Many New Wetlands Wither Away in Neglect : Environment: Few attempts to re-create freshwater areas have succeeded in Orange County, and habitats are disappearing statewide despite ‘no net loss’ rule.

Dead saplings jut out of the barren soil like shattered bones. A handful of sickly, knee-high willows and sycamores struggle to survive among pervasive weeds and piles of litter; the other trees--hundreds of them--show no signs of life at all.

This is a six-acre, man-made wooded wetlands in Mission Viejo, created by home builder Barratt America. The area, long neglected, has become a dusty moonscape of dead trees and debris, and if any wildlife lives there, it’s likely to be an urban rat.

Barratt, like builders across the nation, agreed to create a freshwater wetland alongside a creek in exchange for being allowed to bulldoze a natural one that was home to songbirds, deer, hawks and an occasional mountain lion. Such trades, called mitigation, are a fledgling effort to comply with a national policy that forbids a net loss of wetlands; for every acre destroyed, one must be restored or created nearby.

But a review of projects and records shows that wetlands, already rare in California, are disappearing despite the “no net loss” policy declared by President Bush three years ago. Of the estimated 50 to 90 attempts to create freshwater wetlands in Orange County, some have failed miserably, others are off to shaky starts and only a few have been declared successes so far.

Even worse, the vast majority of projects are left unchecked.

State and federal wildlife officials, charged with overseeing wetlands, have no way to know in most cases if the restoration work was even started. They have inadequate manpower to monitor them, so only the largest and most high-profile projects are tracked or evaluated.

California Department of Fish and Game biologist Mike Giusti estimates that “fully 90%” of the wetlands mitigation projects in Southern California are never completed as required.

The lack of follow-up is a “shocking, major deficiency” in the national effort to protect the rarest of the country’s ecosystems, said Harriet Hill, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scientist responsible for monitoring wetlands in Southern California and Nevada.

“Without that, we’re not meeting the intent of the law at all,” Hill said. “It should be a major priority, but we don’t have the staffing or time.”

More often than not, failures in building marshes are caused by neglect, frequently due to a landowner’s attempt to cut costs, according to wetlands consultants and wildlife biologists. Well-planned mitigation projects are expensive; restoring a 25-acre piece of land can cost over $1 million.

“It is a very rare project that is fully successful,” Hill said. “There is not a sterling record as far as mitigation. . . . There’s always a tremendous amount of uncertainty around it, and the overall success rate is very low.”

Developers and local governments say wetlands mitigation is a balanced way to allow economic growth while still protecting a rare resource. When a project is done right, everyone wins, they say, because larger, improved wetlands often replace old, patchy ones degraded by weeds and urban runoff.

Marsh building does have a few success stories. Government-backed restorations of several salt marshes, especially Newport Bay and Anaheim Bay, apparently have worked well. Results so far have also been promising at several new, large projects to create freshwater wetlands undertaken by major developers such as the Irvine Co. and Santa Margarita Co.

But creating wetlands is a complex science that is developing slowly by trial and error, so many projects suffer serious problems even when the developer has good intentions.

“Things are getting much better,” said Sat Tamaribuchi, the Irvine Co.’s senior director of environmental issues. “There was a learning curve we all had to go through, and the trend is to do it better and better.”

Wetlands, which include inland freshwater stream beds as well as more familiar coastal salt marshes, are among the world’s richest natural systems, rivaling tropical rain forests in their diversity of plants and animals. One third of the nation’s endangered species are reliant on wetlands, which also provide winter homes for more than half of the migratory birds in the United States and spawning grounds for 75% of commercial sport fish.

Losing wetlands is like shutting off the life-support system of the creatures that depend on them for food and shelter. Fisheries collapse, birds and mammals vanish, plants and trees die.

The nation’s wetlands have been bulldozed at the rate of 60 acres per hour for the past two centuries--amounting to a total loss of more than 100 million acres. Already 53% are gone, while the status is much worse in California, where 91% have been developed, drained, filled or paved, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Every year, an estimated 50 acres of freshwater wetlands are lost in Orange County, even when considering the new man-made ones that are supposed to replace them, Giusti says. That amounts to perhaps a 2% annual loss of a habitat that already has nearly disappeared to development, roads, flood-control work, agriculture and other urban impacts.

