are hotspots for bird watching. For example, the Elkhorn Slough in the western United States is one of the premier bird watching sites in the western United States. Over 340 species are seen visiting including several rare and endangered species. Species of birds seen in sloughs such as the Elkhorn slough include acorn woodpecker, brown pelican, Caspian tern, great blue heron, great egret, great horned owl, snowy plover, and white-tailed kite. Sloughs are largely influenced by human development such as urban and agricultural expansion, industrial and agricultural practices, water management practices, and humans influence on species composition. Uses of identifying these aspects of human involvement can help to better predict restoration efforts to be made in managing sloughs. Examples of attributes that are affected by human stress upon the environment include periphyton, marsh plant communities, tree islands, alligators, wading birds, and marsh fishes, invertebrates, and herpetofauna. Formation A slough can form when a meander gets cut off from the main river channel creating an oxbow lake that accumulates with fine overbank sediment and organic material such as peat. This creates a wetland or swamp environment. One end of the oxbow configuration then continues to receive flow from the main channel, creating a slough. Sloughs are typically associated with the ridge formations found in their presence. Such a landscape consists of mosaic linear ridges, typically of some sort of grass such as sawgrass ridges in the Florida Everglades, that are separated by deeper water sloughs. Edges of sloughs are layers of sediment deposited by a river over time. The development of this landscape is thought to occur by the preferential formation of peat in bedrock depressions. Multiple of these deposits mounted on top of the surrounding bedrock can become elongated alongside the slough and create flow diversions within the system. Different rates of this peat accumulation could be triggered by variations in microtopography that alter plant production and vegetation type. Water flow might be the key to preventing an accumulation of organic sediment in sloughs due to the fact that accumulation leads to lowering water depths and instead allows for the growth of vegetation. Degradation Overall little quantitative data on the degradation of slough landscape exists. Slough and ridge landscape has been greatly degraded in terms of both topographic and vegetation changes over time. Topographical changes create an increase in the relief between ridge crests and slough bottoms. Vegetation changes consist