Welcome to the Home page of the Habitat Restoration Group, an affiliate of the Benthic Lab at Moss Landing Marine Labs

Restoration Goals

Many of the problems that are now associated with California's waterways stem from the fact that natural watershed functions that served to maintain high water quality and wildlife have been disrupted.  Some of the functions that are lost when watersheds are destroyed include filtration of pollutants, recharge of aquifers, flood storage capacity, and habitat maintenance for native flora and fauna.  Restoration of the core of the watershed is one of the most technically and scientifically sound, and cost effective means for solving many of these problems.  We have been working within the Moro Cojo Watershed to restore, enhance, and create wetland habitat.  Throughout the Salinas Valley much of the historical wetland habitat has been converted to rural and agricultural uses.  Much of the runoff from these modified habitats is funneled into created, or highly altered, waterways that are essentially used as drainage ditches to remove excess water.  This water often has very high nutrient and pesticide concentrations, which eventually enter the Monterey Bay Sanctuary.  Our group is working towards restoring wetland habitats in order to restore wetland functions.

By ponding water that for over much of the past century has been streamlined into the ocean by numerous ditches, we will allow it to percolate into the substrate and hope that it will eventually reach the local aquifers, reversing a 50-year trend of seawater intrusion into the coastal aquifers.  Wetlands allow for the finest sedimentary particles (which transport pesticides, metals, and other pollutants) to settle out of the water column, preventing the concentration of these materials at deepwater locations such as the Moss Landing Harbor.  Restored wetland vegetation and microbial organisms “clean” water by removing and breaking down nutrients.  Restored upland vegetation around the wet corridors buffer the wetlands protecting these habitats from being impacted by human activities.

The Moro Cojo Project directly targets several environmental and water quality problems identified in the Moro Cojo Slough Management and Enhancement, Northern Salinas Valley Watershed Restoration, and the Central Coast Regional Toxic Hot Spot Cleanup Plans by implementing measures that address the primary goals and objectives of these plans, within the context of an active large-scale agricultural setting.  Our specific goals are the enhancement and restoration of the natural resource values of the wetlands, floodplains, and adjacent upland habitats of these watersheds for maximum biological resource values, particularly for species of special status, as well as to reduce the impacts of human activities on wetland resources (particularly those that affect water quality).  Furthermore, our project will demonstrate the use and advantages of Best Management Practices (BMPs) for the watershed, while providing natural resource interpretation, educational, and research benefits, all of which are stated goals and objectives of these plans.

Two very general principals guide our restoration of native habitats and ecosystems.  The first is that restoration sites should be developed as biodiversity centers, which can function to preserve as many native species as possible and to spread these species into other habitats in the future.  All native habitats in our regional watersheds are rare.  The few surviving habitats are usually highly degraded, and thus low in ecological diversity.  Historically, these same native habitats covered very large geographic areas.  Therefore, all restoration areas in the present human disturbed landscape should be biodiversity centers, unless there is some compelling ecological or socioeconomic reason not to do so.  The second guiding principal is that restoration is a natural process.  The main focus should not be on static plans, but on this active process of ecological succession.  A primary restoration goal is to establish a natural succession of native species, often using aggressive early native colonists to help control invasive non-native weeds.  These weeds usually dominate grazing lands, farm edges, and non-agricultural open space throughout watersheds.  Whenever possible, weed control should be part of the natural process of ecological succession.  Each restoration site is a spatial and temporal mosaic of native habitats and species.  There is no static end point.  This is especially true for rare annual plants that depend upon the periodic provision of open space, which is usually created by disturbance to perennial species.