Salt Marsh Restoration Experience in San Francisco Bay

Abstract

WILLIAMS, P.B. and FABER, P.B., 2001. Salt marsh restoration experience in San Francisco Bay. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 27, 203-311. Royal Palm Beach (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Efforts to restore ecologic functions in ten major tidal wetland restoration projects implemented in the San Francisco Bay over the last 25 years have had variable results. Although almost all restoration projects constructed do now support important wetland functions, in a number of cases they have performed or evolved in ways that were unanticipated at the time they were planned. This extensive restoration experience has provided important lessons for restoration planning and design that can be applied in other estuaries. These lessons include: 1) the need for well thought out, explicit, restoration objectives; 2) developing an understanding of restored salt marshes as evolutionary systems that have changing wetland functions as they mature; 3) the need to incorporate an understanding of the morphodynamics, or interaction of key physical processes in restoration design, and 4) the need to fully integrate monitoring into the restoration plan in order to institute a learning curve so that practitioners can build on the experience of earlier projects.