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Bay Nature Staff Picks of 2024

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Thursday, December 19, 2024

Here, I present results from our highly unscientific poll of our ten staff members on the Bay Nature stories, talks, hikes, and fun facts from 2024 that most delighted us, changed our views of the world, or just stuck with us.Feel free to send yours: letters@baynature.org. —Kate Golden, digital editor Best Quest For this great insect schlep, scientists fed butterflies with Q-tips dipped in Fruit Punch-flavored Gatorade. Cutest Baby Animals To be specific, they are the cutest baby animals that are also a great starry-armed hope for our coasts. Least Anthropocentric Often we write about ecological restoration. Rarely from a turtle’s point of view. This one wended five miles over two months, on two-inch legs, up Redwood Creek.  Best Longread “One of Kimberly Stevenot’s responsibilities as a kid was to hang out by the side of the road and look for park rangers—or anyone else who looked like they might be trouble,” H.R. Smith begins, in a story about the making and the meaning of Dos Rios, the newest California state park. Best NBD Chat with a Superstar Author Amy Tan drove through a storm to join this conversation with our editor-in-chief! VIDEO Best Education Story Our kind of education story, that is. Most Likely to Inspire a Cold Plunge  Sachi Cunningham, a surfer and filmmaker, writes about what the ocean has meant in her own life. Wildest Dial-In Guest to a Bay Nature Talk Guest Amanda Spears joined our talk on the Farallones from the Farallones. (So did some birds, in cameo appearances.) VIDEO Most Game-Changing New Technology Best Private Sunset Hike In August, we experienced an epic sunset in the golden hills of McCormick Ranch, a special North Bay spot that isn’t generally open to the public. Most Dense With Fun Facts We love a long read here at BN, but we also live for fun facts, which are easier to dish out at parties. Best Talk about the Birds and the Bees (and Yet on Neither Bird Nor Bee) Janet Leonard’s talk on banana slug sex in September was very, very informative. VIDEO Most Fearsome Bird Battle  One could also call this a battle of birds vs. biologists. Best Headline Most Sobering Yet Mind-Blowing Introduction to a Species We’ll Never Meet “For each crayfish is a universe unto itself, a host of tiny passengers.” Most Sow’s Ear Into Silk Purse Sediment may not seem scintillating, on the surface, but Sonya Bennett-Brandt will make you care about mud. We must have it, to cement the future of the San Francisco Bay. The Climate Change Story That Got to Us Climate change touches most of our work, yet some stories hit more than others. Why this one? Maybe it was that bats are adorable and fragile-seeming, maybe that people went to such lengths to help them. Most Promising Wad of Cash for Environmental Projects As our next president has promised to axe environmental priorities, conservationists are counting their blessings that California’s voters decided to fund climate adaptation in a big way. Best Reader-Submitted Photography We are lucky to have a community of photographers, professional and amateur, who send us their unusual observations. In March, Dan Osipov beautifully captured an insect that is so rarely photographed, in fact, that federal officials contacted us about using the photos. Most Bay Nature-y News Our thanks to Eric Sanford, the UC Davis prof whose student made this momentous discovery, for the tip. Send your stories: editorial@baynature.org. Finally, a few more moments from the trail … Hardiest Hikers On an unexpectedly blustery day in June, Bay Nature members proved to be hardy sorts who braved the elements to see some coyote brush leaf beetles. Most Hollywood Moment on the Trail At Coyote Ridge in April, just when scientist Stu Weiss was explaining how grazing could control non-native grasses to help native species, a rancher-conservationist showed up … almost as if they had planned it. Best Bioblitz In November we unleashed our inner children at Ocean Beach, digging in the sand to find its treasures. Note to selves: In 2025, more of this. Mole crab (Emerita analoga), with humans.

Butterflies fed with Q-tips, Hollywood moments on the trail, bird battles, beetles, and the Bay Naturiest story of 2024. (It was a competitive field.) The post Bay Nature Staff Picks of 2024 appeared first on Bay Nature.

