1983 – The Department of Fish and Game decides to return several hundred acres of diked marshlands to the tides. The lands behind the dikes had subsided; simply breaching the dikes would create lagoons, but not wetlands. So workers created a system of channels and mounds that would become islands.


These fields in what is now South Marsh had subsided as much as three feet below the level of the original marsh.

Creating the channels and islands.

The completed project. Twenty years of exposure to the tides has turned this artificial system into more natural-looking islands, mudflats, and creeks, but the original system is still evident in the South Marsh (aerial photos)