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Rice Fields Provide Habitat for Migratory Birds

Sacramento Valley, California, USA

“They were stakeholders who used to conflict, who are now working together in a complementary way to maximize conservation benefits, while still preserving traditional agriculture and respecting water rights.”

Brian McGraw caught up with SUNY ESF Professor John Stella about the bright spot of wetland management for migratory bird habitat, in the Sacramento River Basin of Northern California. Drawing on two decades of his scientific experience in the area, he offers a wealth of insight on the abundance, the degradation, and the promise that each form an integral part of the river’s story. 

BM: Thank you, Professor Stella, for talking with me. Do you mind introducing yourself and the work that you do both at ESF and in California? 

JS: Sure. And thank you for inviting me. My name’s John Stella. I’m a professor of Sustainable Resources Management at ESF, and I’ve been at ESF since 2007. I teach Restoration Ecology. For many years I’ve taught Watershed Ecology & Management, as well as Ecological Modeling with R, and several other seminars. 

Ever since graduate school, which I did at University of California at Berkeley, I have been working in California on a variety of science and restoration related research. I have been involved in the Sacramento River Valley and Basin since my postdoc, back in 2006. 

Map of major river basins in California, including the Sacramento River Basin

The Sacramento River Basin is a special place. It’s one of the largest river basins, if not the largest, in the Continental U.S. to lie entirely within one state, and accounts for something like 30% of the total surface water in California. 

It is characterized by a Mediterranean climate, which means that it has warm, wet winters and hot, dry summers, as does much of the state. But being in the north of California, it gets more rainfall than in the south, where a lot of the population centers are, such as Los Angeles and San Diego. 

The Sacramento River is the northern half of the Great Central Valley. The other big river in the Central Valley is the San Joaquin River. The San Joaquin River flows from the South to the North, from roughly Bakersfield to the town of Tracy, where it meets the Sacramento River, which is flowing from the North to the South. They meet in a large inland delta, which then flows into the San Francisco Bay and then into the Pacific Ocean. The Sacramento River is important hydrologically because it provides most of the drinking water for the state’s major population centers, and most of its irrigation water for agriculture.

Schoenoplectus acutus, called tule or hardstem bulrush, has many ethnobotanical uses in California and beyond. Photo by Matt Lavin

In the mid 1800s, the Sacramento River was largely undeveloped, and it was used by Native American peoples in the Central Valley. And it was a vast wetland. The Native American tribes that lived there used the wetland plants, such as tule, for their houses, their boats, baskets, and the river was at the center of their way of life. 

The river teemed with several runs of salmon and other important fish species. King salmon, or Chinook salmon, one of the better known species, is a huge source of protein. The fishery was utilized extensively by Native American peoples all through the basin, including the Sacramento River and its tributaries. 

Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), swimming upstream to spawn

Photo by Ryan Hagerty, US Fish & Wildlife Service

“The Sacramento holds kind of a mythical status…you could see the wetlands from miles away, with the Sierra Nevada mountains in the background.”

The Sacramento holds kind of a mythical status in California, almost analogous to a regional Mississippi River. There are settlers, folks from the east, who write about the Sacramento and how wide and vast it is, and how you could see the wetlands from miles away, with the Sierra Nevada mountains in the background. And how in its tributaries, when the fall and spring run Chinook salmon came upstream to spawn, you could walk across the river on the backs of the salmon. The San Francisco Estuary Institute., a nonprofit based in Petaluma, California, has a project on the historical ecology of the Sacramento River (Check out the project here).

After the Gold Rush in the 1850s, the Sacramento River was rapidly developed by Anglo Americans, who dredged the river and used it for navigation to move goods up and down between the towns of San Francisco and Sacramento, long before the Sacramento was dammed in the 1930s for water supply and flood control. Gold mining resulted in the digging up and washing away of all the fine material in the flood plains, to go after gold that was buried in paleo channels. Along the river, the vast riparian forests were cut down, the wetlands were drained, and it was converted to agriculture. And today, the Central Valley is the richest agricultural production area in the country on a per-hectare basis. The vast majority of our fruit and nut crops, and some grains and grapes, are grown in California’s Central Valley. The expression goes something like, “If you take away California agriculture, you won’t starve, but your diet will be much less interesting.”

Gold dredges have caused extensive damage to riparian ecosystems.

So by the mid 1900s, 95% of the wetlands and the riparian areas of the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin Valley were lost, mostly to agriculture. The river was levied, and in many places the banks were hardened with engineered rock called rip rap, to prevent the channel from moving and to facilitate navigation. 