Here, I present results from our highly unscientific poll of our ten staff members on the Bay Nature stories, talks, hikes, and fun facts from 2024 that most delighted us, changed our views of the world, or just stuck with us.

Feel free to send yours: letters@baynature.org.

—Kate Golden, digital editor

Best Quest

For this great insect schlep, scientists fed butterflies with Q-tips dipped in Fruit Punch-flavored Gatorade.

Cutest Baby Animals

To be specific, they are the cutest baby animals that are also a great starry-armed hope for our coasts.

Least Anthropocentric

Often we write about ecological restoration. Rarely from a turtle’s point of view. This one wended five miles over two months, on two-inch legs, up Redwood Creek. 

Best Longread

“One of Kimberly Stevenot’s responsibilities as a kid was to hang out by the side of the road and look for park rangers—or anyone else who looked like they might be trouble,” H.R. Smith begins, in a story about the making and the meaning of Dos Rios, the newest California state park.

Best NBD Chat with a Superstar Author

Amy Tan drove through a storm to join this conversation with our editor-in-chief!

Best Education Story

Our kind of education story, that is.

Most Likely to Inspire a Cold Plunge 

Sachi Cunningham, a surfer and filmmaker, writes about what the ocean has meant in her own life.

Wildest Dial-In Guest to a Bay Nature Talk

Guest Amanda Spears joined our talk on the Farallones from the Farallones. (So did some birds, in cameo appearances.)

Most Game-Changing New Technology

Best Private Sunset Hike

In August, we experienced an epic sunset in the golden hills of McCormick Ranch, a special North Bay spot that isn’t generally open to the public.

Most Dense With Fun Facts

We love a long read here at BN, but we also live for fun facts, which are easier to dish out at parties.

Best Talk about the Birds and the Bees (and Yet on Neither Bird Nor Bee)

Janet Leonard’s talk on banana slug sex in September was very, very informative.

Most Fearsome Bird Battle 

One could also call this a battle of birds vs. biologists.

Best Headline

Most Sobering Yet Mind-Blowing Introduction to a Species We’ll Never Meet

“For each crayfish is a universe unto itself, a host of tiny passengers.”

Most Sow’s Ear Into Silk Purse

Sediment may not seem scintillating, on the surface, but Sonya Bennett-Brandt will make you care about mud. We must have it, to cement the future of the San Francisco Bay.

The Climate Change Story That Got to Us

Climate change touches most of our work, yet some stories hit more than others. Why this one? Maybe it was that bats are adorable and fragile-seeming, maybe that people went to such lengths to help them.

Most Promising Wad of Cash for Environmental Projects

As our next president has promised to axe environmental priorities, conservationists are counting their blessings that California’s voters decided to fund climate adaptation in a big way.

Best Reader-Submitted Photography

We are lucky to have a community of photographers, professional and amateur, who send us their unusual observations. In March, Dan Osipov beautifully captured an insect that is so rarely photographed, in fact, that federal officials contacted us about using the photos.


Most Bay Nature-y News

Our thanks to Eric Sanford, the UC Davis prof whose student made this momentous discovery, for the tip. Send your stories: editorial@baynature.org.

Finally, a few more moments from the trail …

Hardiest Hikers

On an unexpectedly blustery day in June, Bay Nature members proved to be hardy sorts who braved the elements to see some coyote brush leaf beetles.

Most Hollywood Moment on the Trail

At Coyote Ridge in April, just when scientist Stu Weiss was explaining how grazing could control non-native grasses to help native species, a rancher-conservationist showed up … almost as if they had planned it.

Best Bioblitz

In November we unleashed our inner children at Ocean Beach, digging in the sand to find its treasures. Note to selves: In 2025, more of this.

Mole crab (Emerita analoga), with humans.
Read the full story here.
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To Improve Your Gut Microbiome, Spend More Time in Nature

Microbes found in green spaces can transfer into your body, increasing bacterial diversity and potentially boosting the strength of the immune system.

