Around a third of Santa Rosa Island, off the Santa Barbara Coast, was burned in a wildfire earlier this year. Recovery efforts are now gearing up for El Niño this winter.
Dozens of volunteers are rolling up natural fiber netting materials into long tubes called wattles. We are 26 miles off the Santa Barbara coastline on Santa Rosa Island, in the Channel Islands National Park. The island was heavily damaged by a wildfire earlier this year.
"The Channel Islands overall are considered the Galapagos of North America, home to many species of plants and animals that exist no place else in the world," explained David Mazurkiewicz, wildlife biologist for Channel Islands National Park.
The island is home to a number of unique species, including a critically endangered grove of Torrey pines — a genetically unique tree subspecies found naturally in only two places on Earth. Thousands of those trees were lost or damaged when the wildfire rapidly spread across the island in May.
"Some of the areas that were severely burned, we lost all of the duff, the pine needles, the debris burned up, so there's a lot of bare soil," explained Mazurkiewicz. "And so this is to help keep the soil in place in the grove as well as seeds. And also post fire, there was a lot a needle cast from the pine, so we're trying to keep all that material to help with erosion ahead of winter."
"We don't know how this El Niño is going to manifest. You know, there's a lot of variables in place, but it's mainly just being as prepared as we can in anticipation of what the forecasts are saying and trying to get ahead of that," he added.
The idea is to roll around 500 of these wattles to be installed in burned areas to help keep soil and native seeds from washing away in the rain. And with El Niño expected, that could be a race against time, says Michelle Gados, restoration ecologist for California Institute of Environmental Studies.
"I'm very concerned myself," said Gados. "The first time I went into the Torrey Pines — it is really steep in there — and it's just barren now that the fire burnt all that organic material that'll protect and lessen the impact of the rain onto the soil. It's really kind of impossible to put wattles in the super steep areas because they'll just like roll away so that's why there is such a huge emergency response for the wattles and wattle installation prior to those rains occurring."
These volunteers stay on the island for three days, and this physically demanding work in the hot sun is a labor of love.
"I just want to help," said one volunteer. "It feels good to just be out here with people that make an actual difference instead of just scrolling on my phone being mad at stuff all day. It feels good to be out there and doing something."
Another volunteer told KCLU, "when the fire happened, I was watching it daily, the progress, and it was actually freaking out when it went over the Torrey Pines. So I'm just doing what I can to help revitalize the island, bring it back."
And those charged with protecting the island for the next generation say they hope this is just a chapter in its overall growth, rather than the first few sentences of an obituary for a lost species.
