Spring recap

Jill Carr measuring canopy height at a Nahant reference bed.

Despite all the bad weather that we've had, it was a very busy and productive spring for the MarineFisheries HUB3 eelgrass restoration project.  Our work has shifted from Salem Sound to Boston Harbor, and the spring was spent planting and monitoring at six sites that were selected last fall.  The sites that were selected for restoration are Green Island, Great Brewster Island, Gallops Island, Long Island, Governors Island Flats, and Deer Island Flats.  All of our harvesting for the Boston Harbor restoration will take place in expansive natural eelgrass beds near Nahant.  We also began monitoring at three reference beds; two near Nahant and one east of Logan Airport.  As noted in a May post, during our initial assessment of the reference beds and harvest sites, it appeared that some of the natural beds had suffered some damage from winter storms that battered the area.  While we don’t have enough data to say for sure, the beds do seem to be rebounding as seedlings are growing and filling in some of the bare areas.    

Boston Harbor restoration, reference, and harvest sites.

The Boston Harbor sites are set up in a similar layout to our six plots per ¼ acre sites in Salem Sound.  The plots that were planted this spring will act as test plots and five additional plots will be added to the sites that are deemed successful based on the initial plots.  Our goal is to get at least 1 acre planted in Boston Harbor.  We are planning to use volunteers for large scale planting days again as last year’s volunteer days with Salem Sound Coastwatch and The New England Aquarium’s Live Blue Ambassadors program were a huge success.

Earlier in the spring, we looked at two of our restoration sites that were planted last year in Salem Sound.  Both the Woodbury Point site and the Middle Ground site survived the winter and appeared to be expanding.  A full monitoring event is planned for all of the Salem Sound sites in late July so that we can determine the actual one year success of those sites.

We are all keeping our fingers crossed for the weather to begin to improve.  We have a lot of work to do throughout the summer, so stay tuned for further updates.

Mooring video, Salem Sound Under Water lecture series and more!

Greetings from the MarineFisheries eelgrass team!  Like many of you, much of our winter work involves crunching data from the previous field season and disseminating our findings in reports and public presentations. I recently gave a presentation as part of the “ Salem Sound Underwater” lecture series hosted by Salem Sound Coastwatch (http://www.salemsound.org/) The talk focused on eelgrass, why it is important and what we are doing to map, monitor and restore it to our coast. 

 The next presentation in the series will be "Saltmarshes Under Siege" by Robert Buchsbaum of the Mass Audubon Society,  March 27th, 7pm at the Marblehead Abbot Public Library.

We are always trying to find new ways to engage the public through presentations, pictures and videos.  Recently, we edited some of our field work videos to turn them into educational tools.  One example is our video of a dive on a traditional, block and chain, boat mooring. The footage, captured in July 2011, demonstrates divers monitoring a boat mooring located within a mooring field that overlaps an eelgrass meadow in Manchester-by-the-Sea. The chain from the traditional mooring system drags along the bottom, scouring the seafloor as it sweeps in and out with the waves. This was not a very windy day, but look at that chain bounce!

The Manchester mooring project was part of a collaboration with the Mass Bays Program and was funded by the Association of National Estuary Programs with a NOAA Community Based Restoration Partnership Grant.  The primary objective of the project was to restore eelgrass to denuded areas around traditional block and chain mooring systems.  Sixteen block and chain moorings were replaced with conservation mooring systems in existing eelgrass beds: eight in Manchester and eight in Provincetown.  Following replacement of the moorings, eelgrass was transplanted into a subset of the scars to determine if transplanting would facilitate the recovery of eelgrass.  Monitoring has been performed annually and is still underway.  For more information, refer to the project poster here: http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dmf/programsandprojects/neers_mooring_poster.pdf

Looking forward to Spring and our upcoming field season!

- Tay Evans, MarineFisheries biologist