Microbes in our gut can have a profound impact on our health, but research is showing that those surrounding us in our environment—what’s known as the natural environmental microbiome—can have a big impact too. This suggests that we should all spend a lot more time interacting with nature, both outdoors and indoors.I was first introduced to this emerging area of science by Professor Gretchen Daily from Stanford University. She mentioned a Finnish research project that showed how letting kindergarten-aged children play in a yard that contained “dirt” from the forest floor resulted in a significant positive impact on their gut microbiome. Seventy-nine young children took part, all living in urban environments and spending the majority of their days at different daycare centers around Finland. The only difference between them was that these daycare centers had three different types of outdoor spaces.The first type was a fairly standard outdoor play area, comprised of concrete, gravel, and some plastic matting. The second was the type typically found in daycare environments that are already nature-orientated, with grass, soil, and planted areas for the children to play in. These two acted as a control against which to compare the third experimental space, where the concrete and gravel were covered with segments of forest floor and soil from the local coniferous forest.The children were encouraged to play in only one of the three types of yard each day over the 28 days of the experiment (note that some kindergartens have multiple play areas). Before and after periods of play, the children’s skin and gut microbiota were measured using genetic sequencing of bacteria taken from skin swabs and stool samples, along with changes to T cells and cytokines in their blood. These cells and proteins play a critical role in preventing autoimmunity and autoimmune diseases; their levels are often used as an indication of how well the immune system is functioning.Science NewsletterYour weekly roundup of the best stories on health care, the climate crisis, new scientific discoveries, and more. Delivered on Wednesdays.Remarkable results emerged. The children who played in the experimental yard showed a large increase in the diversity of microbiota on their skin and in their gut in comparison to the children playing in the urban and nature-orientated areas. Importantly, these were the “good” types of microbiota—those associated with health benefits. There was also a significant increase in the children’s immunity markers, indicative of them having gained enhanced immunoregulatory pathways—which is indicative of a reduced risk of immune-mediated diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis.The importance of this study cannot be overstated. It implies that even short-term exposure to nature’s microbial diversity has the potential to radically alter the diversity of microbiota on our skin and in our gut. In addition, it suggests that the altered gut microbiota can modulate the function of our immune system.A Healthy Microbiome Is Made, Not BornEveryone has a distinctive community of microbes in their gut—a person’s ethnicity, the food they consume, antibiotic use, body size, and the amount they exercise all leave a clear signature on their gut microbial diversity. The role of these microbiota communities is significant. Our organs can only synthesize 11 of the 20 essential amino acids that we need, so the rest, along with 13 essential vitamins, are retrieved and synthesized by our gut microbes.And these microbial communities don’t just help our gut extract nutrients from food. Microbes also produce some of the most important compounds for our health, including immuno-suppressants, anti-cancer, and anti-inflammatory compounds. They appear to be associated with the functioning of our immune system, central nervous system, and associated health outcomes, so much so that clear correlations have been found between particular gut microbiota—so called “sick” microbiomes—and certain illnesses. Those with a distinctive gut microbial signature include irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, and colorectal cancer as well as nonintestinal disorders such as obesity and type 2 diabetes.

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Climate
Food

Canyon De Chelly in Arizona Will Become Latest National Park Unit to Ban Commercial Air Tours

Commercial air tours will soon be prohibited over Canyon de Chelly National Monument in northeastern Arizona under a plan approved this week by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Park Service

