A few miles down the Sacramento River from the small town of Rio Vista lies a 6.5-mile stretch of undeveloped riverbank that California Forever calls “the perfect location” for the nation’s largest shipyard. … Yet even while California Forever has pushed to skip new environmental reviews, it has offered few or shifting details on what the infrastructure will be and how it might impact the Delta’s delicate biodiversity, Bay Nature has found. … While ecologists and advocates say the shipyard site itself has minimal ecological value, it lies less than two miles from the restored Montezuma Wetlands, as well as Suisun Marsh, one of the largest remaining intact marshes on the West Coast. “Placing industry next to one of the last wildest areas in the San Francisco area, hands down, it’s just a bad idea,” says John Durand, an ecologist at UC Davis who has surveyed the river’s biodiversity for years. But what kind of bad idea, Durand notes, “all depends on the details.” 

Other wetland news:

• The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.): Marin Audubon Society closes deal for 323 acres of baylands