“We’ve probably lost 75% of the wetlands in Orange County. We are trying to protect the remaining 25%, but we are losing those too,” Giusti said.

Duplicating nature’s formula for the mix of plants, soil conditions and hydrology is difficult, and there are numerous examples of botched design, construction or maintenance of restoration projects.

Often, it’s a case of a herbicide sprayed in the wrong place, sprinkler heads turned in the wrong direction or an undetected leak in an irrigation line. Or the problem can be a miscalculation of exactly where the water table lies, or a failure to detect too-salty soils or an overly steep slope.

Sometimes the wrong trees are planted--Italian poplars instead of native cottonwoods in one case, or weeping willows that thrive in the Midwest rather than the willows that can survive in California.

Many companies try to cut corners, while others encounter unforeseen technical problems. Others are so slow that years have passed between the time they destroy the wetlands and the time they replace them, leaving the area’s wildlife with nowhere to go in the meantime.

Some mitigation projects are never done at all, or simply abandoned, such as the Barratt America project in Mission Viejo, at the corner of Glenwood and Pacific Hills drives near Oso Parkway.

Barratt America Co. was supposed to plant hundreds of willows and other wetland trees in 1989 and monitor and maintain the site for five years. The saplings were planted, but then abandoned; no irrigation was installed and the mitigation is a complete failure.

Tim Cane, Barratt America’s director of land acquisitions, said the company abandoned the project when the land as well as its nearby Pacific Hills development was foreclosed upon. Wildlife officials, however, say whoever destroyed the original wetlands--in this case Barratt America--is held responsible under the law for ensuring that the compensation works.

Even when a project goes well, decades-old wetlands with 40-foot-tall willows are replaced with one-gallon seedlings that are a foot tall. It takes about two years of irrigation and five years of vigilant maintenance for the new wetlands to become self-sufficient; it takes even longer for them to grow dense and tall enough to match natural areas.

And once built, do these new wetlands merely look like a natural one, or do they actually behave like one, with a full, healthy ecosystem? There is little biological data--and much controversy--on that subject. So far, no endangered species has ever been known to use a freshwater wetland created in Orange County.

A National Research Council scientific panel concluded in a report issued in April that restoration should not be used in exchange for destroying natural wetlands until there is more certainty about the outcome.

“Mitigation efforts cannot yet claim to have duplicated lost wetlands’ functional values. It has not been shown that restored wetlands maintain regional biodiversity and re-create functional ecosystems,” the panel of 15 scientists said in its report.

The National Research Council team urged scientific studies to answer the unresolved biological questions, but added that “project proponents do not want to know and regulatory agencies cannot afford to find out.”

A review of a dozen recent mitigation projects in Orange County showed half have had serious problems, some undetected or uncorrected for years. Some examples:

- The city of Irvine created a 2.5-acre wetland in 1989 near Veeh Creek, at the dead-end of Lake Forest Drive. But apparently the city stopped irrigation too soon. The best trees are only a few feet high, and the place is overgrown with weeds. Federal records show city officials were warned in July, 1990, that at least 100 trees had died and the area needed more water, but no corrective action was taken.

* The Orange County Water District was supposed to create 17 acres of wetlands at the same time it destroyed wetlands along Santiago Creek to build a system to replenish ground water. Planting didn’t occur until November, 1991--more than three years after the development was completed. Even if it succeeds, there is a five-year gap between the loss of habitat and the creation of a new one.

* At Mason Regional Park in Irvine, Los Alisos Development Co. created a 25-acre wetland, one of the largest in the county. Planted about a year and a half ago, it is suffering some serious problems, including spots where no trees will grow, and the project will fail if left uncorrected, said Jack Fancher, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist in Carlsbad who has monitored Southern California’s wetlands for 15 years. The company says it is investigating the problems.

Restoration of most coastal salt marshes is easier than trying to create a wooded freshwater wetlands; if an opening is cut to the ocean to restore tidal flows, nature does most of the rest as long as care is taken to prevent buildup of weeds and silt.

After suffering some initial trouble spots, Newport Bay, Anaheim Bay, Talbert Marsh and part of Bolsa Chica are now considered new, improved homes for thousands of birds and spawning fish.

