Hello! Welcome to the Slough Cast, the Elkhorn Slough Foundation podcast. Elkhorn Slough is one of California's last great coastal wetlands. We see Elkhorn Slough in its watershed protected forever, a working landscape where people, farming, industry, and nature thrive together. Here on the Slough Cast, we'll explore Elkhorn Slough together, build community, and share stories of the special place. Welcome!
Bienvenidos, everyone! I hope you're all well. It's been a while, but I'm so happy to be back and share today's story with you all. This episode is going to allow us to zoom out and see the big picture of restoration. Imagine like you're a hawk in the sky, but it's also going to allow us to zoom in and really understand the importance of soil, all centered around Sandhill Farm.
We've already done an episode about Sandhill Farm and the restoration story, and in case you didn't get a chance to listen to our Healing Sandhill Farm episode, Sandhill Farm was a strawberry farm. It was causing a lot of issues and water quality of Elkhorn Slough, mainly because of the erosion that was going into North Marsh of the Slough. The hillsides were just too steep to farm, and for years we dreamed of restoring that site. Finally in 2016 that dream came true.
One of the first things that ESF did was stopping erosion. We changed the contours of the slopes. We added huge berms, just imagine speed bumps. That slowed the water down. It gave water a chance to trickle down the roots of the plants. Recharge our aquifers. Now native plants are naturally recruiting, and that's going to continue happening, creating the conditions that oaks and oak woodland need to be created. It used to be an oak woodland at Sandhill Farm.
Now it would take hundreds of years to happen, but we're interested in figuring out if there's anything that we can do to bring back the oaks faster. This beautiful conversation between Connor and Harrah Baker, our conservation specialist, who's been here for five years. Connor also just wrapped up his second year at his master's program at CSU Monter A. Bay. He's going to be talking with Ross Robertson, our director of communications about his research project.
Connor is going to take us straight to Sandhill, and where Sandhill is in its restoration and healing story. Bueno, listos, amanaos. It's a laboratory for trying to get native plant communities established in a soil that has a legacy of agriculture and of pretty severe degradation.
Right? An erosion. So we get to try different things out, and that's sort of what inspired my research project, and really just thinking about, okay, what does an intact, beautiful, ancient oak cathedral have that Sandhill doesn't? So what's the research question that you decided on for this particular project in this place? The research question then is, how can we help grow oaks that form woodlands on a property as degraded as Sandhill farm, where the soil has been depleted over many years?
Can we do some kind of intervention that will actually boost the oaks chances of growing? I want you to imagine just over the ridge of Sandhill farm, that's where our outdoor classroom is. And how are oak the heart of our program? I would say it's probably one of student's favorite places. It's showing up over and over as a favorite memory in student reflections. I think one of the reasons why it's their favorite memory is because that soil is home to so many critters.
You're hearing students excited about finding centipedes, rolypoles, slender salamanders. And it's because it has so much life. Soil is alive. Again, it has fungi. It has the bacteria. It has nematodes and everything. But it looks different. It's a different assemblage than it was before. One that might be more conducive for oaks to grow in. Because the oaks have evolved with certain fungi and bacteria. And I think that given enough time over hundreds of years, the soil would regenerate.
There'd be carbon again. There'd be enough shade and moisture to make it a hospitable place for oaks to naturally recruit into. The idea behind this project is what if it was as easy as bringing in a cup of nice, earthy, nice, dark, rich woodland soil, digging a hole, putting that soil into the hole and popping an acorn in. Could that jump start the process?
I think that if we start there, start at these small regions where the acorn is and it helps those acorns become oaks seedlings, then the roots of that seedling will spread out and have micro-isle fungi. And that can form a network across the whole site. My project, since it's just a master's thesis, is very short. So I'll be looking at the first year of life for an oaks seedling, which is a really challenging and pivotal moment in their lives.
That first summer, especially here in California, we have a Mediterranean climate where we have all of our rainfall comes in the winter time. In the cooler season and during the summer and the warm season, we basically have a drought every year. And oaks and most other native plants are adapted to this. But when you are a tiny seedling, especially in a really harsh site with really harsh soil, that can be a really tough time, or a really tough hurdle to get over.
So my research project is at Sandhill, takes place on a four acre site, on a pretty steep slope, south facing slope. I've planted 168 coast live oak acorns in groups of three across the entire site, randomly selected points in that four acre site. And that group of three is what I'm calling a plot. And in the plot, we have one acorn that was planted in woodland soil that I collected from a nearby oak woodland. And then heat treated that soil to remove pathogens and diseases from it.