CANYON DE CHELLY NATIONAL MONUMENT, Ariz. (AP) — Commercial air tours will soon be prohibited over Canyon de Chelly National Monument in northeastern Arizona under a plan approved this week by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Park Service.The park service said in a statement that the plan was was signed Thursday and will take effect in 180 days, barring any legal challenges. It will ban the tours over the park and within a half mile (800 meters) outside its boundary.“Prohibiting commercial air tours protects these lands’ cultural and spiritual significance to the Navajo Nation,” said park Superintendent Lyn Carranza. “Canyon de Chelly National Monument’s Air Tour Management Plan honors the unique nation-to-nation relationship regarding decisions affecting the park and helps to preserve one of the most important archeological landscapes in the southwest.” What is Canyon de Chelly National Monument? The park lies within the Four Corners region inside the Navajo Nation and is among the most visited national monuments in the United States. It's known for its soaring sandstone cliffs and 800-foot (244-meter) high Spider Rock spire. Prehistoric rock art is found throughout the area, which has been home to Native Americans for millennia. What's the history of air tours at U.S. national parks and monuments? The sightseeing flights reportedly date back to the 1930s, when crews building the Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada border asked helicopter pilots working on the project to give flyovers to their families.The tours offering a unique overhead view of spectacular landscapes have long been popular at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. Some of the nation’s busiest spots for tour operators have included Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, which is home to one of the world’s most active volcanoes, and Haleakala National Park. What are some objections to to the tours? Supporters of the tours say they offer an exciting experience to tourists and allow older people and those with disabilities to see and enjoy the parks. Critics say the flights are an unnecessarily dangerous way to view some of the most stunning public lands in the United States. Rules designating routes and minimum altitudes were set in 1986 after two tour aircraft collided over the Grand Canyon, killing 25 people. Still, there are currently numerous options for helicopter tours to the Grand Canyon, departing from places including Las Vegas and Sedona, Arizona. Critics also complain that the buzz of helicopters drowns out the sounds of nature, disrupting the experiences of visitors on the ground and tribal members who call the land around the parks home. What regulations exist to manage the tours? The park service works with the FAA to implement the National Park Air Tour Management Act of 2000, which requires tour operators who want to conduct such commercial air tours to get FAA approval. The law also requires the FAA, in conjunction with the park service, to establish management plans for air tours for those parks and nearby tribal lands where applications are made. What other parks have air tour regulations? Canyon de Chelly is the last of roughly two dozen national park units where the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility had fought for flyover restrictions. Other national parks where such commercial flyovers essentially are or will be banned in coming years include Badlands National Park and Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota, Glacier National Park in Montana, and Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. Only two air tours per year are allowed at Death Valley National Park along the California-Nevada border.Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Sept. 2024

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Work In Progress

Aren’t we all? This article is scheduled to go live soon. Please check back shortly! The post Work In Progress appeared first on Bay Nature.

Aren’t we all? This article is scheduled to go live soon. Please check back shortly! About the Author Tanvi Dutta Gupta is a 2024-2025 editorial fellow at Bay Nature focusing on Wild Billions, Bay Nature's project tracking federal money for nature. She graduated in June 2024 from Stanford with an assortment of degrees including earth systems, ecology, and science communication. Before reaching California, she grew up across Singapore, London, Hong Kong, and India. She enjoys unraveling the intersections of people, nature, and politics; cool animal facts; long runs; and new scone flavors. Every story from Bay Nature magazine is the product of a team dedicated to connecting our readers to the world around them and increasing environmental literacy. Please help us keep this unique regional magazine thriving, and support the ecosystem we’ve built around it, by subscribing today—you’ll get Bay Nature four times a year in your mailbox! Read This Next December 18, 2024 Baynature.org November 27, 2024 Baynature.org November 19, 2024 Baynature.org November 19, 2024 Magazine

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Animals
Science

Ecologists find computer vision models’ blind spots in retrieving wildlife images

Biodiversity researchers tested vision systems on how well they could retrieve relevant nature images. More advanced models performed well on simple queries but struggled with more research-specific prompts.

