Fern Canyon

A few photos from the archives- my work at Fern Canyon

Beam-Raising at Columbia Science and Natural Resources Center

We recently celebrated the raising of the last beam for the new Science Center at Columbia College in Tuolomne County, California.  This building will be LEED Gold, which is fitting for a building placed atop a former gold mine in the foothills of the Sierras.  The main features of the building are the geothermal wells to heat and cool the building, large solar panels, plus the centralized preparation room for the science labs.  Outside in the landscape, we selected plants native to the foothills and county of Tuolomne to restore surrounding habitat and shade the hardscapes.  My contribution to the project was awarded the highest possible number of LEED points for landscape water efficiency and site development. 
I see this place as a nurse site to reintroduce plants that were missing from the surrounding landscape due to the degradation suffered during the gold mining days.  Not only did we chose plants that were missing from this community, but we also chose plants that would provide food and shelter for animals of the foothills.  What added to the complexity was finding plants that fit these requirements and were also available in the nursery trades in the quantities we need for this project. 
When we undertook this project, we intended to preserve all the trees between the building and roadway, and as part of this the key trees had been given special names so as to give them more significance in the planning process. This helped keep us all on the same page when later in the process, other professionals assigned the trees their own numbering systems, which ordinarily could have made things really confusing. Here we are three years after the initial planning process began, and unfortunately bark beetles have hit the region hard as a result of climate change, in ways we have yet to imagine.  Our Sentinel Pine became infected very recently, and there is no cure for the diseases the insects bring with them.  The Sentinel was a loss we all mourned, as the building footprint had been determined originally by our desire to keep this, the site's largest pine, standing tall and providing shade for the hard surfaces below it. 
Designers are rarely asked to consider the future of a project or product after their ideas have manifested themselves in the physical, let alone years into the future.  On my projects I try to incorporate the history of a place- in this case, the gold mine and even the time before this- as well as possible outcomes for the future to create a long view that guides my decision process.  In this case climate change threw me for a loop, and I imagine many other people have been experiencing unanticipated outcomes as a result of human factors they hadn't considered. What happens, for example, if predictions come true and we in California lose so many of our key species?  Will we no longer even have redwoods, or oak forests?  And if not, what will there be, if anything? 
These are questions that continue to vex me, but I counter these uncertainties by incorporating into my plans ecological principles such as redundancy, genetic variation, and adaptation.  In the end, if I have done my job well, no one will even know I was there at all.

Columbia Child Development Center

We recently celebrated the opening of the Child Development Center in Tuolomne County, California.  The team (myself included) designed this center on the campus of Columbia College to allow mothers to continue their education by providing a fun place for their children while they're at class.  The place is revolutionary on many levels.  The five building center mimics a village in the rural foothills, with each age group in their own miniature house.  Rather than sequestering operation away in a different area, each building has two classes united by a kitchen with washer and dryer in the center, so the children are never far from the sounds they associate with home.  It seems as if it were designed by the children themselves, with doors and windows, even the sinks and toilets, set at their height.  My favorite part is that the center was set in the middle of a mature oak forest, with no grade changes, so the buildings are on piers to prevent damage to the root systems of the trees.  These trees, aside from being loved by the children, will serve the purpose of keeping the buildings cool in the summer, part of our LEED design. The photos where you can't see the buildings for the trees- that's the point! I was brought on the projects as an ecologist with the goal of preserving as many trees as possible. 


For more on this project see my other post
http://greenmyplanet.blogspot.com/2007/12/value-of-tree.html

