Wetlands conservation a community effort for Southeast Alaska Land Trust
- Ellie Ruel
- 8 hours ago
- 5 min read
Fireside lecture outlines ways to defend habitats
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
Wetland preservation – and privately managed conservation efforts – flooded the focus of last week’s Friday Fireside chat on “Community Care: Local Conservation in Action” at the U.S. Forest Service Juneau Ranger District Office.
“To put it really simply, as you may have noticed over the last few years, even land that is placed under federal law is not necessarily foolproof. Because we are private, we are not beholden to any sort of political shift,” explained Bailey Williams, who works on outreach for the Southeast Alaska Land Trust. “This land is for the community, for everyone in the community to enjoy.”
A land trust is a private, non-profit organization that permanently protects land and water through conservation easements and land acquisition, according to the SEALT website.
Williams said SEALT currently stewards about 3,000 acres of land, most of which is publicly accessible, and hopes to increase that area to 4,000 acres by the end of the year. Their stated goal is to “protect lands and waters in Southeast Alaska,” which the trust accomplishes by acquiring tracts of land with ecological importance. Some tracts are purchased by the trust with funds from private donors and grants, while others are placed under their stewardship through a conservation easement, or a legal agreement with a landowner to limit land usage to conserve it.
“I don't think that's like a value grade, but we are looking for habitat that's intact,” Williams said in an interview after the lecture. “Most of our work is protecting the area that's already pristine.”
One of those 43 sites is a series of land slivers acquired from property owners by SEALT bordering the Mendenhall Peninsula and Mendenhall Wetlands. Williams said legally it’s considered an accretion site — where sediment or other mass accumulates — but geomorphologically it’s a different story. Isostatic rebound from melting glaciers has caused the land to rise as the weight of the ice runs off, Williams said.
“Probably no one would want to build in these particular wetlands now, right? It's very wet because it's still emerging,” she said. “What about in 100 years? What about 150? So by us owning that land and putting in private conservation, which everybody can still access, we are protecting forever and always access onto the state game refuge. We're also protecting that, but that watershed quality, the ecological value of having a buffer zone around protective land.”
SEALT also owns a slice of land with a single access staircase to a North Douglas fishing beach. Out the road, the trust manages the approximately 70-acre stretch of wetlands across the highway from Windfall Lake Trailhead, dubbed “Very Beary Berry Wetlands.”
Throughout her talk, Williams encouraged the handful of attendees to get out on the lands to forage or just appreciate nature. She found her passion for conservation in graduate school when she found joy in hiking and reading textbooks in trees.
“I think the desire to be amazed by the world and share that amazement is very ancient,” she said.
Williams noted SEALT didn’t start in 1995 as a wetlands-focused organization, but quickly morphed into one while scouting for ecologically important conservation sites.
Wetland areas can filter water, provide coastal buffering from storm surges, and protect coastlines from erosion. Dissolved organic matter can act as a carbon sink and provide support to a wealth of biodiversity.
A recent study in the Yakutat Forelands and the Copper River Delta found that wetland environments are warming at a similar rate to the atmosphere. Previous research has shown that bodies of water, such as streams and rivers, warm more slowly than the air above them, since water has a high heat capacity and can act as a temperature buffer. However, since wetlands contain shallower waters, the buffering capacity is diminished. These findings suggest juvenile salmon, migratory birds and aquatic invertebrates that use wetlands as habitat may be at risk.
After acquiring lands to preserve, SEALT does annual site visits to ensure ecological health. Those observations can prove useful when planning future conservation efforts. Their team partners with researchers to do projects like tracking invasive buttercups or testing the impacts of climate scenarios in Glacier Bay National Park.
“We're establishing greater ecological baselines. So we know what it is we're protecting. So we have better data to inform our policy decision, our stewardship decision,” Williams said.
She also noted managing the land typically involves picking up litter, with the help of other local nonprofits, and looking for any signs of pollution or damage.
“It's also being a good neighbor. Part of being a community of care is being aware and being mindful of the people who share borders or property boundaries with us,” she said.
In response to a question by an attendee about how the airport runway affects migratory bird habitats at the end of the talk, Williams said that there’s a balance to be struck between letting things be wild and human usage. She said that impacts from the runway are offset by habitat restoration projects in other areas.
“It's less, ‘don't touch anything,’ more ‘touch it with reverence, thought and care,’” Williams said.
According to Williams, the land trust has concerns about another project in the area: the proposed Juneau Douglas North Crossing.
“The official position of this Southeast Alaska Land Trust is, if the city feels it is a priority to spend upwards of half a billion dollars on a bridge when we already have one, the Mendenhall Wetland State Game refuge is not a place to do it,” she said.
Coming from the South and from graduate school in California, where Williams said king salmon runs used to be abundant, the patterns of habitat destruction are familiar to her.
“I looked at the story of after. So after the rivers had been dammed, after the roads had been built, after the destruction had happened — you’d hold it in your hands like this, and it was the sacred thing that there was still a steel head left,” she said. “Like, a little itty bitty steel head. They used to have salmon runs just like Alaska. Central California used to have king salmon runs that were overfished, and the habitat was destroyed. I always have that perspective of the pressures that developed down south are at work in Alaska.”
She said the Mendenhall Wetlands are classified as an important bird area (IBA) by the Audubon Society, adding those are important to protect as bird populations decline due to habitat and climate pressures.
“Basically, if that habitat did not exist, a substantial amount of different species would die,” Williams said. “It is vital to their migratory life. There's three IBAs in Southeast Alaska and one of them is right here in Juneau, so protecting that is a pretty big priority.”
Overall, Williams noted that conservation defense is an important accompaniment to the trust’s preservation of ecologically important areas.
“We live in a time that's really contentious and really tense, and there’s a lot of othering and a lot of polarization,” she said. “We're a community. We're all in this together. We gotta figure this out.”
The next Fireside Chat is scheduled at 7 p.m. Friday at the U.S. Forest Service Juneau Ranger District Office, featuring "heartfelt and humorous" tales from Pete Griffin's 38-year Forest Service career called “Diary of a Forest Ranger.”
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
