news >> jennifer natali | design for water + land + habitat

05.2010

Edible Roof Greens and Feeds

Can you feed two people from a small urban lot? Now shrink that lot to a postage stamp by building a storage shed. Get the ladder, it's time to start growing food on your roof.

After one year of experimentation, we now have two edible gardening solutions growing on our backyard shed roof:

a set of modular seed-starting trays,
two rows of firmly planted, organic strawberries and spinach.

As summer kicks in, so does the watering. Our next project: intensive rainwater harvesting and drip irrigation will bring it full circle and inform designs for our house roof.

Can we all build affordable homes that stave winter floods, reduce imported water, and keep us eatin good and healthy? What would the Pajaro Valley look like if more roofs grew strawberries?

04.2010

Wildcat Creek Watershed Restoration Action Plan published
Wildcat Creek snakes through the City of San Pablo relatively unnoticed until heavy rains send water pulsing out of storm drains and over creek banks. In 2005, the City along with Urban Creeks Council and San Pablo Wildcat Creek Watershed Council embarked on a planning and prioritization process for managing floods within the lower reaches of Wildcat Creek. The report ties together technical investigations into the causes of flooding, health of the watershed, and habitat quality for steelhead. Based on these assessments, the WRAP recommends strategies and actions to reduce flood risk, improve riparian habitat and develop recreational resources.

After presentations to the City Council and ongoing work with the City's Department of Public Works, grant applications to fund recommended actions are underway. Download the report at Urban Creek Council's website.

11.2009

Vision for a revitalized Pajaro River presented in Watsonville
The City of Watsonville invited the Pajaro River Committee of the Sierra Club to present a vision for a restored river that reconnects residents to a defining feature of their regional landscape. A restored Pajaro River has the potential to strengthen the City's identity, creating a definitive sense of place for the community, and connecting residents in every neighborhood to a vibrant and active trail system for recreational and everday use. While the City Council expressed interest in expanding trails, increasing safety and improving habitat, the River's is currently ignored, devalued, and entrenched in a dangerous and devegetated flood control channel that continues to sink resources and tax dollars into a broken system that promises little protection in a major storm and harbors crime rather than bicycling commuters or wildlife. Broken levees in 1995 left the City underwater.

The Sierra Club committee continues the push to heal the relationship between the River and the surrounding community. The vision presents strategies for a revitalized edge between the River and the City by focusing on well-defined access nodes, connective pathways to the river and an active, public urban face along the river with an expanded mixed-use downtown promenade, multi-use trails, and diverse destinations.

08.2009

Field Course Teaching Assistant, Sagehen Creek Field Station, Lake Tahoe, CA
Geomorphic and Ecological Fundamentals for River and Stream Restoration

06.2009

River Field Camp, Institut Beaumont
Team study of geomorphic processes in northern Provence, France

A team of researchers descended upon the valleys below Mount Ventoux for nine sun-filled days of river exploration, long profile and cross-section surveying, facies mapping, gravel assessment (including an innovative "red board" approach to measuring roundness), bank sediment study, and data crunching to understand channel and vegetation response to long-term land use and hydrologic changes in the catchments.

We focused on the Toulourenc and Ouveze rivers of this Mediterranean climate landscape, where peak flows are generated by infrequent but intense convective storms, characterized by a rapid rise in stage with little warning of high flows. As we searched for reference reaches for further study, efforts at channel stabilization were evident but often failing, revealing conflicts between flood flows, channel response and agricultural interests. Who wouldn't be compelled to protect a field full of lavender or beautifully rolled haystacks?

A long hike up the limestone scree fields of Mont Ventoux revealed the region's unique geology and its history of timber harvest, severe erosion, and then systematic afforestation and how that influenced the current trends of incision or embeddedness of upstream reaches and the channel widening or narrowing of downstream reaches. The long history of settlement and yet the relative congruity between the landscape and the culture as reflected in land use and management really impressed me, especially in constrast to the everday landscapes of agricultural regions of the U.S. Whether the region's increasingly dominant tourist economy helps or hurts that relationship was debated among the local people we met along the way.

