CARLSBAD, Calif. – Never ones to be chained to their desks, 20 regulators and biologists left the comfort and safety of their offices March 20 to slosh through mud and muck in their search for hydric soils at a former salt mining pond in San Diego Bay.
The trek into the field was part of a four-day training course for the scientists conducted by Dr. Jacob Berkowitz, a research soils engineer from the Corps’ Engineer Research and Development Center in Vicksburg, Miss., and included representatives from the Corps’ Los Angeles and San Francisco districts, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board.
“Regulators consider three parameters when determining the presence of wetlands: hydrology, where the water comes from and goes; vegetation, whether it’s hydrophytic, or water oriented; and soil type,” said Therese Bradford, chief the Los Angeles District’s South Coast Branch in Regulatory Division. “Identifying hydric soils is a critical part of delineating wetlands, and the class focused on increasing their knowledge of soil science.”
Determining soil type is an important step in establishing whether an area is a wetland, because that has a major impact on whether the Corps has jurisdiction. It also factors into the type and amount of mitigation required. Bradford said, however, that while most regulators have a strong scientific background, soils training may not necessarily be included in that list.
“Most of us don’t have in-depth soils training. We have botany or biology backgrounds,” Bradford said. “Very few people have even one soils class in college.”
“When people come to work for the Corps, they’re usually comfortable looking at vegetation charts,” she said. “This class is for them to get really comfortable looking at categories (of field data), and when they review things to ask, “Does it make sense?” and if not, to figure out why not. Improving knowledge on hydric soils can really raise our level of competence and allow us to better analyze what comes into our office.”
Bradford said the Carlsbad office recently received a permit application that indicated the presence of wetlands hydrology and vegetation, but an absence of hydric soils.
“When something meets two criteria, but not a third, we say, ‘Hmm, I wonder why,’” Bradford said. “Sometimes it’s explainable and sometimes it’s not. We couldn’t explain it from our desks, so we came out and dug lots of pits, and we found hydric soils. Since this is actually a wetland, it changed from one type of mitigation to another, instead of from non-wetland to wetland.”
The technical training for hydric soils and wetland identification is funded by Corps Headquarters through the Wetlands Regulatory Assistance Program. The program provides support to regulatory staffs to ensure they have the technical expertise to identify wetlands in the field.
The WRAP program provides technical support addressing national and regional level issues, such as the National Wetland Plant List, Regional Supplements to the 1987 Wetland Delineation Manual, and the Hydrogeomorphic (HGM) Approach to Assessing Wetland Function to improve accuracy and efficiency of wetland delineation procedures. Additionally, the program provides local support to Corps districts facing specific technical challenges regarding wetlands and other water resources.
WRAP also provides trainings on Wetland Plant Identification and Arid West Ordinary High Water taught by Bob Lichvar, a research ecologist at the ERDC Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H. These courses focus on major wetland plant families such as grasses, sedges, rushes and asters and on the basics of Ordinary High Water delineation, including the use of remote sensing materials and interpreting gage data.
The hydric soils and regional supplement training courses increase the employees’ technical proficiency and efficiency and result in more accurate and repeatable wetland delineations. Berkowitz said the high level of development in Southern California has affected and disturbed soils areas, posing technical challenges for regulatory staffs.
But, Berkowitz said, “We have strategies to deal with that in the wetland identification manual.”
Berkowitz, who has taught the courses for the past six years, stressed the importance of soils training for scientists with the Corps and with other regulatory agencies with whom the Corps works.
“We need to develop technical subject matter experts, because this is a key portion of the regulatory process, to identify where wetlands exist and what the boundaries of wetlands are,” Berkowitz said.
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