California Coast & Ocean

Wheelchair Rider's Web Guide
Following on the success of its wheelchair rider's guides to accessible coastal sites in Los Angeles and Orange County and in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Conservancy approved $100,000 to Access Northern California to produce a web-based guide to the rest of the coast. The guide will provide essential details about coastal parks, trails, piers, and other recreational areas for people with impaired mobility. Users will be able to search and print the guide, and will be encouraged to provide feedback to help keep the information up to date.

First to be covered will be San Diego, Ventura, and Santa Barbara counties. After that, Access Northern California will cover the North Coast. Information from two books previously published by Coastal Conservancy Publications, A Wheelchair Rider's Guide: Los Angeles and Orange County Coast (2001) and A Wheelchair Rider's Guide: San Francisco Bay and the Nearby Coast (2006), is already available online at www.scc.ca.gov/Publications/wheel.htm.

Historical Ecology Studies to Help in Restoration Projects
The San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI), a pioneer in the relatively new field of historical ecology, will undertake three studies with the help of $675,000 approved by the Conservancy in May. This work will enable scientists engaged in habitat restoration work along the coast and on San Francisco Bay to design projects in light of information on how those systems functioned in the past. One of the approved SFEI studies will focus on Ventura County's coastal wetlands and rivers. Another will map and analyze historic coastal wetlands from Point Conception in Santa Barbara County to the Mexican border. The third, under a grant to Contra Costa County, will examine historic habitats in that county.

In Ventura County, which has some of southern California's least developed coastal valleys and watersheds, several major conservation and restoration efforts are under way, led largely by the Conservancy: Santa Clara River Parkway, Ormond Beach Wetland Restoration, Ventura River Parkway, and floodplain restoration projects on lower Calleguas Creek to Mugu Lagoon. The SFEI team, which includes the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, the California State University Northridge Geography Department, and Stillwater Sciences, will develop a detailed picture of how the rivers and wetlands looked and functioned before they were significantly modified more than a century ago. Researchers will study historical landscape characteristics, including the stability and migration trends of the river channels, the extent of wetlands, the composition and distribution of other habitat types, and the watershed drainage pattern.

For the historical mapping of southern California's coastal wetlands, the team will rely heavily on the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey's topographic maps (T-sheets) completed between 1851 and 1893 (see George Davidson and the Point of the Beginning. They will determine how far inland wetland habitats then extended and how different types of wetlands were distributed along the coast. The digitized maps will allow scientists to calculate more accurately how many total acres of wetlands have been lost, as well as how much of each habitat type, which will help regional planners and land managers set goals for how much of each should be restored.