Water Resources Collections and Archives

Tassajara Creek is located in Dublin, California, and drains an area of 23.2 square miles. Alameda County restored a one mile reach of the river in 1999 and 2000 to stop the channel incision and reestablish the riparian vegetation and habitat. Subsequent monitoring by University of California, Berkeley, students determined that the restoration efforts successfully halted the channel incision. This paper establishes the progress of the riparian habitat restoration through plant transects and photomonitoring. The plant transects and photomonitoring are based on the monitoring surveys established in 2000 and 2001 by Davis Environmental Consulting. We concluded that plant diversity and plant growth increased since 2001. Six new species were observed in the plant transects, and plants in 2008 were 1.5 to 8 times their original height in 2000. We also observed a reduced total number of plants Reach 1, when compared with 2000, which may be due to the death of weak plants over the past few years. Few foreign species were observed in the project reach and mature oak trees are in good health. The downstream reach (Reach 1) has denser vegetation growth than the upstream reaches (Reaches 2 and 3), which may be due to Reach 1 having a lower flood frequency interval and depth to groundwater ratio than Reaches 2 and 3. We conclude that the riparian habitat is in good health and successfully met the qualitative goals of the restoration project.