Educators Learn the Value of Southern Louisiana's Maritime Forest Ridges

By Paul C. Focazio, Web Content Manager, New York Sea Grant

"Healthy wetlands support our fisheries, our industry, and our communities,” said Mel Landry (pictured in (1) above), sitting on a boat heading to Port Fourchon's Maritime Forest Ridge from the mainland's marina. “By restoring habitat, we are preserving an engine of job-creation and economic growth.”

Landry, a Marine Habitat Resource Specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Restoration Center, joined up with the educators on the New York State Marine Education Association (NYSMEA) and New York Sea Grant (NYSG)-led plant restoration and wetlands education trip during their final days in the region in late February around Port Fourchon, Louisiana's southernmost port.

This sea port shows significant petroleum industry traffic from offshore Gulf oil platforms and drilling rigs as well as the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port pipeline. With primary service markets in domestic deepwater oil and gas exploration, drilling, and production in the Gulf of Mexico, Fourchon has earned the tagline "The Gulf's Energy Connection" for several reasons: (a) it has over 600 oil platforms within a 40-mile radius, (b) it's port currently services over 90% of the Gulf's deepwater oil production, and (c) this area furnishes 16-18% of the U.S. oil supply.

In addition to being noted as an economic asset for its abundance of fossil fuels, Port Fourchon is also home to some unique environmental projects. For over 10 years, the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program (BTNEP) has partnered with the Greater Lafourche Port Commission and other organizations for a plant re-establishment effort on a maritime ridge located just offshore from the Port Fourchon Marina. Ridges such as this one are extremely important to many animals, including the millions of migrating birds that cross the Gulf of Mexico in the spring each year on their way back to their breeding grounds in the eastern United States and Canada.



Landry, a former BTNEP Public Involvement Coordinator, was accompanied by several current BTNEP staff for this habitat restoration trip, including their Plant Materials Coordinator Matt Benoit (pictured in (2) above)

"We'd like to establish a maritime forest here [on the ridge, pictured in (3) below]," said Benoit. If successful, BTNEP and its partners will help to minimize the impacts of strong storms, including wetlands loss, among other issues. These efforts don't come without their own set of challenges, though.

"We're trying to determine which species will thrive on the ridge, the ones that will do best giving the high salinity in this environment," says Benoit. BTNEP works through this process via a volunteer program where numerous groups, including ours, pitch in each year.



During our group's first effort with BTNEP in February 2011, the educators planted nearly 800 salt matrimony vine tree/shrubs on this rather vegetatively-bare ridge. These small, native evergreens have a high success rate in most soils and are also tolerant of salt spray and drought conditions. Other plants found on the ridge, including marsh hay, bitter panicum and Spartina patens, exhibit similar endurance qualities.

While most of last year's overall plantings didn't survive on the ridge due to severe drought conditions in the area, ours made it through. This year, with the help of about a dozen students from Massachusetts' Brandeis University, we planted 480 plants, including hagberry, salt matrimony vine, live oak and sand oak.



Prior to this year's planting, the educators and students unloaded the boats, which were filled with numerous racks of the various plant species (pictured in (4)-(5) above). Benoit then showed the educators and students how to prepare and plant the different species (as shown in (6)-(10) below). After holes were drilled deep enough to support the roots, the plant's soil needed some loosening up before placing it in the ground. Dirt filled in around the plant was mixed with a growing agent (such as gypsum, bag asse or a fertilizer tablet) or, in some cases, nothing (to serve as a control in the study), depending on the plant's location in the test plots laid out on the ridge (as shown in (11) - (15) below).













In order to document the success of this and other BTNEP plantings on the ridge, baseline data was gathered once all the plants were in place in the various test plots (as shown in (16)-(20) below). This information - which includes statistics on height, leaf spread and stem width - will be used as a measure of growth and survival after the plants are in the ground for a year.





"If we get a steady rain this year, maybe 20 percent of these plants will survive," said Benoit. And, though the soils on the sparsely-growing maritime forest ridge (pictured in (21) below) aren't yet optimal for large-scale survival, BTNEP staff and volunteers are making strides through this project to find the right combination of factors needed to combat the area's range of issues.



Following the planting with BTNEP on this ridge, the educators returned back to mainland and headed to Grand Isle, a barrier island in Louisiana's Jefferson Parish located at the mouth of Barataria Bay where it meets the Gulf of Mexico. On the Isle is a good example of what they helped work towards in Port Fourchon - a more robust and, hopefully one day, full maritime forest ridge.

