| "We’re trying to be more proactive than reactive." | |
| Karen Martin,
Pepperdine Universit |
|
California is famous for its golden sandy beaches, attracting millions of tourists and their dollars every year. To keep the beaches tourist-brochure perfect, workers may mechanically rake a beach to remove trash left by beach goers, as well as kelp and debris washed ashore by the tides.
Researchers are finding that raking also can sweep away a myriad of small creatures that are vital to ecosystem health.
As a result, local beach managers, researchers, the California Coastal Commission, and others have teamed up to develop and encourage more ecologically friendly beach management practices, and to help educate the public about the need for more natural beaches.
“We’re trying to be more proactive than reactive,” says Karen Martin, a professor of biology at Pepperdine University in Malibu. “We’re definitely moving in the right direction here.”
Catchall
Beach grooming is practiced in many states and throughout the world, but the term is a catchall describing a variety of methods of raking, sieving, and bulldozing sand to remove material from a beach.
It is estimated that over a hundred miles of Southern California beaches are groomed, primarily by tractors with forks on the front and rakes on the rear. Six-wheel dump trucks haul kelp, trash, and debris off the beaches.
In San Diego, beach grooming has been regularly practiced since the 1960s, with reports of beach grooming from the 40s and 50s, says Dennis Simmons, beach manager for the city’s Park and Recreation Department.
Their operations consist of raking up and removing excess kelp, cleaning the sand of debris, which can include fire rings and dead animals such as seals and whales, and making sure lifeguards have emergency access to the water. They also empty 1,000 fifty-five-gallon trashcans and provide overall beach management, trail management, and bluff maintenance, Simmons says.
He notes that 35 to 40 percent of the city’s beaches are physically maintained, and the ones that are groomed “are the ones that have the greatest impact as far as our patrons are concerned.”
Beaches as Business
California’s beaches are recognized as an enormous economic engine in the state, drawing in billions of tourist dollars every year.
“We have 2 million people living in San Diego and 20 million tourists every year,” notes Simmons. “This is a significant economic issue, as well as an overall safety and cleanliness issue.”
He notes that San Diego beaches that receive grooming are often in large urban areas and are used daily by thousands of visitors year-round.
Beaches as Ecosystems
Ecologically, the state’s beaches are just as rich, says Jenny Dugan, associate research biologist at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California in Santa Barbara.
Each year, from March through July, grunion lay eggs in the sand on the beaches in Southern California, including many of the beaches in San Diego.
Grunion are fish that come ashore in California during particularly high nighttime tides to reproduce and lay their eggs. The eggs develop out of water while buried in the sand and hatch two weeks later when high tides enable the baby grunion to reach the sea.
Dugan notes that beach wrack—or the piles of kelp and plant and animal remains that are washed ashore by waves—are a valuable part of the marine ecosystem, providing microhabitat for a variety of animals. Many of these animals provide vital resources for shorebirds.
“While this may appear to beach visitors as unsightly debris, wrack accumulates and breaks down as a result of natural processes,” Dugan says. “Grooming removes or destroys the wrack and degrades the beach habitat.”
Cause for Concern
In the late 1990s, conservationists and scientists began expressing concerns that beach grooming could be harmful to birds and other species that reproduce and forage on the coast.
Simmons and the San Diego beach maintenance staff agreed to work with Martin to research the impact beach grooming had on the buried grunion eggs and later with Dugan to study the recovery of the animals dependent on beach wrack.
“You can’t ignore the public and various concerned groups,” Simmons says. “We share the concerns with them and want to find balance. We needed to find out what was happening.”
Research Results
Martin’s and Dugan’s research showed that aggressive mechanized grooming removes significant amounts of wrack and sand, and disturbs or destroys countless beach organisms, including grunion eggs.
Grooming also strips beaches of native plants and “embryo dunes,” making the shoreline more vulnerable to erosion.
“Wrack is an important coastal resource,” says Dugan. “The coastal ecosystem will benefit from changing or improving the management of this particular resource.”
With the research in hand, Simmons began educating his staff to recognize and avoid sensitive grunion breeding areas during spawning season and validated the city’s practice of not grooming below the line of high tide.
Coming Together
Simmons began calling beach managers from around the state to come together to talk about the research and how to improve beach-management practices in general.
In 2004, Martin hosted the first meeting of beach managers at Pepperdine University to discuss ecologically sound management practices and to educate beach managers and state agencies about the importance of protecting, restoring, and enhancing natural beach resources.
The working group for Beach Management in Ecologically Sensitive Areas meets twice a year. The group is in the process of incorporating as a nonprofit educational organization, the Beach Ecology Coalition.
“We plan to examine some standard practices,” Martin says, “and from those we can develop some options for best practices.”
For instance, during grunion season, almost all public beaches across the state now only groom beaches following a protocol distributed through the group, notes Jonna Engel, staff ecologist with the California Coastal Commission.
“Nothing is groomed below the highest high-tide mark, which is adjusted every two weeks to help the operators of the grooming tractors stay higher on the shore than the recently deposited eggs,” she says.
Alternative Approach
Besides participating in the meetings of the beach managers group, the California Coastal Commission has formed a beach grooming work group.
The work group is looking at “several beach grooming alternatives that are being discussed, promoted, and in several cases implemented by cities through permit conditions,” Engel says. Cities and counties are also being encouraged to voluntarily change their local coastal plans to address beach grooming.
Alternatives being promoted, she says, include no grooming, hand grooming, seasonal grooming, zonal or rotational grooming, and threshold grooming, or wrack removal beyond a certain density or height.
Changing Views
To educate the public and beach managers about these alternative practices and their benefits, the California Coastal Commission and the Beach Ecology Coalition plan to create a statewide natural beach ecosystem awareness campaign and to develop a statewide best beach management practices guide.
“We understand that the tourist draw is really important, but we feel that with education we can perhaps change the public’s viewpoint on what is a desirable beach,” Engel says.
Simmons also encourages other beach and coastal managers to start a dialogue with those performing beach grooming in their state.
“It’s very important,” Simmons says. “The best way to address issues is to first get them out on the table and talk about them.”
For more information on beach grooming in California, contact Karen Martin at (310) 506-4808, or Karen.Martin@pepperdine.edu, Jenny Dugan at (805)893-2675, or j_dugan@lifesci.ucsb.edu, or Jonna D. Engel at (805) 585-1821, or jengel@coastal.ca.gov. For more information on beach grooming in San Diego, contact Dennis Simmons at (858) 581-9975, or DJSimmons@sandiego.gov.