Try taking a picture of each of North America's roughly 11,000 tree species, and you’ll have a mere fraction of the millions of photos within nature image datasets. These massive collections of snapshots — ranging from butterflies to humpback whales — are a great research tool for ecologists because they provide evidence of organisms’ unique behaviors, rare conditions, migration patterns, and responses to pollution and other forms of climate change.While comprehensive, nature image datasets aren’t yet as useful as they could be. It’s time-consuming to search these databases and retrieve the images most relevant to your hypothesis. You’d be better off with an automated research assistant — or perhaps artificial intelligence systems called multimodal vision language models (VLMs). They’re trained on both text and images, making it easier for them to pinpoint finer details, like the specific trees in the background of a photo.But just how well can VLMs assist nature researchers with image retrieval? A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), University College London, iNaturalist, and elsewhere designed a performance test to find out. Each VLM’s task: locate and reorganize the most relevant results within the team’s “INQUIRE” dataset, composed of 5 million wildlife pictures and 250 search prompts from ecologists and other biodiversity experts. Looking for that special frogIn these evaluations, the researchers found that larger, more advanced VLMs, which are trained on far more data, can sometimes get researchers the results they want to see. The models performed reasonably well on straightforward queries about visual content, like identifying debris on a reef, but struggled significantly with queries requiring expert knowledge, like identifying specific biological conditions or behaviors. For example, VLMs somewhat easily uncovered examples of jellyfish on the beach, but struggled with more technical prompts like “axanthism in a green frog,” a condition that limits their ability to make their skin yellow.Their findings indicate that the models need much more domain-specific training data to process difficult queries. MIT PhD student Edward Vendrow, a CSAIL affiliate who co-led work on the dataset in a new paper, believes that by familiarizing with more informative data, the VLMs could one day be great research assistants. “We want to build retrieval systems that find the exact results scientists seek when monitoring biodiversity and analyzing climate change,” says Vendrow. “Multimodal models don’t quite understand more complex scientific language yet, but we believe that INQUIRE will be an important benchmark for tracking how they improve in comprehending scientific terminology and ultimately helping researchers automatically find the exact images they need.”The team’s experiments illustrated that larger models tended to be more effective for both simpler and more intricate searches due to their expansive training data. They first used the INQUIRE dataset to test if VLMs could narrow a pool of 5 million images to the top 100 most-relevant results (also known as “ranking”). For straightforward search queries like “a reef with manmade structures and debris,” relatively large models like “SigLIP” found matching images, while smaller-sized CLIP models struggled. According to Vendrow, larger VLMs are “only starting to be useful” at ranking tougher queries.Vendrow and his colleagues also evaluated how well multimodal models could re-rank those 100 results, reorganizing which images were most pertinent to a search. In these tests, even huge LLMs trained on more curated data, like GPT-4o, struggled: Its precision score was only 59.6 percent, the highest score achieved by any model.The researchers presented these results at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) earlier this month.Inquiring for INQUIREThe INQUIRE dataset includes search queries based on discussions with ecologists, biologists, oceanographers, and other experts about the types of images they’d look for, including animals’ unique physical conditions and behaviors. A team of annotators then spent 180 hours searching the iNaturalist dataset with these prompts, carefully combing through roughly 200,000 results to label 33,000 matches that fit the prompts.For instance, the annotators used queries like “a hermit crab using plastic waste as its shell” and “a California condor tagged with a green ‘26’” to identify the subsets of the larger image dataset that depict these specific, rare events.Then, the researchers used the same search queries to see how well VLMs could retrieve iNaturalist images. The annotators’ labels revealed when the models struggled to understand scientists’ keywords, as their results included images previously tagged as irrelevant to the search. For example, VLMs’ results for “redwood trees with fire scars” sometimes included images of trees without any markings.“This is careful curation of data, with a focus on capturing real examples of scientific inquiries across research areas in ecology and environmental science,” says Sara Beery, the Homer A. Burnell Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT, CSAIL principal investigator, and co-senior author of the work. “It’s proved vital to expanding our understanding of the current capabilities of VLMs in these potentially impactful scientific settings. It has also outlined gaps in current research that we can now work to address, particularly for complex compositional queries, technical terminology, and the fine-grained, subtle differences that delineate categories of interest for our collaborators.”“Our findings imply that some vision models are already precise enough to aid wildlife scientists with retrieving some images, but many tasks are still too difficult for even the largest, best-performing models,” says Vendrow. “Although INQUIRE is focused on ecology and biodiversity monitoring, the wide variety of its queries means that VLMs that perform well on INQUIRE are likely to excel at analyzing large image collections in other observation-intensive fields.”Inquiring minds want to seeTaking their project further, the researchers are working with iNaturalist to develop a query system to better help scientists and other curious minds find the images they actually want to see. Their working demo allows users to filter searches by species, enabling quicker discovery of relevant results like, say, the diverse eye colors of cats. Vendrow and co-lead author Omiros Pantazis, who recently received his PhD from University College London, also aim to improve the re-ranking system by augmenting current models to provide better results.University of Pittsburgh Associate Professor Justin Kitzes highlights INQUIRE’s ability to uncover secondary data. “Biodiversity datasets are rapidly becoming too large for any individual scientist to review,” says Kitzes, who wasn’t involved in the research. “This paper draws attention to a difficult and unsolved problem, which is how to effectively search through such data with questions that go beyond simply ‘who is here’ to ask instead about individual characteristics, behavior, and species interactions. Being able to efficiently and accurately uncover these more complex phenomena in biodiversity image data will be critical to fundamental science and real-world impacts in ecology and conservation.”Vendrow, Pantazis, and Beery wrote the paper with iNaturalist software engineer Alexander Shepard, University College London professors Gabriel Brostow and Kate Jones, University of Edinburgh associate professor and co-senior author Oisin Mac Aodha, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst Assistant Professor Grant Van Horn, who served as co-senior author. Their work was supported, in part, by the Generative AI Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, the U.S. National Science Foundation/Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change, a Royal Society Research Grant, and the Biome Health Project funded by the World Wildlife Fund United Kingdom.