Throughout its history, Grand Isle has been repeatedly pummeled by hurricanes. On average, Grand Isle has been affected by tropical storms or hurricanes every 2.68 years since 1877, with hurricane direct hits on average every 7.88 years.

In 1860, a 6-foot storm surge and great winds resulted in the total devastation of the island. More recently, 2005's Hurricane Katrina hit Grand Isle very hard, destroying or damaging homes and camps along the entire island. Katrina's surge reached 5 ft at Grand Isle, with large waves severely damaging the only bridge linking Grand Isle to the mainland.



The Nature Conservancy's Jean Landry took our educators on a tour of the 20 acres of undeveloped land that comprises Grand Isle's Landry Le Blanc Tract (pictured in (22) above and (23)-(24) below). "There are no other undeveloped lands on this Isle like this anymore," she said.





There are many old trees in this maritime forest ridge, some well over 100 - 500 years old (such as the one pictured in (25) below). "They're seen a lot of weather changes," says Landry. They also serve as shelter for animals and filter salt water that comes through from the Gulf during storm events.

One of the challenges facing the Nature Conservancy in this more mature maritime forest ridge is the removal of plant invasive species. The Chinese tallow tree was introduced as an ornamental tree about 150 years ago because of its colorful and shades well. But, it spreads a great deal of seeds, leading to it being quite pervasive and out-competing the area's native species. Potato vine and lantana, the latter bearing bright orange and yellow flowers (as seen in (26) below), are two other key invasives that the Nature Conservancy is working diligently to remove.

In Louisiana, Trip a Lesson in Wetlands Recovery for New York Educators

The New York Marine Education Association and New York Sea Grant's 2012 trip to the Louisiana coast made the paper yesterday (Sunday, March 18). Check out the article, "In Louisiana trip a lesson in wetlands recovery," in Newsday - see pdf of article (click here) or text version below. Newsday is one of the most popular suburban daily papers in the country, with most current circulation numbers for its Sunday paper set at around 671,820 print subscribers.

In Louisiana, trip a lesson in wetlands recovery
Newsday / March 17, 2012 by TED PHILLIPS

Educators who spent Presidents Week restoring Louisiana wetlands are bringing that knowledge back to Long Island, to work with local groups to organize wetland preservation and restoration projects here.

"What's going on there is really dire because the wetlands are being lost so quickly, but it's going on here, too," said Meghan Marrero, president of the New York State Marine Education Association, a nonprofit that promotes marine education and research and co-organized the trip.

Marrero said many people do not realize how much of Long Island, Brooklyn and Queens used to be marshes and how much we rely on what's left. "We're really trying to bring the wetlands back to what they once were because they're really important to catching pollution and preventing flooding," Marrero said.

The New York Sea Grant, a joint federal and state program run by Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and Cornell University, was the other organizer.

The U.S. loses about 60,000 acres of wetlands each year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Construction, dredging, pollution and farming are major causes. Hurricanes, such as Katrina, and other natural causes, can also be factors.

Fourteen educators, mostly from Long Island and the New York City area, traveled last month to New Orleans and a federal conservation center in Galliano. Together, the volunteers planted more than 1,700 plants, and they potted grasses and other vegetation for eventual planting.

"It was a good opportunity for them to see the problem down there to really become inspired to do work up here," said Larissa Graham, outreach coordinator for the Long Island Sound Study at the New York Sea Grant. Some volunteer projects that are likely to be organized on Long Island include planting native species in wetlands and pulling up invasive species, she said.

Elizabeth Platt, a science teacher at Smithtown High School West who went on the trip, said she wants to involve her students in a project to restore the tidal flow in Sunken Meadow State Park. "When they see how much effort it takes to try to restore something, that makes us more sensitive to disturbing things in the first place; and to be more concerned about protecting it," Platt said.

New York Educators Help Restore Threatened Coastal Habitats in Louisiana and at Home

Louisiana’s wetlands are being lost at an alarming rate—approximately one football field of wetlands is lost every 38 minutes due to the canals that have been dug for oil transportation, the floodwaters that have ripped through the area during hurricanes, and the damming and channelization of the Mississippi which used to supply sediment to replenish these vital areas. If these rates continue, an additional 800,000 acres of wetlands will disappear by 2040, and the Louisiana shoreline will advance inland as much as 33 miles in some areas.

