By Audrey Glazier:
One dark, cloudy day in November, my Restoration Ecology class was joined by students in another ecology class to attend an educational field trip with the Laguna Foundation. The goal was to learn about the Foundation’s restoration efforts along the Laguna de Santa Rosa, and also gain field experience.
Referred to by the Laguna Foundation as Sonoma County’s ecological treasure, the Laguna de Santa Rosa is a tract of preserved land surrounded by urbanization. It has been altered significantly by humans in the past couple hundred years; cattle grazing by Spanish missionaries, clear-cutting during the Gold Rush, and channelization of the main creek have all left their mark. Remnants of old creek channels are still visible in parts of the Laguna, which now provides free public open space, with restoration efforts and public trails made possible by grants and state tax measures. It is important to restore this land and keep it healthy because it functions as a local wildlife corridor and a stopover for birds migrating along the Pacific flyway.
We met the team – Paul, Brent, and Hannah – at the Foundation’s water treatment facility on the outskirts of Santa Rosa. The team led us to the site where we would be working, and gave us a brief overview on how restoration work is done. First and foremost, the plants are the most important aspect of a restoration project. It’s vital to keep plant sources local, so seeds for this site were harvested from within the Santa Rosa area, to ensure the new seedlings’ genetic ability to thrive in this particular habitat. Here, plants were placed in rows so they could easily mow the exotic grasses that native grazers (deer, rabbits, and gophers) won’t eat. It would be ideal to allow cattle grazing to keep the exotic grasses at bay, but new seedlings are too small to withstand cow activity.
“Three years is the amount of time that a plant is going to be established after you plant it,” Brent said. Our site was planted five years ago, and was now ready to be decommissioned and left to its own devices. Our job, as the work crew for the day, was to survey the planted area and assess the survivorship of the restored vegetation, and then remove the irrigation hoses. Under darkening storm clouds, we set out in pairs, with each assigned a different species to search for. We tallied how many individuals were thriving, not doing well, or dead, and compared our findings to the previous survey from 2015. So far, the majority of the plants were doing great!
Suddenly, the clouds opened up and began dumping buckets on us! We spent our lunch hour huddled under portable awnings, hoping for it to stop before we needed to move on to the next task. Wendy St. John, our instructor, commented to the class that most people figure out early in their careers whether they’d prefer outdoor conservation work versus working form behind a desk. I suspect many, if not all, of the students made their decision at this moment!
After lunch, with only a light rain now falling, we pulled up all of the irrigation hoses, since the plants were big enough to fully rely on what nature provides. This involved gathering the lengths of hose, collecting all the metal anchors and plastic connectors, cutting the hoses into 4-foot lengths, and then bundling them up for disposal. It was muddy and exhausting, but we got it done within an hour or so.
Brent let us know that the Laguna Foundation is very grateful that our classes performed this work. We spent only a few hours at the site, but a smaller team might have spent at least an entire day completing the same tasks. This field trip was an important part of our conservation and restoration curriculum. We were able to get a taste for what restoration work is like, and to decide whether restoration field work is a career we’d like to pursue in the future.
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