Although the Bay Area is prized for its natural beauty and ecological diversity, groups like Save the Bay and the Friends of Corte Madera Creek Watershed have been struggling to prevent that beauty and diversity from disappearing into construction and landfill.

Both groups work to regulate construction seasons and areas in order to protect the Bay’s wetlands and endangered species, which President of the Friends of Corte Madera Creek Watershed Sandy Guldman said she believes are intimately intertwined.

“Organisms tell us that our environment isn’t completely destroyed,” she said. “They’re canaries in the coal mines, and when they go, we’re in trouble.”

The FCMCW works to conserve and restore Marin’s wilderness, as well as to educate citizens on environmental conservation, rehabilitate areas by hosting community cleanups, and even grow endangered and endemic species in order to swell the depleted ranks of organisms.

Among those species is the California clapper rail, the endangered and endemic bird species that shifted construction on Doherty Drive late last year.

“Clapper rails live in wetlands that are vital for absorbing and breaking down nutrients, for filtering the water that passes through them, and also for doing things like maintaining stable, balanced populations of important organisms,” said Guldman, who took part in ensuring that construction would not disrupt the clapper rails’ nesting season. “Clapper rails are a good indication of whether or not that habitat is healthy.”

The wetlands, like many of the natural areas in Marin, have been threatened in the past by human development. While Marin is often perceived as an environmentally-friendly place, Guldman said she believes that when it comes down to the bottom line, Marin may not be too different from other places.

“Some people are careful, but there’s a sizeable minority who are more concerned with their private property than with the wildlife that they might build upon or reduce,” she said. “When it gets right down to it, I don’t think Marin demonstrates a very responsible environmental attitude, because other things get in the way.”

Ecology teacher Joe Stewart echoed Guldman’s sentiment. “I think that by being American in a pretty affluent place, we are definitely consumers,” he said. “The infrastructure that we have, the energy and the water use we have, and the financial comfort people often have in Marin, all that maybe creates a disconnect.”

Save the Bay, a group that also works to protect wetlands and Bay Area organisms, has been trying to bridge that disconnect for over 50 years.

According to Jana Romero, a Field Outreach Coordinator for Save the Bay, the organization began when three women gathered public support and pushed laws regulating garbage dumping and filling in the San Francisco Bay. “Laws are really valuable, but we need to put them into action and recreate the habitat that we’ve lost, or there’s no point,” she said.

For Save the Bay, action takes the form of volunteer activism.

“In 1961, we managed to mobilize literally thousands of people to protest against construction projects and pollution that was destroying the Bay,” Romero said. “Berkeley was planning to double in size by expanding into the Bay, and people were dumping all sorts of trash into the water. The Bay was disappearing.”

Save the Bay’s protests attracted enough support and attention to close down dozens of garbage centers located on the Bay and to stop Berkeley’s expansion. Fifty-two years later, the organization has set its sights on wetland restoration, preventing construction, and conserving species.

“Protecting the Bay means protecting the over 100 threatened and endangered species that live here,” said Romero. “Places like the wetlands, which act as nurseries for all those animals, need to be restored or preserved if we want to maintain the diversity we have.”

Save the Bay’s current project is the restoration of over 100,000 acres of wetlands that fringe the Bay. “Only 5% of our wetlands remain untouched. We’ve damaged or destroyed a lot of that other 95%, and now we need to rebuild it,” said Romero.

Save the Bay’s efforts were rewarded earlier this year, when the San Francisco Bay Area was recognized as a “Wetland of International Importance” by the Ramsar Convention, a treaty between 165 countries.

“This is a big deal, and a great recognition because it really means we have something valuable and unique here,” Romero said. “That’s what we’re trying to save, and why we’re trying to save it.”

Earlier this year, the San Francisco Bay Area was recognized as a “Wetland of International Importance” by the Ramsar Convention, an environmental treaty between 165 countries.

The recognition is a nod to the high number of endemic and endangered species that call the Bay Area their home, and the pride of several environmentally active groups that have been campaigning for decades to keep the Bay Area’s biological diversity alive.

The California clapper rail, which found itself in the spotlight late last year after construction on Doherty Drive was scheduled to accommodate its nesting season, is one of over 100 endemic species found in the Bay Area. Now it, like many other species in this area, is endangered.

According to the PRBO Conservation Science’s 2008 report on the Clapper Rail’s population growth, the number of Clapper Rails has dwindled down from the tens of thousands present before 1900 to just under 1,500, earning the birds a place on the nation’s endangered species list since 1970.

The report further states that the population downturn “likely represents a true decrease in the Estuary-wide population and could be linked to a number of factors, including extreme weather events, predation, heavy construction, and pollutants.”

Policies put into place to protect the Clapper Rail impacted Redwood earlier in the school year, when Doherty Drive closed for construction. The original construction plans had meant to avoid school schedules, but doing so would interrupt the Clapper Rail nesting season.

“Clapper Rails live in wetlands that are vital for absorbing and breaking down nutrients, for filtering water that passes through them, and also for doing things like maintaining stable, balanced populations of important organisms,” said Sandy Guldman, President of the Friends of Corte Madera Creek Watershed. “So it’s not just that we want to preserve the Clapper Rail’s existence. We want the habitat that they live in, and Clapper Rails are a good indication of whether or not that habitat is healthy.”

But while the Clapper Rail has been thrown into the spotlight by construction near its habitat, it is not the only local species to be threatened by human interference.

According to the Marin Chapter California Native Plant Society, the Tiburon Mariposa Lily and the Tiburon Jewelflower are two flowers that grow exclusively on Marin’s peninsula, where they live on protected government land.

The former flower grows only “among the serpentine rocks of Ring Mountain,” where the MCCNPS said it was first documented after the area became public land in 1971. The latter was discovered nearly a century early in 1886 by flower collector Edward L. Greene.

According to the 2011 Rare Plant Survey Report by Wetlands Research Associates, the Tiburon Jewelflower blooms in late spring and has dark petals that give it its secondary name, the Black Jewelflower.