Restoring Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge

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Sand is dredged from the nearby San Joaquin River and moved onto the refuge. Photo by Antioch Dunes National Wildlife Refuge

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. 

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