October 16, 2024After doggedly pursuing funding for long-term restoration monitoring, River Partners will soon begin to see the fruits of its labor.
As part of a $40 million grant River Partners received from the California Wildlife Conservation Board (WCB) in 2023 for restoration planning and implementation across the San Joaquin Valley, nearly $4 million of the funding is earmarked for a Before-After Control-Impact monitoring project (BACI), led by River Partners Restoration Science Ecologist Dr. Sarah Gaffney and Restoration Science Ecologist Ashley Verna. The grant runs through June 2026.
The WCB is known for funding restoration projects that will produce measurable and meaningful impacts to protect California’s biodiversity, rather than esoteric research projects. The organization recognized this when it funded River Partners and our BACI project.
BACI is a method used to assess, measure, and evaluate the success of project objectives and the impact of activities (like conservation efforts) and outside forces (like floods and drought) on restoration sites and to assess how closely outcomes are attributed to restoration practices. To do this, River Partners has matched up a future restoration site (called a planning site, for which River Partners is also writing restoration plans) with a nearby site which is similar in size and physical characteristics that has already been restored (a reference site), either by River Partners or another entity, or a remnant ecosystem that has never been restored. Pre-data is collected before restoration begins to provide a baseline for post-restoration data collection. River Partners scientists can then directly compare a set of metrics—like vegetation diversity and pollinator abundance, for example—before and after restoration.
It’s a practice that can pay dividends over years, and even decades, and can even help inform our future restoration efforts throughout the state of California.
“For the outcomes we need to assess how successful a restoration project is, we really need to be going back to sites after year 10, year 15, year 20, and onward,” Gaffney said.
This summer, River Partners paired Sweetwater Ridge, a planned 560-acre restoration site in Merced County, with a site within the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge, a sprawling 26,800 acres of wetlands, riparian woodlands, and native grasslands. The two are just a few miles from each other and boast the same type of habitat, wildlife, and vegetation.
Receiving funding for monitoring-only projects is rare in the restoration space. And it can be a challenge to integrate monitoring efforts into grant applications, since state agencies are committed to funding work that will result in immediate improvements for wildlife, not necessarily pursuing abstract research questions. However, to get restoration and wildlife science right, the kind that leads to true population recovery, restoration practitioners must study, monitor, track how wildlife populations respond to completed restoration—while continuing to innovate with restoration efforts.
WCB Deputy Executive Director Rebecca Fris said the state program funds many non-profits, land trusts, and local, state, and federal entities as well as Tribes. After River Partners’ grant application went through the agency’s multi-step review and rigorous evaluation process, it awarded River Partners the grant, opening the door to expand knowledge about current and future restoration.
“Projects that most closely align with WCB goals, available funding sources, and state initiatives are most competitive in receiving funding,” Fris said.
“The fact that the WCB views this monitoring work as closely aligning with their goals demonstrates that we have tied our monitoring objectives with the need to quickly, effectively, and efficiently recover biodiversity in this time of crisis,” River Partners’ Associate Director of Science Emma Havstad said.
So how was the BACI project able to get earmarked in the funding package? Helen Swagerty, River Partners Grants Director, believes that what sets River Partners apart from other restoration groups is our ability to understand nuances of each funding program, while our non-linear approach to seeking funding opportunities appeals to and excites our clients and partners to work with us.
“Historically, it has been challenging finding a way to integrate bigger monitoring or research efforts into grant applications,” she said. “The earmark language gave us a lot of flexibility that we normally wouldn’t have in traditional competitive grant programs offered by the state.”
Part of what is so thrilling about the BACI project is not just the restoration itself, but also restoration trajectories. What River Partners considers the implementation phase of our projects is just the beginning of an ecosystem being rebuilt.
“After we get plants established and walk away, pollinators and other invertebrates come in. Then, birds respond to the invertebrates providing a food source. Larger animals or those that require more complex habitat structures take longer to respond to restoration, often much longer than the implementation funding,” Havstad explained.
“That’s why there is a mismatch and a general lack of long-term monitoring data. Our science team’s excitement about this data collection effort is that we are getting to verify and improve our model of how these trajectories work, so that we can design better projects with more specific outcomes and better understand the timeline that these outcomes will be realized.”