Starting in the 1930s, through the end of the 1960s, two major water projects were constructed to move water from the Sacramento River to the South, via large aqueducts that irrigated farmland in the Central Valley and brought municipal water to Los Angeles, San Diego, and the rest of southern California. These are called the Central Valley Project, which was built by the US Bureau of Reclamation in the 1930s, and the State Water Project, which was a state effort in the 1960s and ‘70s that finally came to fruition under Governor Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown, and was developed by the California Department of Water Resources. 

The Shasta Dam is one of many rim dams that control the flow of water and alter natural disturbance regimes in the Central Valley.

The Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River have also been extensively dammed in both the main stems and their tributaries. There’s a series of huge dams at the transition between the Sierras and the foothills. They’re called the rim dams, and they control the majority of river flow in the Central Valley, in the basins of the San Joaquin and Sacramento. Any kind of restoration that happens downstream of those dams needs to factor in modifications to the flow regime and to the channels of the rivers. 

Today, the Central Valley is highly contested in terms of its water supply, its land use, the many stakeholders that have a stake in the rivers. The Delta, where the Sacramento and the San Joaquin Rivers meet, has its own state agency, the Delta Stewardship Council, which draws from a consortium of governmental agencies, private groups, nonprofits, and citizens who are really concerned about the ecological health of the Delta and the upstream areas of the Sacramento and San Joaquin river networks. 

BM: Are there particular wildlife sanctuaries that stand out as conservation “bright spots” in the area?

JS: I think of the Sacramento River Basin as a conservation bright spot for a number of reasons. Separate from the study of riparian forests and their restoration, which I’ve been most involved in, there’s also work toward increasing the amount of wetlands that can be used by migratory birds. The Pacific Flyway is the migratory route that birds use going from Alaska to Patagonia in South America. And the great Central Valley is a very important stopover place where they can refuel and rest. When it was predominantly wetlands, prior to the 1850s, it was hugely important for all sorts of wetland birds, and other migratory birds and songbirds. 

As the Central Valley land got converted to agriculture, those opportunities for food and fuel and rest decreased radically. Starting around the early 2000s, there was concern about the amount and quality of wetlands available for migratory birds. 

There have been many organizations that have organized around conserving habitat of various types in the Central Valley. The first one that I’m aware of was called the Riparian Habitat Joint Venture, initiated in 1994, and got 18 federal, state and private organizations to sign a landmark cooperative agreement to protect and enhance habitats for native landbirds throughout California. Twenty years later, the Migratory Bird Conservation Partnership was formed to continue this work; the Partnership includes Audubon California, the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, which is now called Point Blue, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and others. 

Flooded rice fields provide valuable habitat and food for migratory birds, like this sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis).

In 2014, TNC leveraged the work of the Migratory Bird Conservation Partnership and devised a very innovative project called Bird Returns, in which they raise money from donors and then hold what are called “reverse auctions.” They advertise to rice growers, who have water rights in the Central Valley, the option to pay them to put some of their legally allocated water onto their fields during the bird migration period. They were specifically targeting rice fields, where the rice stubble after the harvest, once it is wetted up, creates an incredibly rich mix of microbial and insect food for birds. And so through these reverse auctions, farmers would submit bids to keep fields flooded, and The Nature Conservancy uses the limited dollars that it has to maximize the area, the time, and the quality of the food. And it’s been going for many years now, and has been amazingly successful, where the Bird Returns experiment has been implemented. There’ve been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds that have stopped over and used these farms during the fallow time of year.

The success of Bird Returns has spawned efforts by other organizations, in kind of a virtuous cycle, to provide land and other resources for bird conservation. Private landowners, such as Lundberg Family Farms and Montna Farms, and organizations including River Partners, Trout Unlimited, and Ducks Unlimited, are expanding this approach in which agriculture, specifically rice agriculture, can complement and enhance conservation and restoration.

Back in the early 2000s and in the 1990s, rice was seen as a very wasteful and environmentally unfriendly crop. But because of these conservation efforts, it’s now seen as a beneficial partner in restoration. 

“They were stakeholders who used to conflict, who are now working together in a complementary way to maximize conservation benefits, while still preserving traditional agriculture and respecting water rights.”

I got to participate in a field trip, organized by colleagues at UC Berkeley, to the Sacramento Basin back in February of 2025, when we traveled through the valley visiting rice farms that participate in the Pacific Flyway restoration programs. We heard from farmers and representatives from River Partners (a floodplain restoration non-profit), Trout Unlimited, and the Northern California Water Association, about these joint conservation efforts — and how they used to be at odds with one another. They were stakeholders who used to conflict, who are now working together in a complementary way to maximize conservation benefits while still preserving traditional agriculture and respecting water rights. 

