The 19th annual Love Your Wetlands Day featuring bird watching, science talks, and Kumeyaay tule boat building was held on Feb. 3 at Kendall-Frost Mission Bay Marsh Reserve in Crown Point.

The annual event was co-hosted by the San Diego Audubon Society and UC San Diego Natural Reserve System, which manages the approximately 40-acre Kendall-Frost Marsh, one of four California habitats used for science research and education.

San Diego Audubon also coordinates ReWild Mission Bay, a coalition of more than 90 community conservation groups working to restore the wetland along the northern shore of Mission Bay and re-establish a critical connection to Rose Creek. The ReWild campaign seeks to restore 315 acres of wetland and buffer habitats adjacent to the Kendall-Frost Marsh Reserve.

Love Your Wetlands Day is a once-a-year opportunity for the public to explore Kendall-Frost Marsh while learning about the importance of coastal wetlands, the climate threats they face, and how local communities are working to restore and protect them.

“Kendall Frost Marsh provides so much value to the City, cleaning Mission Bay’s water and all the users benefit,” said Andrew Meyer, director of conservation for San Diego Audubon Society and ReWild Mission Bay program manager. “We (also) get resilience to sea-level rise and storm surge. Our community gets protection from the physical space that a tidal marsh provides as well as protecting endangered bird species in the 1 percent of marsh that we have remaining in Mission Bay. We need a couple more percentages to be ready for the coming decades.”

Added Meyer: “The City is presently going through their master plan update for the northeast corner of the bay. We want the City to prioritize tidal wetlands marshland restoration in the northeast corner of the bay. We need this parcel, and the rest of the northeast part of the bay, to be tidal wetlands.”

“The Kumeyaay are people of the islands, the oceans, the valleys, the mountains, and the deserts – all these different ecosystems for thousands of years,” said Stan Rodriguez of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel, who is president of Kumeyaay Community College. “We are no strangers to climate change. This environment is important to all of us. We are part of that. We cannot separate ourselves from everything else. What affects one affects us all.”

“Your presence here is indicating to the rest of the world the significance of wetlands, which play a very important role in carbon sequestration and climate change and sustainability,” said UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla, “There’s a lot to study here. If only we could expand the reserve system, we would have natural ways of undoing the negative impacts of climate change. Don’t just look at this as marshland. Look at this as nature’s miracle. We have to work with and support nature and become good partners.”

“Wetlands are kind of a big deal,” noted District 1 Councilmember Joe LaCava representing Pacific Beach, who chairs the council’s environment committee. “There were 4,500 acres of wetlands that used to be here and it is now narrowed down to this corner. Climate change is here. It is happening. We are seeing it every day, and we don’t have to look past the last couple of weeks (high tides and heavy rains). We need to start adapting quickly. And adaptation means not concrete seawalls, but natural solutions. It’s the best response and we can prove it right here.”

Speakers also included Megan Cooper, the State Coastal Conservancy South Coast regional manager and Dick Norris, professor of paleobiology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and interim director of the UC San Diego Natural Reserve System.

The special environmental day was all about community engagement. Hundreds of volunteers participated. They picked up, sorted, and weighed trash, all in the name of citizen science. This year attendees participated in conservation activities from fish seining (counting populations) to bird watching. There were a series of science talks, and marsh tours, and groups worked together to repair traditional Native American canoes in partnership with Kumeyaay Community College.

WETLANDS FACTS

• Wetlands provide flood protection, erosion control, and climate moderation.
• Wetlands function as natural sponges that trap and slowly release surface water and rain (e.g. flood waters).
• Wetland vegetation slows the speed of flood waters and distributes them more slowly over the floodplain. The water storage and slow release lowers flood heights and reduce erosion.
• Wetlands store carbon within their plant communities and soil instead of releasing it to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Thus wetlands help to moderate global climate conditions
• Wetlands improve water quality biologically (when organisms take up nutrients), chemically (when pollutants and nutrients are broken down into other substances) and physically (when pollutants bind to sand/silt/clay and settle out of the water column).
• Wetlands provide a nursery to juvenile fish (particularly halibut) and migrating birds (like the endangered Ridgway’s rail) that are precious to our region’s natural and economic ecosystem.