Estero Americano getting more protection
Gold Ridge RCD, Coastal group put funds into restoration
By George Snyder, Sonoma West Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
VALLEY FORD - The Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District has received $250,000 from the California Coastal Conservancy to help continue ranchland restoration work in the upper watershed of the Estero Americano on western Sonoma County's southern edge.
The projects, which will be completed on three Valley Ford area ranches beginning this fall, are aimed at improved water quality and habitat restoration on some 750 acres. All of the work will take place on ranches where the district, based in Occidental, has been granted access and where individual landowners promise to maintain the improvements.
Previously, eight other area ranches have either completed or are winding up similar projects, the groundwork for which began in 1999 with a grant from the Marin Agricultural Land Trust as part of the Marin Coastal Watershed Enhancement Project.
Subsequently, in 2002, the California Coastal Conservancy authorized additional money to extend the scope of the project.
“Our basic concerns are to contain sediment impacts into the Estero,” said Kathie Lowery, senior environmental planner on coastal projects for Prunuske Chatham, an Occidental-based natural resource engineering firm that has been active on agricultural lands in west Sonoma County for at least the past decade.
“We are also interested in nutrient management from livestock as well as building vegetation buffers along streams and wetlands to enhance the resource values,” Lowery said.
Altogether, according to a report by Richard Retecki, the Conservancy's Estero Americano project manager, completion of the second phase of the restoration program will result in a total of about 5,850 acres in the Estero Americano watershed having been served with environmental enhancement projects.
The seven-mile Estero, which runs from Valley Ford to the Pacific Ocean near Bodega Bay, is a diverse and environmentally valuable area, consisting of open water, freshwater and brackish marshes, mud flats, coastal grasslands and a small stretch of coast.
Although surrounded by ranchland, the Estero is an important habitat for wildlife, including migratory and resident waterfowl.
The Estero has in the past been identified as a resource suffering from bank and gully erosion and loss of riparian habitat and sedimentation, conditions the current projects are aimed at addressing.
Projects on the various ranches, located on Valley Ford Road and Highway 1 near Valley Ford, include grading and installing riprap to control erosion, removal of invasive plant species, stabilizing banks with erosion control devices and planting native grasses and trees for wildlife habitat and erosion control.
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