The Value of a Tree

I asked in the last article the question "How much is a tree really worth?"
A few weeks ago I found myself asking that very same question while working on a project just west of Yosemite, in Tuolomne county. I have been working as the ecological consultant and landscape designer on a 5 building college facility, nestled beneath a mature oak forest. We've been designing what we hope will be the coolest Child Care Facility ever, where kids will have a connection to nature and a desire to protect it and other natural places when they get older.
We're shooting for LEED certification on this, and the oaks are a key aspect of the 'greenness' of the project. In fact without them, our goal of eliminating the need for summer air-conditioning and reducing our cost to build and maintain the facilities would never be possible.
These are amazing trees, most sporting trunk diameters of three feet of more, and canopies that stretch out as far as 50 feet! Many of the trees are spaced so closely together that they have combined their shapes to form single arching canopies, their roots just as surely entwined with one another. With summer temperatures reaching sometimes in the hundreds for days at a time, these oaks will provide much needed shade for the buildings.
Building a structure in a mature forest is no easy task. It is well known that oaks trees suffer greatly form the impacts of development, from damage to their roots to alteration of the way water moved on the land they have grown up on. There are many different professionals who work as a team when planning any building project, and this one has the added responsibility of ensuring the health of these oaks. Normal projects involve altering the land dramatically, as when trenching to lay utilities, grading to make flat surfaces for foundations and handicap accessibility. Here we are not able to do any of that without first considering the effect on the oaks. Our buildings will be unique and attuned to their habitat, with special features such as piers over roots, which I like to think of as buildings on their tiptoes, that allow the buildings to rest on the land without altering it.
We are now in the process of awaiting permitting, and eventually the plans will go for public bid. It is an unfortunate fact that in the contracting world, the low bidders are the ones who get the contracts. This often means cutting corners wherever possible, including 'accidentally' losing trees to reduce the labor time needed to move materials and equipment carefully on a site. With all this special design put into preserving trees, the architect and I decided to write into the specifications penalties that would make construction think twice about causing our mascots any harm. I found I was crouched over my specifications asking myself, "How much are these trees worth if we had to replace one?"
I started reviewing the tree protection specification from other LEED buildings. Not much help there, this is a quiet revolution we're waging with this project. The numbers I came up with, when applied to my project, gave the average value of their cooling services at about $25,000 each, a negligible loss considering the value of the project itself. Then I factored in the service of providing the key element in the landscape and what that would take to replace. Then the value of keeping the campus lake free of soil runoff by stabilizing the hillsides. I got some figures on replacement of the trees, and was astounded to find the price of a mature oak at half the size would cost $36,000. This is just the price of tree and installation, without any of the administrative costs factored in.
In the end, the architects and I decided on a number that would make each tree worth around $100,000, though this value is by no means complete. I wince to think of any value attached to an organism that has taken so long to reach this size. I think of the Miwok Indians who must have planted these trees and then nursed them to maturity, knowing that future generations would be able to harvest the acorns, an essential part of their traditional diet.
Evaluating ecosystems services is a great technique to preserving functioning, intact ecosystems because it helps people realize their monetary value in this profit-driven economy. A growing body of economic and scientific evidence shows that humans simply cannot design systems that perform these core services better, be it filtering our air and water, providing the necessary pollination for more than 2/3 of our food supply, or even growing the natural products we get from the forests and oceans. This is another important tool in our arsenal when we as designers and scientists wage the quiet revolution.

