“San Diego’s Wetlands are Fighting Back and Here’s How” 

If you have driven along San Diego’s coast lately, you may have noticed stretches of muddy, reedy terrain  that don’t quite look like a beach. These are wetlands, the soggy often overlooked transition zones  between land and sea that filter pollutants, buffer against flooding, support wildlife and sequester carbon. During the 20th century, San Diego County’s wetlands experienced a lot of degradation due to urban development. Now, thanks to a wave of restoration projects, the wetlands in the county are slowly recovering.

ECOSD’s Resilient Wetlands Campaign has been tracking progress across more than a dozen active restoration sites, from the Mexican border all the way up to Carlsbad. This article will cover the recent developments to the wetland restoration projects.

At the southernmost edge of the county, the Tijuana River Estuary has long been one the most ecologically valuable coastal wetlands in California. However, years of sediment build up, altered water flow, and cross-border pollution have degraded much of what was once a thriving expanse of salt marsh and tidal mudflats. However, the Southwest Wetlands Interpretive Association has been leading a restoration project for this delicate ecosystem and in May 2023, the project cleared a critical legal milestone when a Record of Decision was issued, formally approving a long-awaited restoration plan.

Phase 2 of the effort will restore approximately 80 to 87 acres of coastal wetlands and upland habitat. The  approach is methodological with crews excavating new intertidal channels connecting to existing sloughs, restoring tidal flows to areas cut off for decades and carefully layer low marsh zones beneath higher marsh buffer zones. These designs allow the estuary to rise with sea level rather than drown beneath it. The habitat improvements are expected to benefit endangered and migratory species that depend on the estuary, including birds that use the Pacific Flyway

To read the full article, click the link below:
https://sandiegoeco.org/wp-content/uploads/ECOSD-Wetlands-restoration-article.pdf