Similar concerns over wetland loss are mirrored in New York wetlands such as Jamaica Bay, a 39-square-mile estuary that includes portions of Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island's Nassau County. During the "State of the Bay: Past, Present and Future—Revisited" symposium, a New York Sea Grant (NYSG) co-sponsored event held at Brooklyn College this past fall, scientists discussed restoration plans for the bay's salt marshes, which are being lost at a rate of 44 acres per year.

To learn about wetland loss in Louisiana and how it relates to the habitat loss occurring in New York, a group of fourteen educators traveled to Louisiana for five days late last month to rebuild habitats devastated by recent natural and man-made events. The group was organized and led by Larissa Graham, New York Sea Grant’s Long Island Sound Study (LISS) Outreach Coordinator and Meghan Marrero, the President of New York State Marine Education Association (NYSMEA) and faculty at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY.

In addition to providing crucial resources to the nation, wetlands are extremely important in an ecological sense as they serve as feeding, breeding, and nursery grounds for thousands of native animals. "Healthy wetlands support our fisheries, our industry, and our communities,” said Mel Landry, Marine Habitat Resource Specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Restoration Center. “By restoring habitat, we are preserving an engine of job-creation and economic growth.”

To rebuild wetland habitats in Louisiana, the group of educators volunteered at the United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service Golden Meadow Plant Materials Center in Galliano where they planted more than 1,700 gulf bluestem plants, harvested seeds, and prepped planting materials. They also worked with Louisiana Sea Grant at the Wetland Plant Center in New Orleans to pot native wetland vegetation which will be planted at various wetlands around Southern Louisiana.

Working with the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, the group planted nearly 500 live oak, sand oak, and hackberry trees on a restored ridge re-created from dredged sediments that were excavated during dredging in Port Fourchon. With this and future plantings, this ridge will one day become a mature maritime forest—a crucial habitat that provides food and shelter for birds during their migration routes.

While they worked, participants learned from local experts about the natural history of Louisiana’s wetlands and the natural and man-made processes that affect them today. Marrero and Graham hope that this trip will motivate these educators to protect and restore their New York coastline.

Similar to Louisiana, New York struggles with many of the topics that the educators learned about during their restoration trip. Marrero and Graham taught the group about wetland loss and current restoration projects in Jamaica Bay and Long Island Sound, and other issues such as problems with hypoxia, or a level of low dissolved oxygen, that occurs in both the Gulf of Mexico and Long Island Sound. They provided science-based information, highlighting much of the research that has been funded by NYSG and LISS.

“Our expectation is that these educators will see how the environmental problems effecting Louisiana are also very real here, at home, and will use what they have learned during this trip to become stewards of our New York coastline,” said Graham.

As part of the follow-up to the trip, each participant will lead a restoration project of their own over the next few months in their New York neighborhoods. Educators will involve community members and their students in invasive species removal, beach cleanups, plantings, and other projects with local environmental groups.

The group also hopes to educate others about habitat loss and other environmental problems by giving presentations to their classes and community groups and by encouraging people to visit this blog, which tells of their adventures, lessons learned, and inspirational experiences during and after the trip. Additional blog posts documenting the trip will be added throughout this month.

“NYSMEA’s goal is for our members to be stewards of the marine environment, and to ‘pay it forward’,” said Marrero, “Our students and the public will benefit from what we’ve learned in Louisiana, and engage in stewardship projects closer to home, where the environment also needs our help.”

To learn more about wetland loss along the Louisiana coast, visit www.btnep.org or gulfseagrant.tamu.edu/oilspill/index.htm.

Restoration Efforts in the City with a Ring Around It

By Paul C. Focazio, Web Content Manager, New York Sea GrantThe greater New Orleans area is a melting pot of complex issues that often overlap and sometimes conflict. We've seen the impact that major hurricanes (like those in the 2005 season, Katrina and Rita) have had on the area, which are only heightened because of accelerated wetlands loss. According to data from partners of the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act initiative, "If nothing more is done to stop this land loss, Louisiana could potentially lose approximately 700 additional square miles of land, or an area about equal to the size of the greater Washington D.C.-Baltimore area, in the next 50 years."

Overall, these wetlands serve a vital purpose, both as physical habitat and nursery grounds for a wide variety of marine organisms as well as storm buffers by reducing wind and wave action in shallow shoreline areas. But, over the years, their presence in the Barataria-Terrebonne Estuary System (BTES) has declined, mostly due to subsidence, a complex process in which marsh sediments compact and sink under their own weight. Historically, annual floods over the banks of the Mississippi River provided freshwater and sediment inputs to BTES marshes and kept them above water. But, the levees that have been constructed to protect shoreline communities from these floods are also preventing water and sediment from reaching BTES marshes.

