This e-book records favorite stories about salt marsh secrets that my collaborators and I uncovered while studying southern California coastal wetlands, from the 1970s to date. In 1986, we became the Pacific Estuarine Research Lab.

Please download the files as they appear online and enjoy learning what we learned…and more. You’ll meet many “detectives,” and you’ll be able to appreciate how they learned so much–undeterred by mud and flood. Learn while exploring the salt marshes near you!

PDF name and brief description:

Preface: Learning while exploring (2 MB)
1. Discovering Secrets: Introducing salt marshes (17 MB)
2. Seasonal Change: How weather and tides change over the year (11 MB)
3. Rare Plant & Bird: An annual plant and a clapper rail (9 MB)
4. Where Plants Grow: The influence of salt and water and more (7 MB)
5. Perennials & Annuals: How short- and long-lived plants get along (22 MB)
6. Salt Marsh Weeds: Which species invade and why (11 MB)
7. Sedimentation: A little sedimentation is good; a lot is not (25 MB)
8. Heterogeneity: Variable elevation and patchiness (16 MB)
9. Transitions: From marsh plain to high marsh to upland (9 MB)
10. Testing Diversity: What diversity affects and what affects diversity (15 MB)
11. Runoff Cattails Algae: Freshwater pulses trigger pesky invaders (18 MB)
12. Dunes: Why our dunes are low and flat (6 MB)
13. Damages: How we damage salt marshes (9 MB)
14. Go Fish: Fish and invertebrates respond to changing waters (10 MB)
15. Animal Mobility: Mobile and immobile species (6 MB)
16. Food Web: Who eats whom (12 MB)
17. Conservation Battles: It wasn’t easy saving salt marshes (6 MB)
18. Restoration: Returning tidal influence (25 MB)
19. Testing Theory: Contributions to the science of ecology (21 MB)
20. References: References cited and other PERL research (2 MB)
21. PERL alumni: Where the “detectives” are now (4 MB)