However, many other salt marsh restorations in California have been troublesome because of badly designed plans. Perhaps the worst was spearheaded by the State Coastal Conservancy to restore a Humboldt Bay marsh. A berm built around the marsh left it virtually dry and useless to wildlife, yet developers for years were allowed to use the failed project as compensation for draining other coastal wetlands.

Most of Orange County’s recent failures, however, come not with the high-profile coastal salt marshes but with attempts to create inland, freshwater wetlands.

These complex areas, called riparian habitat, are wooded areas found along creek beds. They are wetlands even though they only rarely contain water on the surface. The roots of willows, cottonwoods, sycamores and other plants dig into a high water table.

With care and expertise, these wooded wetlands can be artificially created. When done right, willows and other riparian plants grow as easily as weeds, sometimes by inches per day.

In 1987, the city of Anaheim planted 12 acres of riparian wetlands in Weir Canyon to compensate for an auto center built near Ball Road. Five years later, the trees are tall and thick, closely resembling native wetlands nearby.

There is “no magic, no witchcraft” to the work, “just common-sense farming,” said John Tettemer of Tettemer & Associates, a Costa Mesa environmental consulting firm that handles many wetlands creation projects. Included are an Irvine Co. site next to UC Irvine, which has been growing well, and a large, newly planted Mission Viejo Co. site along Aliso Creek.

Most failures, Tettemer said, occur either because the location chosen has improper hydrology or soil, or the plants are weaned off irrigation water too soon.

“You need the right planting and water and loving care,” Tettemer said. “If you create the right hydrologic situation, it becomes like growing weeds. It’s helping nature do what nature knows how to do perfectly well. All we have to do is be committed to do it right.”

The rate of initial success is “about 50-50,” with the worst record among smaller developers or companies, said Trish Smith, a wetlands restoration ecologist with Michael Brandman Associates. The Santa Ana environmental consulting firm handles about 50 wetlands projects per year, including a highly commended Santa Margarita Co. site a mile off Ortega Highway.

“You need the expertise of many people. You need soil scientists, hydrologists, botanists, biologists, restoration ecologists, landscape architects and sometimes civil engineers,” she said. “It’s not easy work, and it’s not easy to convince the developer that they have to do all these things. They don’t know any better, and it’s hard for them to believe you have to go to all that trouble.”

Smaller Orange County developers say they often have trouble finding and affording suitable open land for wetlands mitigation, especially since it must be close to the habitat it is replacing.

“Trying to find 25 acres in Orange County you can use is virtually impossible unless you’re the Irvine Co. or Rancho Mission Viejo,” said Emmet Berkery, vice president of Los Alisos Development Co. After a long search, his company persuaded county officials to allow them to use Mason Regional Park in Irvine to replace wetlands bulldozed to build Pacific Commercentre, a nearby business park.

Major developers, however, aren’t immune from problems. The Irvine Co. failed twice to create a 16.5-acre patch of wetlands near UC Irvine at the corner of University and Campus drives.

In the first attempt, in 1988, the company used its own agricultural division, and workers accidentally sprayed herbicide on the new plants, killing half of them. A year later, after replanting, the irrigation system failed and no one noticed until the trees were dead.

After that, the Irvine Co. was warned by state and federal officials that it would be denied permission for new development unless the problems were corrected. In the third attempt, begun in 1990, the company spared no expense, and the results look highly successful.

“It doesn’t serve anyone to do it wrong--it just costs more money,” said the Irvine Co.’s Tamaribuchi. “It is in our interest to make sure the (wildlife agencies) are more than satisfied with the results because we want to continue to get credits” for new development.

The Santa Margarita Co., Orange County’s second-largest landowner, also has had mixed results. So far, wildlife officials are pleased with its largest project, in Canada Gobernadora, a remote canyon off Ortega Highway. The company and the county’s tollroad-building agency are building at least 57 acres of wetlands there, the largest freshwater wetlands restoration in Orange County. It is compensation for building Rancho Santa Margarita and the northern leg of the Foothill toll road.

But the company’s other effort, a project along Tijeras Creek to replace wetlands removed for an 18-hole golf course, suffered some problems, perhaps due to overwatering. The site, however, has improved, the company’s consultants say.

“There’s a lot of trial and error in it, but we’ve learned a lot in the past few years,” said Richard Broming, a Santa Margarita Co. vice president.

