East Bay creek and watershed projects - some highlights

The growth in activity around creek and watershed protection rests on grassroots organizations and volunteers - people like you.

Want to know what's going on in the East Bay, and how to get involved? Here are highlights of some projects in and around creeks and watersheds (ordered from north to south), and an accompanying list of contact information to help you join in.

Alhambra Creek (Martinez)

Combining education with restoration, the Alhambra Creek restoration project involves students at the local school and neighbors around the creek. The restoration plan itself includes widening and enhancing a natural, erosion-resistant channel, creation of a path, and a community garden for the school including a vegetable garden, totem pole, and native plants. New plantings of native trees along the creek banks will grow into a riparian canopy and improve water quality for the stream's native trout. Lots of agencies and organizations are involved. Contact Friends of Alhambra Creek.

Wildcat Creek (San Pablo)

The section of Wildcat Creek nestled along Church Lane, between the San Pablo city offices and a senior center, has seen better days. Both of its banks are almost entirely artificial and littered with chunks of concrete. An upcoming restoration project by the Urban Creeks Council will set back the banks, create a trail beside the senior center, and restore the vegetation with native plants. Plans for overall flood control and restoration across the whole watershed are being developed through the Wildcat and San Pablo Creeks Watershed Council, a public-private agency partnership.

Breuner Marsh/Rheem Creek (Richmond)

The Sierra Club Bay Chapter has been working closely with the North Richmond Shoreline Open Space Alliance to protect Breuner Marsh. The Urban Creeks Council has prepared a restoration design for Rheem Creek, which flows through the marsh into San Pablo Bay. Instead of the current channel of concrete and rip-rap (rock emplaced along the creek banks rather than natural soil and vegetation) the restoration design includes new meanders through the existing marsh, and replacement of the concrete and rock with native, bank-stabilizing vegetation.

West Stege Marsh (Richmond)

The nearby West Stege Marsh in Richmond is one of the few remaining tidal marshes in central San Francisco Bay. It provides habitat for shorebirds and waterfowl, including the endangered California clapper rail. It also contains rare native coastal prairie and upland scrub, which greatly enhance its value to wildlife. The Watershed Project, a nonprofit dedicated to environmental education, is working with community volunteers and students to restore the marsh and adjacent upland habitat.

Cerrito Creek (El Cerrito)

Cerrito Creek has been the focus of two major restoration projects involving the city of El Cerrito and the local volunteer creeks organization, Friends of Five Creeks. They have restored a 900-foot reach at Pacific East Mall and an 800-foot stretch at El Cerrito Plaza. Improvements to the Cerrito Creek Trail, which will eventually connect the north-south Ohlone Greenway to the Bay Trail, are scheduled for early 2005. This spring Friends of Five Creeks volunteers will start removing invasives and begin planting natives along another long reach between the two existing projects. Friends of Five Creeks has also developed interpretive signs at the mouth of the creek and along the El Cerrito Plaza reach.

Codornices Creek (Albany/Berkeley)

Codornices Creek, one of the most open and natural creeks in the East Bay and one of the few harboring a population of threatened trout, is currently the focus of two restoration grants. A partnership among Berkeley, Albany, and the Coastal Conservancy is restoring a long stretch just inland of the Bay. The section had been straightened, but the restoration is adding more natural meanders, a native-plants-based floodplain, and fish-passage improvements (see photos above and on front page). A second grant, managed by the Urban Creeks Council, continues upstream to provide further fish-passage improvements and to implement restoration projects in partnership with creekside landowners. Working with Berkeley Partners for Parks, Friends of Five Creeks continues creating an eventual ridge-to-Bay "urban trail" along Codornices, including interpretive signs at the mouth of the creek into the Bay.

