A $4.5 million salt marsh restoration project by Audubon Connecticut at the Great Meadows Marsh in Stratford is already seeing a positive impact on the local ecosystem within a year of construction finishing, an Audubon official said.
Jack Matthias, the manager of coastal resilience at Audubon Connecticut, said that the project, which restored 34 acres of salt marsh and planted almost 180,000 native marsh plants, is in its final stages of monitoring the site and collecting data on the successes and failures.
“We’ve seen a lot of positive response to the restoration,” Matthias said. “The mosquito population has declined drastically. Saltmarsh sparrows return to the area that we restored and are nesting. We’ve noticed a lot of success with the vegetation growth and a lot of reduction in invasive species.”
Salt marshes are wetlands found along the coast that get regularly flooded with salt water during high tides and then drain at low tide, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to the Branford Land Trust, over one third of Connecticut’s salt marshes have been lost since colonial times.
There are around a dozen salt marsh restoration projects active in Connecticut, Roger Wolfe, a wetland restoration biologist in the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said.
Audubon Connecticut has another salt marsh restoration project in preliminary stages at Hammonasset Beach State Park in Madison, Matthias said.
“It’s one of the most important ecological areas in the state, but also one of the most visited state parks with over four million people going there every year,” Matthias said.
Hammonasset is home to over 400 acres of salt marsh, Matthias said, though 30 acres have already been lost due to erosion.
“The eastern shoreline of the salt marsh that faces Long Island Sound is actively eroding at a very accelerated pace,” Matthias said. “It’s retreating at nine feet per year.”
The project is being planned now.
“We’re currently designing what we call a living shoreline to be installed along that eastern shoreline to slow down the erosion and create a nature-based solution that will not only slow the pace of erosion, but create habitat and work with nature to turn it into a system that is not as out of balance,” Matthias said.
Invasive species
The Great Meadows Marsh was heavily degraded before the project began, Matthias said, causing issues with the natural drainage of the marsh.
“It was filled in with dredge material, and that affected the hydrology of the marsh,” Matthias said. “It created a space for invasive species to take over, and it also created a very bad mosquito problem because the mosquitoes were nesting in the water that was stagnant and impounded on site.”
In order to restore the marsh, excavators were brought on site to remove the old, dumped dredge material, which was preventing the marsh from draining. The project also hired local high school students as “salt marsh stewards,” who helped with planting, data collection and invasive species control.
Salt marsh restoration projects have positive effects for birds and wildlife, Matthias said, but also for “the community that surrounds them.”
“Salt marshes can filter run-off before it reaches the Long Island Sound, act as buffer from rising seas and storm surge and provide recreational activities like birding, fishing and kayaking,” Matthias said.
Matthias said that although the construction of the project began in October 2021, it had involved nearly 15 years of planning.
“Salt marsh restoration is a very long process,” he said. “It doesn’t happen overnight. You first have to identify the project, and then you have to bring together the partners, and then you have to get grant funding to do that work, and then you need to get designs and permits. There’s a whole process.”
Wolfe said that marsh restoration projects have been happening for decades to address damage that has been done to marshes since colonial times.
“Colonial farmers came over from Europe bringing European methods, where they did a lot of coastal farming of wetlands to make them more productive for agriculture,” Wolfe said. “Since the late 1600s, a lot of our coastal marshes were ditched and drained and impounded and had structures put on them to make them less salty, to the point where they were actually growing agricultural crops on tidal salt marshes.”
Wolfe said that the first restoration projects began over 40 years ago to try and counter the damage.
“By the mid 1980s, we had started dabbling with tidal wetland restoration,” Wolfe said.
DEEP used to have a “soup to nuts” coastal restoration program, where the department would help with the project at every level, including designing, getting permits, funding and providing equipment, Wolfe said. However, due to employees retiring and shifts in priority, DEEP can no longer support these projects single-handedly, he said.
“A number of coastal restoration projects have been undertaken over the years,” Wolfe said. “They have to contract with a company to design it, to organize it… and then you have to go find more money to actually do the job. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, whereas, in the past, we were able to do it all in-house at the state level for a lot less.”
Despite this, Wolfe said the future of salt marsh restoration is promising.
“A lot of things have already been done for a number of years in the mid-Atlantic and farther down the Atlantic coast, and it’s worked with some level of success,” Wolfe said.
Biological diversity
In Stamford, Katie Boback, the assistant education director of salt marsh programs at SoundWaters, is working to restore two acres of salt marsh along the city’s harbor. SoundWaters is a nonprofit group in Stamford that educates children and adults about the importance of a clean Long Island Sound.
“This marsh is very small, but it’s really important because it’s one of the last marshes left along the shores of Stamford Harbor,” Boback said. “At one point in time, most of the harbor and the coastline was salt marsh, so I think it’s really important to be protecting these habitats.”
SoundWaters’ project involves removing an invasive species of reed, called phragmites, that has spread across the marsh.
“The marsh in Stamford Harbor has a lot of phragmites in it,” Boback said. “[The plant] creates a monotypic culture, which means that it doesn’t allow any other plants to grow where it’s growing.”
Although the project is relatively small, Boback said that it’s important because of how biologically diverse salt marshes are.
“[Salt marshes] are right up there with rainforest and coral reefs in terms of environments that have the most biological activity happening,” she said. “Based on how many plants and animals rely on marshes and contribute to their diversity, if we lose one acre of salt marsh, it’s a huge loss compared to losing, say, one acre of football field grass.”
Boback said that one result of salt marsh restoration projects is that it helps the population of saltmarsh sparrows, an endangered bird species, remain stable.
“If we lose the native species that they like to nest in, their population will decline even further,” Boback said. “Their population is already struggling a lot now, so it’s really important that we protect species like that.”
More salt marsh restoration projects are currently in development across the state. In East Lyme, The Nature Conservancy, a global environmental nonprofit, secured a $4 million grant from NOAA to create a restoration plan for the Bride Brook marsh in Rocky Neck State Park in Niantic, according to its website.
The plan began development in October 2024 and is set to be completed by Sept. 30, 2027, Eli Terris, the project manager for the planning and design of the restoration, said.
Terris said that the marsh is experiencing significant degradation.
“Our coastal salt marshes in the area are under a lot of duress,” Terris said. “The future of these salt marshes is in jeopardy without active restoration efforts.”
Significant amounts of research go into developing these projects, Jared Kannel, a conservation project manager at the Norwalk Maritime Aquarium, said. He manages research projects that the aquarium has on salt marshes.
“We’re looking at what factors lead to salt marshes that are going to be resilient to the impacts of climate change and what are the most time and resource effective ways to restore or manage a salt marsh,” Kannel said.
The aquarium conducts these research projects to learn more about how to most efficiently restore a salt marsh, Kannel said, which they share with organizations that conduct restoration projects.
The conservation department at the Maritime Aquarium is only four years old, Kannel said, but has been consistently growing.
“We have five [salt marsh research projects] right now, and it’s more than we’ve ever had, but next year we might have six,” Kannel said. “It’s been such a short time and I think there’s been a new project added every year.”
Pierce Colfer is a rising senior at the University of Connecticut majoring in journalism and mathematics. This story is republished via CT Community News, a service of the Connecticut Student Journalism Collaborative, an organization sponsored by journalism departments at college and university campuses across the state.
