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Volunteers assisting with stream buffer plantings in Ocean County Park.
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New Stream Buffer Benefits Ocean County Park
and the Barnegat Bay
The NJ Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), Ocean County Parks and Recreation, and Barnegat Bay Partnership collaborated to plant a stream buffer on a branch of the Metedeconk River in Ocean County Park. The planting was an environmentally beneficial project that a Responsible Party voluntarily agreed to perform as a condition of settling an enforcement action by the NJDEP.
The project was designed to benefit water and air quality by creating a buffer of native plant species along an impaired section of the Schoolhouse Branch, the stream which flows through the park on its way to the Metedeconk River. The river empties into the Barnegat Bay about seven miles downstream from the park.
The native plants in the new buffer will help improve water quality in the Schoolhouse Branch by increasing infiltration of stormwater into the ground and by removing nutrients and trapping sediments carried in stormwater runoff. With their deep roots, these plants will help stabilize the stream banks against soil erosion. Another important benefit is that the native plants provide food and shelter for birds, pollinators like butterflies and bees, and other wildlife.
Hundreds of small streams like the Schoolhouse Branch feed water into the Barnegat Bay. Without vegetated buffer areas like the one planted at Ocean County Park, harmful amounts of fertilizers and other pollutants can enter the streams and flow into the Barnegat Bay, leading to negative impacts on the bay's ecosystem and its valuable natural resources.
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Some of the native species planted along the stream in Ocean County Park in Lakewood.
From left to right:
Echinacea purpurea (Purple coneflower),
Lobelia cardinalis (Cardinal flower), and
Rudbeckia hirta (Black-eyed Susan)
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| BBP Field Technician Ceili Pestolozzi monitoring Barnegat Bay wetlands. |
EPA Grant to Fund Barnegat Bay Wetlands Monitoring
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded a grant of $184,548 to Ocean County College to fund wetlands monitoring work by the Barnegat Bay Partnership and the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary (PDE). This grant was one of three awards to agencies in New Jersey to better protect the state's wetlands.
"Wetlands play a critical role in alleviating harmful effects of climate change, protecting against flooding and storm surges," said EPA Regional Administrator Judith A. Enck. "These grants will help strengthen shorelines and the health of wetlands, protecting water quality and fish and wildlife habitats."
The EPA grant will be used to develop monitoring procedures to assess the condition and progress of tidal marsh restoration sites. The project will build on the wetland monitoring work that the BBP has already been doing in collaboration with the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary. The BBP and PDE will evaluate restoration progress in the context of the ongoing long-term intensive monitoring and watershed-wide rapid assessment monitoring being conducted in tidal marshes in the Barnegat and Delaware estuaries.
"Superstorm Sandy had a devastating impact on many of the Barnegat Bay's wetlands," said Dr. Stan Hales, BBP Director. "The storm caused extensive loss from the edges and interiors of marshes. The storm damage also included complex changes to the marsh surface. It's important to understand these changes and monitor the effectiveness of wetlands restoration projects."
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BBP Field Technician Talia Stillman ready to set one of the eel collectors in a stream.
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American Eels in the Barnegat Bay Estuary
by Ceili Pestalozzi, BBP Field Technician
Each winter around this time, small American eels (Anguilla rostrata) - a species of fish with a snake-like body - arrive in the Barnegat Bay. At this life stage, they are known as glass eels (if they are still young enough to be transparent) or elvers (if they are somewhat older and opaque). These eels hatched from eggs in the warm waters of the Sargasso Sea and traveled up to a year and 1,000 miles on ocean currents before reaching our coast.
Once they arrive, most juvenile eels migrate from estuaries into freshwater streams and rivers, where they will spend most of their lives maturing. These eels may live for 15 to 20 years and grow to lengths of over three feet before they leave the estuaries and freshwater streams of the eastern United States to return to the Sargasso Sea, where the adults spawn and eventually die. Eel larvae have been observed in the Sargasso Sea for over a hundred years, but scientists had no direct evidence that adult eels migrated there until a recent study used satellite transmitters to track them.
Eels are important in coastal stream ecosystems as food sources, predators, and transportation for larval mussels, which hitch a ride on migrating eels. In recent years, American eel populations have been declining due to exotic parasites, fishing pressure, and dams which block their migration routes. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided not to list American eel as a threatened species in 2015, but their low population numbers remain of concern coast-wide.
In order to keep track of the size and health of the American eel population in the Barnegat Bay watershed, the Barnegat Bay Partnership has been conducting an eel population survey since 2012. Each winter and spring our field technicians and volunteers set eel collectors in streams throughout the watershed. These collectors mimic the vegetation that juvenile eels like to hide in, attracting them as they are passing by on their migration route. Eels captured in the collectors are taken back to the lab to be counted and "staged" - a technique where markings on the eels are used to tell their age - and finally released back into the stream where they were collected.
In 2015, we caught over 2,500 eels from just five sites in the watershed. This number was even greater in 2014 with almost 4,500 eels caught! That's a lot of juvenile eels. It's too early in the study to make conclusions about how the eel population is doing, but as this study continues, the results will shed light on the size, health, and distribution of the eels in Barnegat Bay. Let's hope they are here for years to come!
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Glass eels captured in one of the collectors.
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Ecosystem Modeling for the Barnegat Bay
When making decisions about how to best manage the natural resources of the Barnegat Bay, we need to understand how a change in one component of the bay's ecosystem might impact the rest of the bay. It's not feasible or ethical to set up a large-scale experiment that dramatically alters the environment to see the effects of a decision. Instead managers are turning to ecosystem modeling.
An ecosystem model is a computer simulation of an actual ecosystem in which a set of key components are linked together. After the model is created and tested using existing data, it can be used to predict the outcomes of changes (for better or worse) to an ecosystem.
Over the past few years, Dr. Jim Vasslides, BBP Program Scientist, has been modeling the Barnegat Bay ecosystem through a research project funded by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. One of Dr. Vasslides' models looked at how different stakeholder groups within the watershed perceive how Barnegat Bay works - what components they think are important and how those components are related. To do this, he interviewed people of diverse backgrounds - baymen and women, scientists, resource managers, members of the NGO (non-governmental organization) community, and others - and drew maps of how they think about the bay.
"It should come as no surprise that people think the Barnegat Bay ecosystem is complicated, with an intricate web of connections," said Dr. Vasslides. "What you might not have expected is that interviewees with different perspectives had similar opinions about which components and relationships are most important in understanding how the bay works - for example, development, human population, nutrients, and seagrass beds. From a practical standpoint, this means we are all speaking the same language and may see similar paths forward when it comes to protecting and restoring the bay."
For more information about ecosystem modeling of the bay based on stakeholder perceptions, read the full article in the Journal of Environmental Management.
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