The National Park Foundation last week received more
than half the money needed to transform 550 acres of Point Reyes Station’s
Giacomini dairy ranch into a saltwater marsh.
The $2.54 million grant from the Gordon and Betty
Moore Foundation will be used by the Point Reyes National Seashore to
breach dikes and levees, as well as carry out other work, to revive
wetlands on the ranch at the foot of Tomales Bay.
The nonprofit National Park Foundation works with
the Park Service on projects nationwide.
The Park Service bought the ranch from the Giacomini
family five years ago for $5.75 million.
Originally a marsh, the land was bought by the Giacomini
family in 1944 when the US wanted to increase wartime milk production.
Subsidized by the federal Land Reclamation Act, the family eventually
built levees to keep water from Tomales Bay from inundating their pastures
at high tide.
The only dairy in West Marin with irrigated pastures,
the ranch thrived with cows grazing from Point Reyes Station to Inverness
Park.
Cows can stick around for now
Cows still graze in most of the ranch’s pastures,
for the Giacomini family – under terms of the sale – can continue
operations on 463 acres through 2007.
Park officials estimate that $5 million will be needed
for the project, with the restored wetlands to be called the "Giacomini
Marsh."
When complete, the restoration project will increase
coastal wetlands in central California by 12 percent, park officials
said. Wetlands ecologist Lorraine Parsons of the Park Service told The
Light that restoration should be completed by the end of 2008.
Parsons, who is managing the restoration, said the
marsh will serve as an enormous, natural water filter for Tomales Bay.
Two-thirds of Tomales Bay’s freshwater comes
from Olema and Papermill/Lagunitas Creeks, flowing across the Giacomini
Ranch, Parsons said. The ranch’s levees funnel the water (and any
bacteria in it) straight into the bay.
A natural filter for toxins and bacteria
But if the creek water is filtered through the restored
wetlands, Parsons said, plants will help reduce the amount of bacteria
entering the bay.
The faster water flows, the more suspended sediment
it can carry. If a marsh can cause the water to spread out, it will
slow down, and sediment suspended in it will drop out.
Plants, she said, will help retain silt in the marsh,
along with bacteria that binds itself to the sediment. And when the
bacteria is absorbed by marsh muck, the nutrient-rich bacteria can help
marsh plants grow.
"Wastewater-treatment districts are actually
using wetlands for this very property," Parsons said, adding that
she does not foresee the Giacomini Marsh becoming a designated wastewater
facility.
A draft Environmental Impact Report on the wetlands
restoration project should be finished next year, Parsons said.