These efforts have also been reflected in recent legislative measures, voluntary agreements, and memoranda of understanding (MoU). One notable one is the Floodplain Forward Coalition, which was signed in late 2024. It’s an agreement between regulatory agencies, conservation organizations, and other stakeholders, such as the Northern California Water Association, which represents private growers, to work to preserve floodplains and restore flooding to floodplains where possible. So flooding rice fields is just one form of reactivating floodplains and restoring natural processes to reconnect the floodplains to the rivers, to undo some of the ecological damage that has been done over the last 150 years. 

BM: What are you excited about for the future of your career? Are you teaching classes next semester? What should ESF know about what you’re up to next? 

JS: Well, in terms of my own research, I’ve been working on groundwater science and policy for the last decade. And I’m really excited about the opportunity to inform policy and management of groundwater, which is a scarce resource in many parts of the world. 

California underwent a severe drought in 2013 to 2016, which was unprecedented in modern times. It was known as the worst drought in the last millennium. During that period, groundwater was tapped to irrigate crops because surface water supplies were unable to meet demand. In many cases in the Central Valley, groundwater dropped tens, sometimes hundreds of feet, which was completely unsustainable. In 2014, in the middle of this dry period, California passed historic legislation, called the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA (pronounced “SIG-ma” like the Greek letter), which requires stakeholders in overdrawn aquifer basins to come together and develop a plan for stabilizing and sustaining groundwater use. It also mandates Groundwater Sustainability Agencies to consider the ecosystems that depend on groundwater, such as riparian forests. They’re called GDEs, or groundwater-dependent ecosystems. And I have had a number of incredibly talented ESF students working in my lab, conducting studies to quantify the effects of groundwater recession on these sensitive GDEs. Together we are developing quantitative thresholds of groundwater decline beyond which these sensitive ecosystems face degradation or collapse.

Those thresholds, those quantitative metrics, directly impact the implementation of this SGMA groundwater law in California. And this has been really exciting for me, and I want to continue this work in some of the other ecosystems that have less information about them, but are still highly valuable ecologically, such as oak woodlands in California, many of which are groundwater-dependent, but we don’t know very much about what those thresholds are. I want to work with Groundwater Sustainability Agencies and nonprofits to adopt these quantitative thresholds that we’ve developed in partnership with other universities, such as UC Santa Barbara, UC Berkeley, and the Nature Conservancy. 

This semester, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to develop a class on Restoration Ecology (FOR 496/607) in which we brought examples, both from northeastern ecosystems and from California ecosystems, to illustrate the best practices and concepts of restoration. I also plan to develop new courses that can be used in an online major for non-traditional students called Sustainability Management, through my department, the Sustainable Resources Management Department. That major is targeted toward working professionals and other folks who haven’t followed a traditional educational path, and I’m really excited to be able to work with them on applied conservation and restoration. 

I feel very fortunate to be working in a place where the students are just as committed, if not more so, than the faculty, to bringing rigorous science to bear on really important questions. ESF students come here ready to learn and ready to apply that learning to improve their world. I have not encountered another place where folks are so committed and enthusiastic to maximize the opportunities that we’re given to make a difference in the world.

The National Parks Service sees more than 300 million visitors every year. Many of those visits are to the most famous parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, or the Great Smoky Mountains, but there are some parks that I’d like to think are hidden gems. When National Park lovers like myself rank all 63, Cuyahoga Valley and Indiana Dunes each rank towards the bottom of the list. They’re not as showy or exciting as Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon to most, but both have amazing stories that most visitors overlook. These are some conservation bright spots within the National Park system. 

Part One: The River that Set the Nation on Fire, Cuyahoga Valley National Park 

Pictured above: Brandywine Falls standing at 65 feet. 

All three of these parks are found within the Rust Belt, a region that spreads from western New York, down to West Virginia, and then roughly across to Wisconsin. These states were once booming with a strong economy reliant on industries like steel production and car manufacturing. This surge of industrialization came, bringing jobs and manufacturing facilities from the mid-1800s until the early 1900s, and went, with the economic decline starting all the way back in the 1950s. The era of industrialization between the 1850s and 1950s was occurring across the U.S. and to this day remains notorious for lax safety, health, and environmental standards. These lax standards aren’t unique to the rust belt states, but these case studies happen to highlight this specific region setting the stage for the creation of our bright spots. 