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In the dust of the Coachella Valley, residents push for a park along the shrinking Salton Sea

In this sweltering desert where residents have limited access to parks, community advocates are calling for the Salton Sea to once more become a vibrant destination where families can gather in nature. But is it safe to recreate there?

SALTON SEA, Calif.  —  In a state boasting epic mountain ranges and stunning coastlines, the Salton Sea is not typically considered an outdoor-lover’s paradise.California’s largest inland lake, which straddles Riverside and Imperial counties, is in fact beautiful. The 35-mile-long sea shimmers, a cascade of colors in the desert, when the sun sets over the Santa Rosa Mountains. But after its heyday as a popular resort destination in the 1950s, the sea has become one of the state’s most critical environmental challenges.The Salton Sea is shrinking as less water flows in from the Colorado River, surrounding farms use more efficient irrigation and the planet warms. As water levels recede, the exposed lake bed is dry and dusty, and frequently emits a hold-your-nose rotten-egg stench, the result of natural processes, according to the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Researchers have linked the dust that blows off the playa to the region’s abnormally high rates of childhood asthma. During its heyday in the 1950s, the Salton Sea was a destination desert paradise. Stars including Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz vacationed there. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The rural communities that surround the Salton Sea, their populations majority Latino, bear a disproportionate brunt of this crisis. Sara Renteria, who lives along the sea’s northeast shore, was diagnosed with asthma three years ago, and doctors said she probably developed the condition from the dusty environment and exposure to pesticides at work. One of her three daughters has developed nosebleeds, which locals say is a common condition among kids in the region.Yet when Renteria visits the Salton Sea State Recreation Area and gazes out at the sparkling water, she sees possibility.“When I come here, I stop and look out at the lake and think, ‘If this place wasn’t like it is now, if it were like when it was recently created, this place would be full of people from the community, and it would bring more tourism,’” she said. “Our community would benefit from that tourism, and the businesses around this area would benefit, too.”In this sweltering desert region where residents have limited access to parks and green space, community advocates are calling for the state to transform the park, which covers 14 miles of the northeastern shore, into a vibrant destination where families could gather in nature. Renteria envisions people hiking and biking on wheel-chair accessible trails and spending evenings at family campsites. There would be bathrooms and shade structures and ready access to public transit. “The children will no longer be stuck inside, because they will be able to leave to walk and ride their bikes,” Renteria said. “They will put aside their telephones and tablets for a little while, and they will have more connection with nature.” A visitor takes a selfie with public art in Bombay Beach, a tiny community on the Salton Sea. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times) Alianza Coachella Valley, the nonprofit group leading the call for recreational infrastructure at the Salton Sea, is pushing for a trail that would connect to a 40-mile bike and pedestrian corridor already under construction in the Coachella Valley, extending from the community of North Shore to the state park.Audubon California, meanwhile, is advocating for improved infrastructure at various locations around the sea to be included in the state’s ongoing work, through the Salton Sea Management Program, to build natural habitats and suppress dust on areas of exposed lake bed. The modern Salton Sea formed amid efforts in the early 20th century to irrigate Imperial Valley farmland using Colorado River water. Heavy floodwaters breached a canal system in 1905, and water rushed into the Salton Sink, according to the Salton Sea Authority.By the 1950s, the sea southeast of Palm Springs had become a desert paradise in its own right. The Beach Boys performed there, and stars including Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz vacationed there, according to Linda Beal, a volunteer docent at the closed Salton Sea History Museum. “The Salton Sea is a thriving hot spot for birds and wildlife, so we do want communities that live there to be able to witness the nature in their backyard,” says Keilani Bonis-Ericksen with Audubon California. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) “The shores were just covered with people sunbathing,” recalled Beal, who grew up in the Coachella Valley. “We’d go out fishing for a while, and then it would get hot, and Dad would say, ‘Kids, let’s go waterskiing.’”Tropical storms in the 1970s flooded the shoreline resorts. In recent decades, as the lake shrank and grew saltier than the ocean, nearly all the fish have died and the migratory birds that relied on them for sustenance have become scarce. Many of the homes and buildings around the sea have fallen into disrepair.But for the farmworkers who toil in the Coachella and Imperial valleys and still live in the shoreline communities, the area is ripe for reinvigoration.The federal and state governments have directed millions of dollars toward restoration work at Salton Sea. The once-abandoned North Shore Beach & Yacht Club is now a community center. Towns such as Salton City, population 6,202, are growing, as low-wage workers seek out affordable housing.The discovery of lithium — an element critical to producing batteries for the electric vehicle market — in geothermal brine below the southern end of the sea has raised the possibility of more jobs and investment coming into the depressed region. A sunbather relaxes in solitude at the Salton Sea State Recreation Area. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times) It’s with that context in mind that Silvia Paz, executive director of Alianza Coachella Valley, held an autumn news conference at the Salton Sea to launch a campaign “designed to seize this moment” and improve the quality of life and economic opportunities for residents.Her organization released a survey of area residents, conducted with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, that found widespread support for a trail along the Salton Sea, as well as bike lanes, children’s play areas, shaded picnic areas and cooling stations at the state recreation area. Many respondents supported the idea of small businesses such as food vendors and farm stands hawking local products, and more than half wanted to see bike rental stations, fast-food options and a souvenir store.Paz said she sees the effort as an opportunity to promote sustainability amid climate change. Groomed walking trails reduce dust; bike trails reduce car travel; shade canopies and water features provide respite from triple-digit heat. California State Parks is in discussion with Riverside County about efforts to connect county facilities at the North Shore Beach & Yacht Club to the state park, and may consider adding trails through the park, according to department spokesperson Jorge Moreno.A separate 2022 survey by Audubon California found community members wanted to see basic amenities at the sea, including bathrooms, drinking water, lighting, paved roads and shaded space. A pair of herons nesting at Salton Sea. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) “The Salton Sea is a thriving hot spot for birds and wildlife, so we do want communities that live there to be able to witness the nature in their backyard,” said Keilani Bonis-Ericksen, program manager for geospatial science at Audubon California.Bonis-Ericksen found that improving public access along the western shore of the sea would bring economic and social benefits to local towns, and that existing public areas such as the Sonny Bono National Wildlife Refuge are easy targets for improvements. Audubon, she said, is encouraging state officials to incorporate community access into restoration projects moving forward, “so that the community can have access and reap the benefits of the new habitats that will be created.”A crucial hurdle to the vision involves getting sign-off for the changes from area landowners. Outside of the state recreation area, California is not a significant landowner in the area. The seashore and the land beneath the water are a checkerboard of ownership. That means constructing trail systems and providing amenities such as bathrooms and drinking fountains in areas outside the state park may require multiple land agreements and time-consuming negotiations, according to a community needs report prepared for the state Natural Resources Agency.Another looming question is whether it is indeed safe to promote recreation alongside a dying sea that has well-documented health effects on people living nearby. One extreme athlete this year ran the circumference of the sea wearing a full-face gas mask to raise awareness of its plight.Paz acknowledged those concerns but emphasized that creating recreation areas would include hardening surfaces, planting trees and greenery, and being “really intentional about keeping dust down.”Jill Johnston, an associate professor of environmental health at USC who has studied the health impacts of Salton Sea dust on children living nearby, agreed the sea could become an asset for local communities, as long as dust-suppression measures were integrated into the design of any recreational infrastructure. She said there should be ways for visitors to monitor the air quality and be notified of dust events that could stir up contaminants, adding: “Those would be days that you would not want to be outside, not want to be running around or breathing in more of those particles.” “We’d like to nourish the lake, so it’s cleaner and healthier, so people can breathe,” says Israel Piza, a father of five who lives in the eastern Coachella Valley. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times) Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia, a Democrat from Coachella, supports the vision for more recreational opportunities. Trails “don’t require a tremendous amount of investment,” he said, and could be incorporated into the state’s ongoing efforts through the Salton Sea Management Program.Israel Piza, a father of five who lives in the eastern Coachella Valley community of Thermal and works in the fields and in landscaping, would like to see trails at the Salton Sea state park dotted with gazebos, benches, water fountains and trees. His hope, he said, is to witness the Salton Sea returned to its splendor — or something like it.“It might not be exactly the same as it was before,” he said. “But we’d like to nourish the lake, so it’s cleaner and healthier, so people can breathe.”This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.

