More Doubts Than Sprouts

Like any suburban gardener, Orange County’s toll road agency must struggle with torrential rains, marauding animals and bad luck when it attempts to sprout seedlings or transplant fragile flowers.

But this is no backyard garden the agency is cultivating in the rugged foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains. To offset environmental damage caused by construction of the Eastern toll road, its builders were required to launch a multimillion-dollar program to grow the same types of native plants displaced by bulldozers.

Now federal wildlife regulators are raising concerns about that program, noting that some slopes along the highway remain barren and that many rare plants perished in transplanting or soon after.

Toll road officials counter that they are confident the program will work, predicting that the dry dirt slopes that commuters pass daily will soon be sprouting native plants.

They say that they’ve been plagued by bad weather, and that some dead plants simply lived out their natural cycle. And they call the transplanting of rare plants an experimental technique.

“The reason you do experiments is to learn from them,” said Lisa Telles, spokeswoman for the Transportation Corridor Agencies, the quasi-public agency that has spearheaded the building of the county’s toll road system.

But some biologists say rare plant communities should not be viewed as laboratories--especially plants as scarce as many-stemmed dudleya, which has only four main populations on Earth, three of them in Orange County.

Eastern toll road construction damaged one of those stands, forcing some replanting. But while more than 4,500 plants were set in the earth in the winter of 1996-97, only 399 remained in May 1998.

“There’s concern about experimenting with the future of a species, and that’s what it boils down to,” said Fred Roberts, a botanist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The tale of the dudleya replanting speaks to one of the great environmental dilemmas created when development encroaches on areas rich with rare native plant life. Wildlife regulators cannot easily reroute bulldozers--especially to guard plants, which are allotted less protection than animals under the Endangered Species Act.

Critics argue this dilemma sometimes forces regulators to accept weaker plans to protect plants as opposed to animals. They wince at the increasing use of transplanting, saying that rare plants simply cannot be moved as if they were common geraniums.

“It’s incredibly complicated,” said David Tibor, rare plant botanist for the California Native Plant Society, opposing transplanting as a way to compensate for environmental damage wreaked by construction.

To offset environmental damage caused by the six-lane Eastern toll road, for instance, builders employed a whole arsenal of approaches, costing $80 million. Among them were measures aimed at helping animals, such as installing five wildlife undercrossings.

They also created a 214-acre area at Siphon Reservoir to restore and preserve the fast-disappearing plant mix called coastal sage scrub where the gnatcatcher lives.

Federal regulators visited the Eastern toll road in June, four months before it opened to traffic, to monitor its plant programs.

They found some success stories but some problems as well, according to a Nov. 6 letter to toll road environmental official Steve Letterly from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The coastal sage project at Siphon Reservoir won praise from inspectors, who wrote that it promised to be successful. But they were less pleased with the coastal sage scrub that was to be planted along the highway’s side slopes.

“The slopes did not appear to support native vegetation,” they wrote.

The fierce El Nino rainfall washed away much of the planted seed, toll road officials said. Those slopes were reseeded this fall and could flourish with an average rainfall this winter, Letterly said. “You’ll see green on the slopes at the same time you see the hills green up in the country.”

Federal biologists also voiced concern about the agency’s program to transplant two types of rare plants, the many-stemmed dudleya and the chaparral beargrass. Both are considered sensitive plants because of their rarity, although they are not protected by the Endangered Species Act.

The Fish and Wildlife letter faults the dudleya replanting on two counts: Only four groups of plants were established to compensate for 14 natural populations, and the size of the planting sites are only one-quarter of the area of lost habitat.

That letter was written before federal officials reviewed a toll road report showing that many of the dudleya died while or after being transplanted. Others were buried by a landslide, and some perished when trampled by cows.

In the most successful transplanting, 300 plants were moved and 82 remained in May 1998, a 27% success rate. By contrast, 1,425 plants were moved to another site and 60 survived, a 4% success rate, according to the report.

Dudleyas generally have a high success rate when moved, said Mark Dodero, a dudleya expert and senior biologist at an environmental consulting firm based in San Diego.

Transplanting the chaparral beargrass also proved challenging. A total of 660 plants were dug up in May 1996 and stored for about 20 months until new sites were available. About 360 lived long enough to be planted; of those, 41% survived until a summer 1998 survey.

“One reason these plants are rare to begin with is that they have pretty exacting conditions,” said Mike Evans, co-owner of the Tree of Life Nursery, which specializes in native plants. Such persnickety plants may need a special kind of soil and certain moisture levels at specific times of the year--and so may be able to grow in only a few areas.

Toll road spokeswoman Lisa Telles cautioned that many people think of revegetation as what they see in new neighborhoods where developers plant full-grown trees and turf. The agency’s efforts to resprout rare plants, she said, can’t be compared with “the kind of plants you see going into Aliso Viejo in those medians.”