Pictured above: A postcard of Cleveland, Ohio, depicting its factory filled skyline along the Cuyahoga River. 

 The throughline between these bright spot parks is the disregard for environmental harm throughout the rust belt in favor of industrial gain, and Cuyahoga Valley NP might be the worst case of it across all three of my examples. As the city of Cleveland started to develop in the late 1790s, the Cuyahoga Valley region was used as a dumping ground for toxic industrial waste and sewage. By the 1870s, they had released so much sewage into the river that the city’s water supply (derived from the same watershed) was spreading illness throughout the region. Cleveland’s own mayor, Rensselaer R. Herrick called the river “an open sewer running through the center of the city.” Later on, they record that the river was bubbling like a deadly stew, with rat corpses frequently seen floating down the river, and the surface of the water covered in a slick, oily film. This was a result of a hundred years of unregulated industrial waste flowing directly from factories into the water system. Oil refinery waste, steel mill waste, and human sewage all combined in the river to create one of the nations worst cases of river pollution. 

Pictured above: Left, oil covering a mans hand directly from the Cuyahoga River. Right, abandoned junkyard cars lining the banks of the Cuyahoga River. 

“The lower Cuyahoga has no visible life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes.” Noted by the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration. 

Pictured above: two political cartoons depicting pollution in the Cuyahoga river, created by Bill Roberts and published by the Cleveland Press.  

These conditions persisted until something happened in 1969 that would give Cleveland a new reputation nationwide… the Cuyahoga River caught on fire. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this story, a river catching on fire might sound like something out of a myth, but this had actually happened twelve times prior to 1969. This time around, the fire was over relatively quickly, and Cleveland residents seemingly went about their lives as usual afterwards. Months after the fire occurred, Time Magazine published “America’s Sewage System and the Price of Optimism” which highlighted the Cuyahoga River as “among the worst” of all rivers flowing through major U.S. cities. The article is written to discuss some of the optimistic cleanup efforts, but it also illustrated just how disgusting the water was. This article was the catalyst for reform, turning the Cuyahoga River into a national symbol for the environmentalist movement of the early 1970s. 

Pictured above: A fire raging on the Cuyahoga River, taken in 1952. 

Just one year after the Cuyahoga River fire made national news, the federal government created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Two years after that, in 1972, the Clean Water Act passed as well. Both of these initiatives were brought about in large part by protesters motivated to clean and prevent waterways from looking like the Cuyahoga River. Since then, the river has been entrenched in environmental activist history. This newfound fame in the environmental world also led to the funding and new authority figures that would transform the river and the surrounding environment. In fact, the first black mayor of Cleveland (and one of the first black mayors elected of any major U.S. city), Carl Stokes, ran his campaign largely on the need to clean the Cuyahoga in 1967. He would be currently sitting as mayor when the infamous fire occurred in 1969, and his response to the fires resulted in his reelection for a second term the very same year. 

In 1974, an act of Congress declared the Cuyahoga Valley a National Recreation Area, allowing for more conservation of the land to be done. It remained that way until 2000, when it was finally redesignated as our nation’s 56^th National Park. The environmental history of Cuyahoga Valley is such a beautiful success story, coming from complete industrial waste to a preserved landscape that inspired activists around the country, but it also has much more to offer for visitors.  

I’ve heard and read many reviews of visitors from Cuyahoga Valley National Park that say they were underwhelmed. In many visitors’ eyes, the park is an average looking forest with some waterways, and not a whole lot to see that’s extraordinary. Park visitors also expect to find a piece of conserved wilderness before them and instead find themselves just outside the bounds of Cleveland, Ohio. One scathing review from google said, “I see no reason for this to have National Park status since it offers nothing unique, except trees and a creek for the local urbanites to flock to.” Visitors are inclined to their opinions, but I think this park truly has a great story of beating the odds that isn’t commonly discussed. 

Pictured above: The Ledges Trail, Cuyahoga Valley NP. 

Cuyahoga Valley is now our 9^th most visited National Park, largely due to its proximity to large urban areas. It provides a recreational green space for hikers and environmentalists looking to escape the city, and hidden just beneath the surface is a rich geologic history. Unique rock formations can be found throughout the park, some of which date back to 400 million years ago. For comparison, the Grand Canyon dates back only 5-6 million years, and the entirety of the Rocky Mountains began forming between 55 and 80 million years ago. So… this park is full of some insanely old rocks. Unique fossils have also been found within the park, like a 300-million-year-old armored fish species called Dunkleosteus (pictured below), which can be found on display at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. 

Pictured above: A Dunkleosteus fossil on exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. 