So with funding secured and a plan in place, River Partners staff and student interns ventured into the summer Central Valley heat, bushwhacked through overgrown foliage, in order to collect both quantitative and qualitative data for vegetation and wildlife. Their tireless work paid off.
“A More Comprehensive Picture of our Restoration”
To gather data required for our BACI project, River Partners deployed a wide range of monitoring equipment throughout the San Joaquin Valley this spring and summer, each with its own focus.
Acoustic recording units (ARUs) captured sound recordings of birdsongs; point counts documented bird species diversity and abundance at a specific moment in time; and motion-activated cameras snapped photos of medium-sized animals, like jackrabbits, grey foxes, coyotes, and raccoons, as well as larger species. In a vegetation survey method called relevé, a surveyor recorded all species and their cover within a measured plot—many plots per site are looked at to understand the vegetation of the site as a whole; and in pollinator surveys, River Partners staff tallied the number of pollinators in a particular spot for a set amount of time, also on multiple occasions. River Partners is also adding drone footage to supplement the on-the-ground data.
All told, River Partners deployed 67 ARUs to eight BACI sites (four planning and four reference locations), the most ever for a River Partners’ project. Additionally, our teams deployed another 85 ARUs throughout California—for a total of 152—the first time River Partners has deployed more than 15 in any year. In total, camera traps for BACI projects in the San Joaquin Valley captured 28,274 photos.
At both the reference and planning sites, we collected baseline data for wildlife, vegetation, and pollinators, but Gaffney said planning site baseline data can only reveal so much if there is no control site to compare it to.
“We find reference sites nearby where we take data at the same time, both before and after restoration,” she said. “That gives us a more comprehensive picture of our restoration.”
That gives our staff an idea of which species are currently at the paired sites under the same environmental conditions. And that can be helpful as future weather events potentially change the landscape.
“If, say, a fire or a flood comes through in three years, we can state that that data is still viable and comparable even after a certain number of years,” Verna said.
Two areas of particular concern are birds and pollinators. Complementing the efforts of our staff, the ARUs play a vital role in gathering bird data. Bird data is an excellent way to measure restoration success, since birds are relatively easy to locate and observe, while also covering a wide range of habitat types.
Photos from River Partners’ BACI project from summer 2024: 1. gray fox carrying prey at San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge; 2. fawn at Dos Rios; 3. jackrabbit at Ott Farms; 4. buck at San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge; 5. red-winged blackbird at Sweetwater Ridge; 6. coyote at Sweetwater Ridge; and 7. great blue heron at San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge.
“Those will pick up bird calls every dawn period, every day, for around three months that the equipment is out,” Gaffney said. “We’re hopeful they will pick up some rare species that we wouldn’t hear during the two five-minute point count surveys.”
And pollinators are also vital, from the endangered Western monarch butterfly, whose populations have crashed by 99% since the 1980s, to imperiled bumblebees.
“We want to ensure we have current data for them and that we understand their needs so we can adapt our restoration strategies at projects to support them,” Verna said.
Adding all these data points together—audio recordings, photos and video, and human-recorded statistics—provide Gaffney and Verna with a wealth of information about completed restoration, future project locations, and what changes we may employ to our restoration plans.
Collecting the data is one thing—analyzing and interpreting it is another thing altogether.
A Data Analysis Collaboration
Project partners Conservation Metrics and Point Blue Conservation Science are both performing a qualitative comparison, focusing on and comparing bird sounds the ARUs picked up in the field, as well as the data from point counts. Gaffney explains that both ARU data and point count data reveal which birds are living on the sites—but in different ways.
“Point counts give us presence and abundance, while ARUs only give us presence, though the ARUs likely capture more species given that they are constantly recording during dawn hours and the point counts are two five-minute surveys,” she said. “Conservation Metrics and Point Blue will discuss their understanding of the results and use their expertise to identify and explain any differences we see in the two types of data.”
In analyzing River Partners’ ARU data of birds, Conservation Metrics senior data analyst Jaclyn Tolchin and project manager Zoe Gustafson are focusing on the yellow-billed cuckoo and least Bell’s vireo, two species of special interest—the former is federally threatened and state-listed endangered, while the latter is both state and federally listed as endangered.
