California Sea Grant College Program

Given the increasingly widespread wetland restoration activities in California(Zedler 1996), it is imperative that reasonable measures of success be adopted. In thepast, monitoring of restored wetlands has focused on superficial indicators of structure, such as density or species number. Functional measurements have been more elusive(Zedler 2000). In this study we compared the trophic structure and function of a 6-7 yearold created salt marsh and adjacent natural marsh in Mission Bay, San Diego, Californiain an effort to develop means to assess recovery of trophic function. The majorobjectives of the study were to (1) evaluate of benthic community structure (density,composition and diversity), (2) track seasonal and interannual changes in trophicstructure based on natural abundance stable isotopic analyses, (3) conduct isotopicenrichment experiments to identify consumers of specific food sources (microalgae,cyanobacteria, Spartina and other bacteria), (4) perform of plant cover manipulations toevaluate the mechanisms by which Spartina influences benthic processes, and (5)improve conceptual understanding of trophic successional processes associated withrestoration. In combination these research results allow us to assess the extent to whichthe Crown Point Mitigation Site (CPMS) in Mission Bay California has come to resemblethe natural wetland (Northern Wildlife Preserve [NWP] and Kendall Frost Marsh) and themechanisms underlying this recovery.