This park also has some of the highest amounts of plant biodiversity out of all 63 National Parks. In recent years, there have been surveys to illustrate just how many rare plants can be found in the park, and out of around 1,500 acres surveyed, there were around 100 different rare plant species recorded. That is 1,500 acres out of the 33,000-acre total. One of these rare plants is Northern Monkshood, or Aconitum noveboracense, a federally endangered flower that can only be found in four U.S. states. It has incredibly small and fragmented populations, and without the protection of areas like Cuyahoga Valley, it may cease to exist.  

Luckily, the valley is protected under the National Parks Service. It’s rare natural history and important environmentalist history combines to create a subtle beauty that some visitors don’t understand. Yet, this is a story of fighting against the odds for the betterment of one small waterway, leading to the betterment of the country. 

Pictured above: Two photos showcasing different parts of Cuyahoga Valley NP, it’s plant life, and rock formations. 

Part Two: Sisters to the Sand, Indiana Dunes National Park 

Pictured above: Indiana Dunes NP, along the coast of Lake Michigan. 

The second National Park bright spot I want to discuss is Indiana Dunes National Park. This park is another hidden gem that was prevented from succumbing to the pressures of industrialization. In 1952, a women’s organization called “Save the Dunes” was founded with the goal of preserving Indiana’s few remaining sand dunes and preventing them from turning into mill and factory plots. This initiative was led by Dorothy Buell who hosted women in her own home to have Save the Dunes meetings. This female-led, community driven advocacy approach is beautiful in retrospect, but in the 1950s it wasn’t taken seriously. Many people thought of Save the Dunes as something that was like a tea party for these women, a chance to socialize. In reality, it was a chance to organize. 

Save the Dunes secured 15,000 acres of land for the National Park through a combination of purchases, land donations, and advocating for expansion bills once the land was state and federally owned. This organization is also largely credited with the title it originally had, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, which provided the land with federal protections, and was later promoted to National Park status. The women of Save the Dunes were behind the scenes securing these land deals and protections with the federal government. Save the Dunes is still an active environmentalist group to this day, and Dorothy Buell’s mission and memory has been immortalized through the naming of the Dorothy Buell Visitor Center inside the park. 

Pictured above: Save the Dunes Committee (L-R) Suzie Butts, Dorothy Buell, Flo Broady, & Hester Butts 

Why did these women feel such a strong urge to protect this land from development? On one hand, Indiana Dunes was a stones-throw away from Cuyahoga Valley, and they were watching in real time what industrialization was doing to an environment close by. They had a great example of what they didn’t want their dunes to look like. But more importantly, this landscape is one of the most quietly unique places in the Northeast. The National Park hosts beaches, dunes, forests, prairies, wetlands, swamps, marshes, and bogs within its boundaries, and that incredible range of habitat diversity has made it possible for an even broader spread of plants and animals to live there. While the Great Smoky Mountains is considered the National Park with the most plant diversity in total, Indiana Dunes National Park holds the title for densest, most concentrated plant biodiversity. An average of 817 plant species can be found per ten square miles within the park. That too much biodiversity to even comprehend. 

Pictured above: Carnivorous plants, grasses, and moss from the Pinhook Bog Trail in Indiana Dunes. 

Not only does the park host outrageous numbers of plants, but some of them are SO COOL! Found within bogs in the park are hundreds of carnivorous plants (meaning they eat insects) that are rarely seen in the wild. You can find Cape Sundews in a plant store, but to see them in their natural habitat is something very special. I’ve done some extensive searching, and this might be the only National Park with a full hike through a carnivorous plant bog.  

Indiana Dunes is also known as “the birthplace of ecology.” Ecology is the study of ecosystems and their interactions within and through one another. It’s only fitting that a place with so many distinct habitats flowing through one another would lead to the formation of ecology as a formal science. This formal study of ecology was first performed by a botanist from the University of Chicago named Henry Chandler Cowle’s, who documented the transitions between plants that lived in habitats throughout the park and their successional history as time progressed and conditions changed. Fittingly, the Cowles Bog Trail was named to commemorate this Botanists work in the park, where you can view carnivorous plants and so much more. 

In this circumstance, the threat of industrialization was looming over one of the most unique places in the northeast United States. It didn’t have as many physical environmental issues as Cuyahoga Valley, but that was because a team of dedicated scientists and advocates ensured the land was preserved and protected from harm. Without their time and dedication, we could have lost a truly one-of-a-kind area to steel mills and factories, and it was one of the earliest cases of female-organized environmentalist groups that paved the path.

–Rose Jansen