Treatment number two is the soil from that site, from Sandhill. It was soil that has been farmed, it's soil that has been tilled up and compacted, and maybe even eroded off and was put back again. Right, so we can call that degraded soil. I heated that soil up to pasteurize it also to remove pathogens, just to see if that alone helps oak acorns grow into seedlings. Treatment number three is just a control. It's the acorn planted directly into the ground with no heat and no soil transfer.
Into that degraded soil. Into the degraded soil. And all three of those treatments get the same cages to prevent herbivory. They get mulch. They're all planted in exactly the same way, the hole was dug to the exact same depth. So I tried to standardize everything about how they're planted and how they're cared for.
That way, if there really are any effects of the woodland soil transfer or of heating the soil, we'll be able to notice them because they won't be confounded by any of those other, any other differences. Treated the soil? Tell us more. Because I was bringing soil from other places into sandhill, there's the risk of bringing in pathogens.
A lot of people have heard of sudden oak death, which was a really devastating disease that's been around in California for a few decades that has caused a lot of mortality in oaks. Okay. And there's a lot of other diseases and pathogens that affect oaks also. So I wanted to mitigate that risk somehow and what I came across of treating the soil was using heat. To kill that stuff? Exactly. Okay. So it's called soil pasteurization, similar to how we pasteurize our dairy, our milk, and things.
It's not the hottest heat that would sterilize, that would completely wipe every living thing out of the soil. So it's only about 60 degrees Celsius. I think that's around 140 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's hot enough to kill most pathogens, including sudden oak death. But it's not hot enough to kill a lot of the beneficial fungi and bacteria that we want in the soil. Okay. Yes. A few weeks after I planted them, I started seeing these little fingers.
They kind of look like little fingers sticking out of the soil. No leaves yet, just a hard little, almost woody finger. And then I think the next time I was out there two weeks later, I was already seeing leaves. And I was just out there today. And there's some that have over 10 leaves. There's some that are 15 centimeters tall. That's almost 16 inches. So they're starting to really settle in. And I can only imagine what is going on below ground. Right.
Their roots are spreading out, feeling out, maybe making contact with my carizal fungi. I would imagine they are since oaks essentially need fungi to survive. That exchange of nutrients and water. They really rely on that. So I picture that in my woodland soil treatments, that those oaks are just covered in my carizal fungi that were brought in from the woodland. And are just creating a massive network of roots, hopefully. Why are oaks so important in this ecosystem?
Great question. Yeah, oaks you could think of as a keystone species, just a foundational species that shapes the ecosystem around it. A lot of our pollinators feed on oaks during their larval stages. Humans love them too. I mean, we associate oaks with, they're very symbolic for humans as well. Definitely one of my favorite trees. Redwoods and oaks are my two favorite trees. Absolutely. Yeah, oaks provide shade for people. They have that beautiful sort of twisted, gnarling, branch structure.
They're just beautiful. They're used by all kinds of birds. They form wildlife corridors for migrating species and animals that travel far distances like mountain lions. Oaks are so valuable, ecologically, aesthetically, culturally, and just to add a cultural note, they're incredibly important to Indigenous peoples of California. They have been one of the most important food sources for Indigenous peoples.
All of these uses and values that oaks have make them an important focus for a restoration. Thank you for sharing about this research that you're doing. I'm curious how did you get interested in restoration work in the first place? Like what led you to this kind of work in your life? What brought me into restoration and land stewardship in general started out with just a flicker of environmental awareness that hasn't always been there for me. I grew up not being super interested in nature.
I was more interested in hanging out at the mall and going to the skate park. And the environmental awareness sort of sparked out of an interest in broadly in justice, in environmental justice when I started learning about issues like climate change and learning about climate change was I think really what made me want to understand nature better and also learn if I had a role to play in getting us out of the mess.
So as I was sort of exploring this stuff in my late teens, early 20s, I was looking for solutions and also ways for myself to become more in harmony with nature and feel better about my existence as a human in a really altered world. So yeah, that's awesome. What's it like being able to do the work that you do? What's your favorite parts about it or
what tell us about how that nourishes you now? And so I'd say my favorite part is it's the calm and the serenity of being out there and all of the other noise and drama of our lives just kind of drifts away and you can tap into the consciousness out there. You can start to see patterns and recognize patterns over different seasons or see relationships between things that you couldn't see before.
