Cascadia Restoration Management and News

Cascadia Restoration Management and News is the SER Northwest Chapter’s quarterly e-newsletter. The content of the newsletter focuses on the practice of restoration within the Cascadia bioregion and includes feature articles, short news briefs, product announcements, notices of events, job openings, and citations/abstracts of recently published research. Join SERNW to start receiving your copy of Cascadia Restoration Management and News.

Excerpts from the Current Issue:

Be sure to click on the “Read more here” button to see the whole article!

Rethinking Restoration

Kathleen Foley Lewis, Conservation Project Manager, San Juan Preservation Trust

“At a Cascadia Prairie-Oak Partnership (CPOP) Conference in 2015, ecologist Peter Dunwiddie gave a talk titled “Is Restoration Dead?” In this talk, he challenged the paradigm of looking backward to reach historical targets in our restoration practices. Instead, he encouraged land managers to look forward—maximizing species diversity on the landscape in light of current, and anticipated ecological changes. Sometimes this may mean employing less conventional strategies—and in the case of the recovery of the endangered Island Marble Butterfy (Euchloe ausonides insulanus)—the planting of a European weed is a crucial element. Island Marbles number in the low 100s– some lepidopterists now think it is one of the rarest butterflies in the world. Its last stronghold is on the southern tip of San Juan Island, at the American Camp prairie, managed by the National Park Service. Since 2016, the San Juan Preservation Trust has been working (alongside other agencies and private landowners) to create additional habitat areas that are planted with the Island Marble’s favored host plant: Brassica rapa, commonly known as field mustard…”

The Sustaining Power of Eelgrass Seeds

Sandy Wyllie-Echeverria and Yuki Wilmerding Seagrass Lab, Friday Harbor Laboratories, University of Washington, and Paul Andersson, San Juan Island Conservation District

“The four families that make up the clade of monocotyledons, known as seagrasses, are unique in that they are the only flowering plants that are fully marine. As such, these angiosperms pollinate and set seeds and release them underwater. The seed rain that follows, contributes to short and long-distance colonization of suitable habitat in the nearshore photic zone of all continents except Antarctica. The seagrass species with the most widespread global distribution is Zostera marina Linnaeus, named by Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linne in his native Swedish) in 1753. The seeds of this species, commonly known as eelgrass in the global literature, have a unique place in the human habitation history of coastal Sonora, Mexico.”

Cypress Island Prairie and Bald Habitats

Toby McLeod, Field Technician, Samish Indian Nation, Department of Natural Resources

“Cypress Island has a diverse history of human management from seasonal fishing and hunting use pre-European contact to homesteading and large-scale logging.Aboriginal use of Cypress undoubtedly is as old as human presence in the Puget Sound, going back hundreds of generations. Several Samish families trace their roots to Cypress in the early days of contact with settlers. In the 1890s, a few early pioneers filed claims to mine iron and chromium deposits on Cypress. Manganese Products Inc. began shipping barge loads of olivine, another sought after mineral, from the northeast side of Olivine Hill to a fertilizer plant in Seattle in 1946. Logging continued on privately held lands until the late 1980’s, by which time Washington State Department of Natural Resources (WADNR) had acquired most of the island for preservation as a natural area.