back aboard the boat. The eel grass, she says, has young bass swimming around, lots of mussels, even a stingray.
“There’s fish outside the eel grass bed, but you can see a lot more inside,” she says.
Is it typical to have an eel grass bed thrive after just a few months?
“It’s really variable. It’s hard to know, because eel grass is really dependent on environmental conditions, which vary from year to year,” she answers.
Coastkeeper volunteers have planted about 750 square meters of eel grass in Back Bay in the past three summers. It’s a feat they and other environmentalists hail.
But not everyone in the bay shares that view.
Can you get rid of it?
Eel grass doesn’t damage boats or clog up equipment – so that’s not what bothers boat owners.
Rather, eel grass comes with a host of environmental protections – too many for boat owners who want to expand their docks or build near the water.
“The boat owners don’t like when you put eel grass near their boats because if you do anything to the eel grass, you have to mitigate,” Briley says.
Because of habitat protections, anyone who destroys or disrupts eel grass must mitigate the destruction by paying for the restoration of 1.2 times more eel grass than destroyed.
The trouble and cost of mitigation have driven some homeowners to quietly remove eel grass, according to Paul Gerst, founding commodore of the Balboa Basin Yacht Club. Gerst lived on the bay for years and just recently moved to a house on the bluff.
“Eel grass is harvested here by what are called midnight farmers,” Gerst said. “Those are unofficial activities.”
Gerst, who owns a dock building business now, said excessive regulatory hurdles, including eel grass mitigation, have capped the number of docks he’s built in Newport Beach. And that frustrates homeowners.
“You don’t want eel grass within 15 feet of your property. You have to have a mitigation if you plan to remove it,” he said.
On the Coastkeeper boat, Brown pulls up to a homeowner’s dock at outer Linda Isle. Eel grass is common here, with 70 acres growing. Brown stops for a minute to allow two Coastkeeper volunteers to dip sensors into the water to measure water conditions.
A homeowner emerges from around a corner and walks toward the boat. Brown says he has stopped for just a minute to take water measurements related to eel grass.
“Did you find any eel grass?” she calls over.
“Yeah, there’s a good patch here,” Brown answers.
“Can you get rid of it?”
Contact the writer: 562-310-7684 or aorlowski@ocregister.com
