Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. – When women professional golfers tee off Sept. 30 in the LPGA tournament at the Trump National, the new course on Los Angeles’ Palos Verdes Peninsula will have recorded one major achievement already.
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“The course now exports young gnatcatchers to habitat in other areas on the peninsula,” says Mike Sweesy, project manager with Dudek and Associates, an Encinitas, Calif., environmental services firm that developed and manages the course’s habitat restoration program. “Even during the 2003 drought when other gnatcatcher populations were decreasing dramatically, the population at Trump National held steady.”
Trump National succeeded at blending land development with environmental protection.
“It shows that economically viable development can co-exist with environmentally sensitive resources through appropriate design,” Sweesy said. “The gnatcatcher’s success at Trump National can probably be extrapolated to similar species in similar environmental conditions.”
The gnatcatcher has been called the canary in the coalmine of Southern California because it is an indicator of how healthy the California coastal ecosystem is.
The gnatcatcher is at risk of extinction due to a decline in natural coastal sage scrub habitat. Of the 2.5 million acres of coastal sage scrub that once stretched from Ventura to the Mexican border, only 10 percent remains. Trump National sits in the middle of one of the last habitats for the bird in the Los Angeles basin.
The plan to protect the gnatcatcher began in the mid 1990s. As a precondition to construction of what was then known as Ocean Trails, regulators told the course’s original owners they would have to show they could successful restore coastal sage scrub. The owners brought in Dudek’s biologists and landscape architects who successfully demonstrated a restoration program.
Hopes for the golf course opening were dashed in 1999 when a landslide claimed the 18th hole. Dudek conducted additional assessments of the landslide’s environmental impacts for the reconstruction effort (which included building an enormous retaining wall). The resulting plans to mitigate the landslide helped the course to be competed. After Ocean Trails slipped into bankruptcy, Donald Trump bought the course in 2002, renamed it Trump National Golf Club and closed it in August 2004 for reconstruction and renovation.
“Mr. Trump came in and said ‘We only do things one way, the right way,’” Sweesy says. “He has been very supportive of the habitat restoration effort because it is integral to his development.”
During course construction, Sweesy spent months walking the rolling hills to map out what to plant in areas sometimes as small as 20-square feet to accommodate micro-topographical features. In addition to the restoration work, Dudek also prepared the master landscape plan for the clubhouse, golf course and residential and designed the Ocean Trails public park. When completed, the restoration project installed more than 100,000 native, drought-tolerant plants.
“The most challenging part of the design was the permit requirement for 20-acres of coastal sage scrub restoration inside the course,” Sweesy says. “As a result, restored slopes and out of play areas passed daily by golfers function as habitat where the gnatcatchers forage and nest. That’s significant because conventional wisdom before this project held that these restoration sites would have been too compromised for the gnatcatcher to thrive.”
Sweesy said the repopulation has been an unexpected bonus.
“The regulatory permits required only restoration of coastal sage scrub and not actual occupation by the birds,” Sweesy said. “The gnatcatchers native to the peninsula have been finding their way to the course and staying. These birds are opportunistic and we have created a place where people can enjoy the California coastline and gnatcatchers can thrive.”