At current rate of loss, salt marsh islands could vanish by 2025.
GATEWAY N.R.A., N.Y.—The theories are diverse and scientific, but the reality is simple and stark: The salt marsh islands of New York City's Jamaica Bay have been disappearing rapidly, about 40 acres per year. Left alone, the marshes could vanish by 2025, destroying wildlife habitat and threatening the bay's shorelines.
"The marsh grass is literally drowning," said Dave Avrin, assistant superintendent of Gateway National Recreation Area, which contains most of Jamaica Bay in its boundaries. "This is an issue of very serious concern to the park. Our goal is to prevent additional loss, but we would also like to bring back some of what's already been lost. It will be quite a challenge."
During the past 80 years, Jamaica Bay's island wetlands have decreased from about 2,300 acres to a little more than 1,000.
Their disappearance into the bay, a recent National Park Service report stated, "is transforming grassy green meadows into submerged mud flats." Salt marsh is a richly productive and crucial part of an ecosystem, offering nurseries for fish, counterbalancing global warming and urban pollution by trapping carbon and chemicals, and buffering homes from storm and wave damage.
Theories advanced by specialists for the salt marsh losses include rising sea levels, erosion, plant mortality, contaminants from landfills, and a decades-old decision to dredge channels and pits in the marshes. "The causes all appear to be things that are very difficult to deal with," said Avrin, "and could be resulting from a number of factors."
As primary steward of Jamaica Bay, the National Park Service has developed a three-prong approach to remedy marsh losses and preserve the site's biodiversity: protection, investigation/ restoration, and education. The Jamaica Bay Learning Center has also been created to facilitate research and inform the public and decision-makers of the project.
"We first need to collect information so that we have a good idea of how we can stem the marsh loss," said Avrin. "Then we will look for ways of physically restoring the marshes." Plans for future action include spraying a thin layer of sediment onto the marshes to elevate them, adding sediment backfill to halt erosion, and examining the effect contaminants have on the ecosystem.
Because of funding shortages, however, the park must attack the problem in small steps. The Park Service's current three-year budget of about $800,000 for restoration is a small fraction of what is needed to thoroughly analyze the bay's problems, officials said.
"It is unfortunate that the park does not have sufficient funding, because we're in sort of a race for time here," said Eileen Woodford, NPCA's Northeast regional director. "But the park is doing the right thing: They are looking at this problem piece by piece and then building upon what they're learning over time.
"They're forging new ground for habitat management," she added.
Indeed, the information gathered from Jamaica Bay's restoration efforts could also be useful to areas such as Cape Cod National Seashore and the Chesapeake Bay, areas less urbanized than Jamaica Bay experiencing similar marsh loss.
Among the park's priorities during restoration efforts will be educating the public about the seriousness of marsh losses.
"We want to be sure to let the public know of the problem, and what we're doing," said Avrin. Also crucial to the effort will be citizen groups, nonprofits, elected officials, and inter-agency partnerships such as those forged with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the City of New York Department of Environmental Protection.
More than two million people visit the Jamaica Bay unit of Gateway each year, relishing its unique serenity in the shadow of New York City. It is also a haven for birdwatchers, a stopover on the Eastern Flyway that provides a resting and feeding station for thousands of waterfowl, including snow geese, pintail ducks, and blue- and green-winged teal.
"If Jamaica Bay's marshes go, the whole migration pattern for these and the other birds will be disrupted," said Woodford. "That would have a national, if not international, impact."