05.2009

Western Pond Turtle Workshop, Elkhorn Slough's Coastal Training Program

Turtles, although slow, do move around. They swim, bask on rocks or logs, and head upland to nest. While my work on the Pajaro watershed initially focused on the turtle's home along the river, the female turtle's preference for burying eggs on warm upland slopes is critical to a population's survival. By understanding the full life-cycle requirements for Western Pond Turtles, I now see that restoration for semi-aquatic species must move beyond the channel and even the riparian buffer, and expand into critical upland habitats for species who have adapted to an unfragmented landscape. Elkhorn Slough Coastal Training program has posted a comprehensive set of papers on the Western Pond Turtle. Anyone want to hunt turtles on the Pajaro (for observation only)?

03.2009

California Red-Legged Frog Workshop, Elkhorn Slough's Coastal Training Program

Major message from the workshop: Rather than managing individual frogs, we need to reconnect isolated populations and build resiliency of meta-populations. While happy frogs don't move that much, juveniles may be compelled to disperse from their breeding ponds. And when people move an adult frog (for construction or mitigation), the frog will bee-line home. Remarkably, their movement patterns follow straight lines directly between breeding ponds. Adults have strong directional bearings and a homing instinct, often to their demise if crossing a road, running into prey, or a barrier such as a wall or fence. Frogs and barriers end in tragedy as the frogs do not have the sense to move around the barrier. They just stop. They will often die of dessication or predation. Because of their movement patterns, dispersal corridors or buffers seem less critical than the spacing, arrangement and protection of breeding habitat (shallow, slow-moving, warm water) as stepping stones between populations.

The Red-Legged Frog evolved with pleistocene mega-fauna, therefore their relationship to contemporary grazers, such as cattle, remains important. Cattle watering ponds, trampled and filled with manure, make up most of the frog's remaining habitat. Populations may also depend on habitat along the main stem of rivers for dispersal as evidenced by the isolated populations on upstream tributaries tendency for extinction when the main stem is disturbed and inhospitable.

Salmonid Restoration Conference, Santa Cruz, CA
After a four-day focus on fish science, riparian habitat and ecological restoration, the following stuck with me: lagoons are critical rearing habitat, estuarine processes are complex and fascinating, fisheries biologists get to snorkel for a living and that's pretty darn cool, researchers at the NOAA seem to know what they're talking about, and as bad as our rivers are...climate change will make things worse. I also gained a much greater appreciation for the differences between salmonid species lifecycles and habitat requirements, especially California's Coho and Steelhead. Next year's conference will be in Redding.

02.2009

A Living Mediterranean River published
Based on the Mediterranean Climates class taught by Professor Matt Kondolf and offered through the Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning department at UC Berkeley, the 48-page publication features student proposals for restoring the Rio Real of Portugal to "good ecological status" as required by the EU Water Framework Directive. The 2007 workshop focused on flood management, agricultural impacts, invasive species, stormwater management, and urban waterfronts in the Rio Real catchment. The publication is also available in printed form. Contact Jennifer to request a printed copy.

10.2008

West Coast Green's EcoCity Design Charrette

As described in the SF Chronicle, planners, designers and policy makers gathered at West Coast Green for a brainstorming session to imagine West Oakland as a "sustainable urban village:" a walkable community that is strongly connected to transit, local commerce, urban agriculture, healthy creeks and recreational greenways. I was lucky enough to volunteer as a photographer for the event and indulge in all the excitement of idea generation.

I was most impressed by the groups who used a scaled aerial map and good old trace paper as a tool for envisioning the future of this community. Generating concepts and ideas in the form of lists and value statements seemed to flow with ease. But the groups who used their markers to physically map and draw those ideas into the constraints and opportunities in this specific place elicited more actionable, applicable recommendations for how to move toward a sustainable future for West Oakland. I left with an appreciation for my design training, inspiration from community groups who are making change on the ground (check out urban releaf's grassroots urban forestry), and some hope for our future.

My photographs of the charrette are featured on EcoCity Builder's Sustainable Urban Villages project site.

08.2008

Sierra Club Ventana Chapter Newsletter reports:
Watershed view starting to take hold on the Pajaro River

"Much like the effort required to turn around a supertanker, incremental work over the last seven years by the Sierra Club Pajaro River Watershed Committee has started to change views about the Pajaro River. The latest contribution of the Committee is to set a vision before the community of how it can reconnect to the River. Recently the Watershed Committee raised money to hire a team of urban planners headed by Dr. Matt Kondolf, urban planner and hydrologist from U.C. Berkeley. Kondolf and his associate, Jennifer Natali have developed illustrations and plans for six sites along the lower Pajaro which would connect it to its communities. The Committee will take these maps and drawings to local organizations in order to inspire a new vision for this important local waterway." [more]...