Ecological Consultation and the Swallows

A few weeks ago I arrived early to a brainstorming meeting for a child care center at a community college near Yosemite National Monument. I stood waiting inside the brand new Learning Resources Center when suddenly a flurry of movement drew me to the second storey windows to see the commotion. Outside there were possibly a hundred or more cliff swallows busily making their mud nests under the eve of the building. I watched mesmerized for a few moments, and began taking pictures. The sound of all those birds calling to their mates was loud, and I noted with amazement how rare it is these days to have the sounds of animals rise above the cacophony of humans and their activities, even in a remote place such as this campus. The nests were still small, just patches on the walls, occupied in turn with one mate while the other rushed off to some unknown location to collect mud. Upon return it sometimes took a few passes before the swallow could land properly on the little stub and add more mud to it. It's amazing that the swallows have enough energy after all that work to raise next year's flock, but once the work is done they return and reuse the nests year after year.
I lost time as I stood there watching those swallows, until a man walked up and said quietly, "Look at the mess they're making,"
I turned to him and smiled. He was right, there was mud all over the sidewalk, the eves, and the windows. "They're beautiful, " I say.
Just then the moderator of our meeting walked up and we entered the room. She commented that it breaks her heart that the maintenance crews knock the nests off to try and get rid of the swallows because they make such a mess.
I felt myself recoil. I was here at the meeting as the Ecological Consultant, invited by the architect to help make the child care center project environmentally friendly. I reminded myself I had a job to do, and now was not the time to get upset. As the meeting came under way my mood was elevated by the efficiency with which the moderator laid out the session, and by the responses we were getting from faculty and staff. They really had done their homework, and were dedicated to creating a facility that nurtured both children and the surrounding habitat on campus.
By the time I returned to the subject of the swallows after our meeting, I had started to believe that there could be a solution to the problem. The man I'd talked to earlier turned out to be the director of management at the college, and I told him that swallows are incredibly valuable because their main food source is mosquitoes. He was surprised. They're an asset in the wrong place, I told him. He asked me what I could suggest to do.
I thought for a moment. Then I told him that the swallows are getting the mud from some place out of the site of the building, most likely from the edge of the reservoir nearby. "Find out where they're getting the mud, and put up a structure that imitates the wall and eves of this building. It doesn't have to be elaborate, just provide shelter and easy access to their building materials."
"Will it work?" He asked, sincerely interested.
I point out that they're spending money on knocking down the nests, and money on spraying mosquitoes, so it would be worth the effort to come up with a better solution. He nods, smiling.
The next day I have an email from the moderator. She's heard that the swallows eat mosquitoes, and that there could be a solution to having them on campus. She's begun gathering support to try and relocate them. Over the next few hours, I receive several emails from others on campus as support for the swallows grows.
Whether the relocation works, we've yet to find out. I've talked to people since who have different theories about why cliff swallows seem to prefer buildings to their cliff sides. Some think it's diminishing habitat, while others have pointed out that it could be the thermal advantage of buildings for incubating eggs. One thing is for certain- when a shift has begun on campus, and what was once thought to be a nuisance is now being seen as an asset, everyone wins.
At the end of my day its victories like this that make me proud to be an ecologist.

learn more about Cliff Swallows

Restoring the Redwoods

A few years back I had the pleasure of working at an estate nestled against open space on Mount Tamalpais, where the main focus was to create natural gardens for the children of the family and support the local wildlife. One of our big projects was to restore the habitat of a redwood forest along a creek and to invite native species back, including the Giant Pacific Salamander and the endangered California Newt.
The work had been in progress before I joined the team, where they had connected up several sections of the creek that had been disrupted by a fire road. At the stage where I joined the project, we freed the trees and tall shrubs along the creek from the grip of algerian ivy and planted native plant species such as Oregon Oxalis, Huckleberry, and Western Sword Fern. The plants started to establish themselves and in time the forest became lush and green, but there were no amphibians. We would see them just on the other side of the fence, but they never ventured over to our side. We wondered why.
We practiced only organic methods here at the property, and taught seminars in the community and the Greenwood School about gardening and design working with nature. One big push was for the use of compost to improve soil quality and drainage, eliminating the need for inorganic fertilizers and improving the overall health of a garden. Every spring I joined the crew with the wheelbarrow, and we would clear the leaves from the previous year and mulch every inch of the property, including the forest.
Then one year I took an Integrated Pest Management course at College of Marin. I learned about soil pathogens and their transmission, and that unfinished compost could spread disease. Up at the property I began to clearly identify that what we'd previously thought were gophers killing all our maples was not an animal, but a soil-born fungal infection from family of diseases collectively known as wilt. More investigation revealed that our practice of mulching with unfinished compost in combination with pruning had allowed these fungi to infect our trees through the wounds. It was everywhere we looked, and each time we cut into a dead branch the blue streaks of diseased tissue revealed wilt in another precious tree.
We promptly haulted our mulching practice until we could find a more reliable source for our compost. Remarkably, many of the trees recovered. During that time we let the forest cover itself in the rust colored duff of fallen redwood leaves. We debated if the duff would smother the young seedlings of the trilliums and other tender plants. Instead, the forest seemed to flourish. And by this accident, one day we discovered salamanders in the largest pool of the creek, basking in the sun that filtered down through the trees.
The one thing our forest had lacked was fallen leaves.


Integrated Pest Management website for California UC Extension