Strawberry Creek area (Berkeley)

Friends of Strawberry Creek, a local volunteer group, does hands-on projects, holds educational seminars, and works on local creek issues across the whole Strawberry Creek watershed. Down by the Bay, restoration at Aquatic Park by the Environmental Greening, Restoration, and Education Team (EGRET) is enhancing bird habitat and replacing invasive plants with natives. Half a mile upstream, near Strawberry Creek Park, where one of the first daylighting projects occurred in the whole country, the Strawberry Creek Lodge Restoration Project has engaged local volunteers, including residents of the site's senior-housing facility, to replant both much of the property along Strawberry Creek with wildlife-attracting native plants, and native, fish-friendly vegetation to control bank erosion. Further upstream the Sierra Club is helping Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza to develop feasibility studies for daylighting the creek through the downtown core, as a model for ecologically based urban redevelopment.

Sausal Creek (Oakland)

In Oakland the passage of Sierra Club-supported city water improvement Measure DD in 2002 has supported a variety of grassroots creek-restoration projects. For example, volunteer-based Friends of Sausal Creek has just completed a major three-year restoration project at Dimond Canyon, removing concrete structures and check dams from 600 feet of the creek and replacing them with native plants for erosion control and bank stabilization. The project is expected to improve water quality, hydrology, flood control, and habitat for rainbow trout and other riparian species. Volunteers will continue to monitor the site, as well as working on many other education and implementation projects around the creek.

Temescal Creek (Oakland)

Nearby, Friends of Temescal Creek is working to enhance Temescal Creek as an urban recreational and wildlife corridor. The group recently received a grant from the Watershed Project to boost outreach efforts for volunteer-based water-quality monitoring. Active since 2002, the monitoring team takes samples at sites where the mostly buried creek is accessible above ground.

Peralta Creek (Oakland)

To the south, Peralta Creek, in the Fruitvale district, provides a wonderful example of the habitat benefits of an urban stream restoration. A few years ago the Urban Creeks Council (UCC) completed a restoration project on the creek's reach at Foothill and 38th Avenues. This past summer, chorus frogs appeared in large numbers for the first time in 35 years, according to local residents. A drip irrigation system was installed to enhance this natural success, and the creek banks now have a gorgeous array of oaks and alders that will provide cover for birds, and shade to cool water temperatures for native fish. Volunteer groups are actively engaged with this project; the Unity Council and Americorps are working with UCC to organize regular planting days for restoring native vegetation. In conjunction with these downstream efforts, the Butters Land Trust is a local group focused on protecting the headwaters of Peralta Creek.

Alameda Creek (Fremont area)

Alameda Creek, which enters the Bay through the city of Fremont, sits as a highlight of the success of grassroots advocacy and implementation efforts in supporting fisheries and creeks restoration in the Bay Area, thanks largely to the local watershed-protection group, Alameda Creek Alliance. Alameda Creek is one of the few streams in the Bay Chapter to harbor substantial steelhead and salmon populations, and supports at least a dozen additional native fish species, such as threespine stickleback, Pacific lamprey, and Sacramento pikeminnow. The 700-square-mile watershed overlaps several cities, moving from rural to urban, and including riparian areas that provide habitat for sensitive species such as the Alameda whipsnake and red-legged frog. The Alliance has worked politically, legally, and hands-on to protect the creek corridor, and to implement significant fisheries-restoration projects up and down the watercourse, including dam removals and installation of fish screens and ladders. The organization sponsors educational events about the creek's steelhead and salmon, and organizes volunteer monitoring teams to observe fish as they migrate up and downstream.

Kottinger Creek (Pleasanton)

The advocacy efforts of the local Friends of Kottinger Creek, teaming with Alameda Creek Alliance, has led to a grant to restore Kottinger Creek. The plan will restore floodplains and riparian ecosystems through stream reconfiguration, bank stabilization, and revegetation to create more continuous wildlife habitat. The newly built surrounding community will benefit from open space, improved water quality, and a reduced threat of flooding and erosion. Volunteers are already providing extensive support for the project, and will provide additional input during every phase, from planning through implementation.

compiled by Juliet Lamont