In general, builders are supposed to avoid wetlands, but they say they often cannot, since topography dictates development, and because control of creeks is necessary for flood control.

Before receiving a permit to build on wetlands, a builder has to submit a detailed work plan to state and federal officials. They agree to plant specific types, sizes and numbers of trees and other vegetation, irrigate them for a stated amount of time and ensure that at least 80% survive. They are usually required to monitor and manage the site for three to five years.

But developers and others who fail to complete the requirements are not fined or penalized, and many are never caught at all. The Army Corps of Engineers, which issues the federal permits, and the EPA have the authority to pursue civil fines, but rarely if ever do.

Three state Fish and Game biologists monitor wetlands from Santa Barbara to the eastern Sierra Nevada to the Mexican border. The federal EPA has just one for all of that area, plus Nevada, while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has one for Orange and San Diego counties.

Failed projects are often found through word of mouth or an occasional drive-by, since there is no regular monitoring by the wildlife agencies.

Whenever the wildlife teams discover a badly done project, they insist on repairs, warning the company that it will get no new permits to build if it doesn’t make things right. “I don’t give up,” Fancher said.

The Corps of Engineers and EPA have the authority to prosecute the companies and seek civil fines, but they have never done so, again citing too large a workload in regulating wetlands.

The agencies have little recourse other than to make them try again. After all, Fancher says, what can you do if the project fails? Force them to tear out the homes? Rip out the road? The damage to the resource is already done.

“It’s true, we should not destroy wetlands under the pretense we will create them someplace else. But in this day and age, that is not realistic,” Giusti said. “We are going to lose wetlands. All we can do is create a system that ensures those wetlands are created someplace else and that they are viable.”

REPORT CARD: Full-page color graphic rates county’s restoration efforts. A38

Land of Lost Wetlands

Agriculture and urbanization have wiped out most of California’s wetlands, including those in Orange County. Wetlands provide many benefits beyond their well-known function of supporting animal life. CALIFORNIA: WORST IN THE NATION

Ten states have lost more than 70% of their wetlands. California tops the list of losses

Pct. Estimated State Lost Acreage Left California 91% 454,000 Ohio 90% 482,800 Iowa 89% 421,900 Missouri 87% 5,583,400 Indiana 87% 385,700 Illinois 85% 1,254,500 Kentucky 81% 300,000 Connecticut 74% 172,500 Maryland 73% 440,000 Arkansas 72% 2,763,600

O.C. WETLANDS: SMALL PIECES REMAIN

About 90% of the county’s coastal salt marshes have been destroyed since the last century. Inland losses are estimated to be about the same. The count along the coast:

Location Size Hellman Ranch 20 acres Anaheim Bay 1,000 acres Bolsa Chica 900 acres Newport Bay 900 acres Huntington Beach 115 acres Talbert Marsh 25 acres Santa Ana River mouth 90 acres Total 3,050 acres Estimated existing pre-1900 30,000 acres

NOT JUST FLORA AND FAUNA

Birds, plants, fish and other types of life thrive in wetlands. But humans also gain from wetlands. Benefits include:

Flood control: Wetlands retain floodwaters that would inundate surrounding areas. Some wetlands also serve as natural flood channels.

Erosion control: Coastal wetlands absorb the impact of tides and waves, protecting inland areas. Inland wetlands can slow the flow of water, reducing stream, river and land erosion.

Recreation: Wetlands are used by fishers, hunters and wildlife watchers.

Water quality: Wetlands filter many pollutants from water.

Fish nurseries: Wetlands are used by fish to spawn or to develop.

Endangered species refuge: Almost 35% of rare and endangered species in the United States live in or depend on wetlands.

Education: Wetlands provide opportunities for nature observation and study.

Agriculture: Some farmers depend on wetlands to produce hay crops. Wetlands also hold water used by livestock and surrounding crops.

WHAT IS A WETLAND?

Wetlands are places where life revolves around the abundance of water. A freshwater lake, a coastal salt marsh and a trickling creek are all examples of wetlands. Wetlands include the large prairie potholes in Minnesota and the Dakotas and ephemeral creeks in Southern California, which may fill with water only a few weeks per year. Waterfowl and plants depend on that water, even if it is only seasonal.

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; National Research Council.