I'd say that's one of the most rewarding things about my work is just that sense of calm and connectedness and a familiarity at this point having been here at the slew for five years, I've gotten to know different places and have a sense for their change and their evolution and what I can do to help. I think an important part of the job is just noticing the responses of changes that we make
as stewards. When we take out invasive trees or we plant native plants or we mo an area or we dig upon, how is the landscape responding and what is the least amount of change we can make that the landscape will respond to positively. It's like Bucky Fuller's idea of a trim tab. Have you heard that? I'm going to get this wrong probably but on a really big ship, like a military ship, like a giant ship or a cruise ship or something. It has a rudder that it's using to steer.
There's a really small little piece of the rudder that's almost like another rudder that's independent that they first move that and then they will almost like it will start the ship turning and then the rudder itself can move. So it's like a little tweak, like the smallest, the lightest, most delicate gentle, well placed tweak of a system to get it moving in a different direction. Because if you have a giant ship with all this inertia moving through the water, it takes a lot of energy
just to pull a big rudder over to get it more forceful. There's a delicate way that this is an engineering thing, but Bucky-Minstor-Fuller applied that idea to technological and creative solutions to things like systemic environmental problems that you're really looking for that trim tab so that you're not trying to go through there like swinging giant, let's cut all those trees
down and like plant a bunch more. It's not like a macro level thing. It's these little micro adjustments to try to learn from the ecosystem and work with it in a more delicate way, which is empowered by the more you know about. You have to know a lot. You have to really pay attention. It's not about just like, oh, it's not crude, it's sophisticated, you know, that kind of thing. Wow, the trim tab, I'm going to keep that in my back pocket.
And I'm keeping it in my front pocket. I always wanted to have Conor speak about how he approaches this work. It's a conversation that I've had with him before, but we got him to speak about it. Check it out. One area of my own, I guess a passion of mine and an aspect of the work that I think really drives me at this point. I guess you could call it my stewardship philosophy is focusing on bringing back processes on facilitating processes as opposed to objects.
The way I learned about restoration and the way it was introduced to me, and this is how I thought about it for years was we need to remove the weeds, the invasives, and we need to put in the natives that belong here, that should be here. And that's just, that is us like the claw at the arcade reaching down and grabbing, you know,
what we don't like, removing it and putting in what we want to be there. I think what this misses the environmental forces that I have actually shaped what's there, what we're seeing. And even the intact pristine so-called plant communities we see were shaped by these forces like fire and disturbance and Pleistocene megafauna like woolly mammoth coming through and trampling and grisly bears coming through and eating grass and all of these sorts of long-term slow and big
processes that actually shape the habitats. What we can do as stewards and restorationists is bring back some of those processes, we can simulate large herds of elk moving through and keeping the grasslands nice and short and sparse for wildflowers to grow between them with mowing
or with livestock grazing which we do at Porter Ranch. And then hopefully we'll have large herds of tuli elk here again actually grazing and performing that function but in the meantime we can mow, we can have a grazing regime, we can implement other disturbances too, we can explore the use of fire as a as a stewardship tool. I'm really interested in this process-based restoration and that's really informed kind of how I think about ecology, how I see a patch of land.
If there's weeds on it five years ago I might freak out and just want to remove all the weeds but now I'm more attuned to like what are the weeds doing, how are the different plants interacting and behaving on this site and is it headed towards a balance? Is there a need for a process or a disturbance to happen here? Or maybe that weed isn't behaving in an invasive way so we don't have
to put a ton of energy towards removing it. Some we definitely do. I'd say the vast majority of non-native plants and we might call weeds, we don't have to put a whole lot of energy into removing them because they're sort of naturalized. If our objective, if our vision for the future, for a restoration site is like a flourishing, diverse functioning habitat that's sequestering carbon that is supporting pollinators that's providing cover for wildlife movement, all of these functions
and then functions for us too like recharging groundwater is just one example. It really advantages us to think more about the processes that lead to that outcome that naturally have led to habitats like that taking shape in the first place. The more that we can sort of guide those processes and not just think about things in nature as objects to remove or insert, I think that will be much better often in getting to that vision. Connor, you are one of the first people that
took me out on the land. Since then, I learned to be with myself out there, to listen, to feel, so I thank you not only for the work that you've been doing, but before you've done for me and my journey here, which is some other guys has to Ross for hosting this conversation and I hope you've learned something today. I know I did. When are everyone that wraps up this episode, honored to have shared this story with you all today and I hope to see you out there soon.
We have member events coming up this summer. Please visit the website alcournsu.org, so you're up to date on all our outings. Well, we'll see you. Bye!