By Alessandra Bergamin, Bay Nature
Leaning on the hood of his pickup truck, parked just inside a chain-link fence, Louis Terrazas rustles through a thick folder of documents that describe the parcel of open space he is trying to restore. The hum of machinery echoes from a yellow bulldozer moving about the industrial lot next door, and under the glaring sun, Terrazas turns through the plastic pockets, narrating each document inside.
There’s a graph of butterfly health, a series of orange bar lines that diminish as they run off the page. There’s a technicolor, bathymetry map that plots the bumps and canyons of the nearby river. And then a black-and-white, crosshatched plan of the area that divides it in two, labeling one “Stam” and the other “Sardis” in square speech bubbles.
In isolation, each of these documents is a standard part of conservation, outlining projects and presenting photographs that remind us of what we are trying to conserve. But as a whole, they tell the story of the rise, fall and possible rise once more of Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge.
Read the complete story at Bay Nature.