Both species have specific habitat requirements and overlap with riparian habitats—so, documenting their presence and location can provide us insight into the kind of vegetation structure they are keying into, while also giving us a better idea of the arrangement of plant species to attract these sensitive species.
“We know it would be a big deal to find either of these two species—it would be good news for these populations that are declining and good news for California and its riparian areas,” Tolchin said. “Knowing that we can restore the areas to a point where these species want to come back—and it’s been a struggle—would be promising; it’s cool Conservation Metrics gets to play a role in this.”
Gustafson said their team is excited about the prospect of detecting the bird species that would signal River Partners’ restoration is working—they happily share the wins and successes internally.
“If anyone finds something right away, we post it on our Google chat and everybody gets excited,” Gustafson said.
Joining Conservation Metrics as BACI project partners in the data analysis is Point Blue Conservation Science. Senior Avian Ecologist Autumn Iverson is encouraged to see positive impacts in any conservation work that gets done.
“When a study is set up to be robust and you can actually detect a difference and what you found is rigorous and it’s real, it’s not only something to celebrate, but it also can inform the next stage so you can design even better restoration,” she said.
Iverson said that understanding how to do habitat restoration in the most effective way to benefit the most species is vital, given the limited space and opportunities for restoration work—by the end of the 20th century, over 95% of the Central Valley’s historical riparian forests had been lost.
“River Partners’ expertise with restoration and Point Blue’s expertise with wildlife and birds and analysis work together really well,” Iverson said. “Together, we can highlight how well restoration is working and also inform future restoration efforts with the data we’ve analyzed.”
Collaborating with River Partners on the BACI project holds a special place for Tolchin, in part because of the amount of data gathered and that both she and Gustafson live close to the area they’re analyzing—and she’s envisioning something bigger.
“This is what we want to be doing—these larger impact projects with lots of data, lots of sites, and high sample size,” Tolchin said. “It would be nice to use this project as an example of what can be done if it all goes well. It’s not going to be perfect, field work never is, but it could still turn out to be an example of what’s possible.”
Not Done Yet
River Partners hopes to receive the first reports from Conservation Metrics and Point Blue sometime this fall. Seeing success at the BACI sites this summer—ample data, hopeful results, and willing project partners—Gaffney and Verna expect to expand the number to an additional five paired locations, also all in the San Joaquin Valley region, next summer, deploying more camera traps and ARUs next April. Gaffney is eager and excited to continue the BACI work.
“We have funding now to go back to these old restoration sites and see how they’re doing and how they’re progressing,” Gaffney said. “In 20 years when we are going back to these, when these planning sites are actually planted and have been growing for a long time, the data we collect from our reference sites today will give us a hint of what to expect our planning sites to look like in 20 years.”
Jim Cogswell, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Coordinator for project partner Central Valley Joint Venture (CVJV), echoed the importance of long-term project monitoring.
“The BACI project is vital because this kind of monitoring and getting a baseline pre-project and then monitoring through the implementation and post-implementation, that’s the kind of stuff that shows if you were successful in achieving your conservation goals,” he said. “With these multi-benefit projects, you need to be doing this monitoring from pre-project implementation through project completion and beyond to really understand the value of it.”
Cogswell added that collaborative conservation efforts like BACI align with the CVJV’s goal of collaborative conservation—and he’s thrilled to be in partnership with River Partners.
“Given the situation of Central Valley, the loss of habitat, the extreme pressure from development and other environmental change throughout the valley, the only way to effectively make an impact is by collaboration—people cannot do it alone and that is the importance of partnership,” he said.
“River Partners is very unique in their capacity. They are the experts in riparian and river habitat restoration, and they have a long history. Their expertise and capacity to work with others and bring the landowners in, get all those things lined up and then the boots on the ground—River Partners is spectacular at being able to pull all of that together.”
Thanks to WCB, as well as project partners like Conservation Metrics, Point Blue, and CVJV, the perception of long-term monitoring at restoration sites is shifting.
“A lot of people focus on doing the work and getting the restoration in,” Gaffney said. “It’s so rare that we could get money to go back to a restoration site—but we’re changing that a little bit.”
