An Ambitious Plan to Re-Create Nature : Wildlife: Some environmentalists have doubts about tollway agency’s proposal for replacing coastal sage scrub.

Ronilee Clark stooped and yanked out a handful of weed. This, she said, holding the leafy stem aloft, is trouble.

Despite nine years and four aggressive attempts at plowing, tilling, seeding and planting, 15 acres at Crystal Cove State Park remain barren of life, except for these stubborn, destructive weeds. It is certainly a poor excuse for what this land is supposed to be--a natural wildlife habitat called coastal sage scrub.

Clark, a resource ecologist at the California parks department, has a warning for Orange County’s tollway agency: Imitating nature is difficult work, and it often fails.

A week ago, county road builders were granted permission by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to destroy 155 acres of coastal sage scrub to clear a path for the $1-billion San Joaquin Hills tollway through the hills between Laguna Beach and Newport Beach.

In exchange, they promised to create 262 acres of scrub on nearby land with the hope of providing new nesting grounds for California gnatcatchers and other imperiled animals that live in the tollway’s path. About half the scrub will be planted atop the closed Coyote Canyon landfill off Newport Coast Drive in Irvine.

The effort by the Orange County Transportation Corridor Agencies will be the most ambitious attempt ever to re-create sage scrub for wildlife.

But as Clark has learned at Crystal Cove State Park, growing the blend of native shrubs is much harder than scattering some seeds. It is an experimental, uncertain process; only about a dozen attempts have been made statewide, and even fewer have succeeded.

“We cannot pretend that we can replace native stands of coastal sage scrub with restoration or re-vegetation,” said Clark, who is overseeing the park re-vegetation project. “The ecosystem is just too complex, and there are so many factors out of our control.”

The land to be cleared for the six-lane tollway is considered prime wildlife habitat, inhabited by 30 pairs of gnatcatchers and 44 pairs of cactus wrens. Both birds are under consideration for endangered species protection.

Experts in sage scrub re-vegetation fear that the man-made scrub will be a poor substitute for the real thing. Even if the plants look natural, the birds may never find it or use it.

“The jury is still out on the overall success, and more important, the methodologies of restoring coastal sage scrub,” said Dennis Murphy, head of the state’s scientific review panel on coastal sage scrub and director of Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology.

“The level of uncertainty is high,” he said, “because there have been both successes and failures.”

For example, the 30-acre Crystal Cove project, on the shoreline north of Laguna Beach, began in 1984, making it the longest-running re-vegetation effort so far.

Five of the acres are considered successful because they attracted 11 pairs of nesting gnatcatchers last year. An additional 15 acres are useless to native animals, while the rest has marginal value, Clark said. Unlike the tollway project, it was designed to revive the park’s natural look, not to compensate for wildlife habitat lost to development.

Federal Fish and Wildlife Service officials who approved the deal with the tollway agency acknowledge the risks. But they say it has a high chance of success because of its magnitude and high profile.

“We suspect their effort to create viable habitat will be substantial and sincere,” said Loren Hays, the federal wildlife biologist who negotiated the deal. “There’s only a very slight possibility that it cannot be achieved.”

Under terms of the agreement, the county tollway agency and the Federal Highway Administration cannot fail.

The wildlife service must be satisfied that 262 new acres are either occupied by gnatcatchers or are the same as “fully functional” natural habitat, according to the contract with the tollway agency.

In addition, two existing acres of sage scrub must be enhanced and four others preserved.

“There’s no provision for failure,” Hays said. “We have the veto authority over what is acceptable, and (the tollway agency) will have to keep trying until they get it right, even if it takes forever.”

Mike Stockstill, a spokesman for the Transportation Corridor Agencies, said his agency has hired biological consultants and is committed to making the re-vegetation successful. The cost, he said, has not been determined. Such projects can run in the millions of dollars.

“Our assumption is we will plant it and it will work,” he said. “We’re just going to take it one step at a time. We’ll work with people who have the expertise to deal with this, and have shown they did it in the past. We are obligated to make it work, and we will.”

About 78 acres, less than one-third of the new habitat, will be planted in April or May. Hays said it could be mature enough to attract nesting gnatcatchers in 1996.

The rest will be planted gradually as the tollway is built. Ninety-four of the acres will be planted when construction is completed in 1997, and since the plants take several years to grow, they won’t be ready for nesting birds until at least the year 2000, Hays said.

Hays acknowledged, however, that so much uncertainty and trial-and-error is involved that it could take much longer. At the Crystal Cove site, for example, gnatcatchers took seven years to begin nesting there.

There is no formula for success. No one is certain what type of soil works best, or what risks pesticides or other man-made threats bring.

At Crystal Cove, the acres that failed were planted atop an area that used to be an old horse stable. The soil apparently contains too much fertilizer, so natural plants are crowded out by weeds.

One particularly destructive weed, called crystalline ice plant, is depositing salt, making the land inhospitable to the native plants. Even worse, its seeds survive in the soil for as long as 20 years.

“We have yet to find the common denominators for success,” Murphy said. “We have intense efforts that failed, and intense efforts that succeeded. And we have some areas where there was virtually no effort and there is now coastal sage scrub there.”

Environmentalists have also raised concerns about the choice of the garbage dump as the major site for re-vegetation, since they fear pollution will harm the birds.

The landfill, which contains 36 million tons of garbage, reached its capacity and was closed in 1990. The trash is now being capped with various layers of soil, clay and fiber at least six feet thick, said Cymantha Atkinson, a spokeswoman for the Orange County Integrated Waste Management Department, which operates the landfill.

Atkinson said the fears about pollution are unfounded because methane fumes are already being collected by wells and runoff is channeled into drainage ditches.

“From our perspective, there is no reason (habitat creation) wouldn’t work there. It seems like a compatible land use,” she said.

Environmentalists are especially angry because the restoration agreement was approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service less than three weeks before the same agency will decide whether to protect the gnatcatcher as endangered. The deadline for the decision is March 17.

Officials with the federal agency, however, insist that the deal was the best they could negotiate with the tollway agency. Even if the gnatcatcher had already been listed as endangered, Hays said the conditions for approval would have been identical.