Your Wetlands

Your Wetlands centres around a free, 20-minute-long guided tour of a major California roadway called Highway 37 (also known as the North Bay Flyway Highway) that takes travellers through nature areas replete with migratory birds. Creators hope that people will listen to the tour, which describes wildlife and features of the wetlands (as well as efforts to restore them), as they drive along the highway. The tour can be downloaded on the project's website (click here for access) and used in an iPod or burned to a CD. This audio component of the project also involves 90-second-long radio programmes/podcasts that give voice to some of the people involved in wetlands protection and tell more of the stories about wetlands.

In addition, the project website provides information about wetlands and their value, and offers ideas for citizens to get involved in wetlands restoration.

Your Wetlands also takes advantage of existing billboards to promote the project, and is working to create more interpretive signs for those who can get out on trails in the wetlands and enjoy them.

Another project strategy involves partnering with local government as part of an effort to acknowledge the cities of Novato and Vallejo (which lie along Highway 37) as the official "gateway to your wetlands". The resolutions were adopted in March of 2006, and dedicated in an official public ceremony in May. The mayors of the 2 towns shook hands, and were presented with gateway signs to anchor each end of the North Bay Flyway Highway.

Environment.

In San Francisco (SF)'s North Bay, up until the mid-19th century, there were some 268,000 acres of wetlands - tidal marshes, tidal flats, vernal pools, streams and creeks. The North American Waterfowl Management Plan (a continental plan adopted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico) has identified SF Bay and nearby seasonal and freshwater wetlands as one of the important areas for the recovery of waterfowl species, as have the other federal bird conservation plans such as the Shorebird and Waterbird Plans for their respective species. Groups like SFBJV and their partners are working to restore them as part of an attempt to directly benefit a broad range of birds, mammals, amphibians, invertebrates, and plants (and people) and, in some cases, to provide more effective flood control and allow for miles of public trails where none previously existed.