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Suggested Viewing

WILD in the Garden State

WILD in the Garden State is the story of connecting to the natural world in suburban New Jersey. Dave and Sarah are city transplants with no gardening experience who want a beautiful, ecological garden. The documentary short (30 minutes) will attract experienced and new gardeners who want to spend less time maintaining a pristine — and unhealthy — lawn and more time enjoying the natural world, right in their own backyard. Filmmaker Sarah Galloway honed her craft producing exhibit media for the American Museum of Natural History. Husband Dave Comins is an architect who is inspired to garden for nature while creating a beautiful, park-like space. Shot over ten years, "WILD in the Garden State" documents gardening missteps, lessons and experiences that go far beyond replacing a rectangle of lawn. It’s a story of connecting to the natural world in suburban New Jersey.

Plants
Nature
Sustainable

Returning Home

Spoken word poetry short film, written from the Earth's perspective from the beginning of time to present pandemic.

Culture
Nature

Descended: The Fight for Harris Neck

The documentary film “Descended: The Fight for Harris Neck” explores an ongoing land battle in Harris Neck, Georgia. In 1942 the U.S. war department seized 2,687 acres of land from a self-reliant community of seventy-five African American families. Since 1962 the land has been a national wildlife refuge. The film seeks to answer the pivotal question: How has a community been shaped by its common goal to reclaim their land?

Social Justice
Government
Nature

SeaMonster II

SeaMonster II is a single channel video with sound, duration 14:19. All the objects used in this performance were collected at the sea shore near the artist's studio on the island of Aegina. This work is part of the "SeaMonster" series. The first iteration "SeaMonster Monk" a live performance took place at the Athens Art Fair 2019 and was featured at the WhiteBox NYC in 2023.

Water
Pollution
Nature

In Praise of Insects [Sandbox]

Insects were here before humanity, but often we eliminate them as a nuisance. They are a fundamental element of this world. Without them, most of the plants would not be pollinated and birds would lose their food and become extinct. Despite their vital role, they are silently disappearing at a rapid rate.... without us noticing. ‘In Praise of Insects’ is a project to help us rethink the tiny subtle lives that are so entwined with our own. The common Bluebottle is one of the few butterflies that can be seen in central Tokyo. Even if you occasionally see the butterfly flying between buildings, you can see the miracle of life by closely observing its appearance and growth.

Experimental
Animals
Nature

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