Over time, the process of subsidence drowns coastal marshes, causing chemical changes in wetland soils which, eventually, kill marsh vegetation. Without plant roots to hold it together, marsh soil breaks up and is carried away by wave action. The end result? Marsh is converted to open water. This additional volume of water causes an increase in the tidal prism, forcing passes to enlarge and reducing the lengths of barrier islands such as Grand Isle, which protect interior marshes from wave action and hurricanes.



"From hurricane flooding to wetlands loss and subsidence, these are complex issues that we're facing as a city," says Caitlin Reilly [pictured above in (1) with an educator from our NYSMEA / NYSG trip]. Reilly, a Sea Grant extension specialist at Louisiana State University (LSU), led the group during a morning of plant propagation and re-potting at the Pelican Greenhouses and Wetland Plant Center [pictured below in (2)] in City Park, New Orleans, LA.

Before beginning their work at the Center, the educators [pictured below in (3)] asked Reilly a series of questions that are likely on the minds of people outside of the area ...

"Why should I care?" ... "A lot of the area's natural resources are in peril," says Reilly, citing oil at the top of that list. One-quarter of all of the U.S.’s crude oil comes from the Gulf. And, Louisiana relies on oil for more than just the day-to-day luxuries of life. One out of every 13 Louisianans work on the drilling and production platforms off the coast. So, without the drilling off the Gulf a lot of people would be out of a job. New York Sea Grant's Long Island Sound Study specialist Larissa Graham discusses the facts, figures and concerns comprising this 'big picture' issue in her February 2011 blog post, "The Louisiana Coast: Oil spills and more."

"So how do we teach sustainability when our economy doesn't dictate it?," one educator asked, using how the oil industry drives the local economy as an example. "Show all sides of the issue and let the students decide for themselves," says NYSG's Graham. "It's something we haven't figured out how to incorporate into our economies," adds Reilly, "but we're going to have to as issues related to and the effects of climate change play a greater part in situations affecting millions of people."

"What can I do at home, focusing on my habitats, to make a difference?," the educators asked. "People are largely unaware of the resources here," says Reilly, "so it's hard to understand what, if anything should be restored." She encourages people to learn more about the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act and decide for themselves.

The other big question on the minds of the educators was something they said they don't hear much, if anything about, in the news anymore: the oil spill. As we're all aware now, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded, flooding the surrounding waters with crude oil. An estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil were estimated to have flowed into the Gulf before it was completely sealed in September 2010. During the cleanup process, 6.8 million liters of soap-like dispersant were used at depth and surface levels to break up the oil. The Deepwater Horizon incident was the largest oil spill to date—in the world.

"There are a lot of unanswered questions," says Reilly, such as the level and effects of the dispersant used, the distribution of oil in the water column, how much oil either evaporated from or was consumed by microbes in the waters of this warm climate. "Compared to all the other issues we're dealing with, the impacts seem relatively negligible at this point," she says, "though large-scale systemic implications may arise down the road."

Like many people in the country, the educators wondered how the seafood industry has been faring through all of this. According to February 2012 report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Fisheries Service, Gulf seafood is safe to eat since 2010's Deepwater Horizon BP Oil Spill. The report was published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and outlines the steps that federal and state experts used to safeguard seafood safety. The report, co-authored by Gina Ylitalo of NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and others from NOAA and the Food and Drug Administration, shows that the public can be confident about the seafood they eat, solely based on the integrity of the science process. For more on the report, see NOAA Fisheries Service's related news release, "Study: Seafood Safe After Deepwater Horizon."


While at the Pelican Greenhouses and Wetland Plant Center [see pictures (4) - (5)], the educators propagated some 612 plantings of bitter panicum, one of a variety of commonly used more salt-tolerant plant species used in and around New Orleans restoration sites [see pictures (6) - (9)].

“We have a lot of salinity issues in this part of the country, so we’re always trying to figure out what will stay in place once we get it in there,” says Reilly.

Other plant species include Gulf bluestem, bullrush, oyster grass and Spartina patens (marsh hay), the latter of which the group also helped to re-pot in larger planters for a future restoration effort [see pictures (10) - (16)]. All weeds were removed from each Spartina plant, as the plants do not compete well once planted. Also, the plants were re-potted using a mixture of mostly sand with some mulch and peat moss.









Following their time at the Center, the educators took a tour around the greater New Orleans area to get a better sense of why restoration efforts are so important in this region. At the heart of discussions was the newly-constructed ring around the city.

In June 2011, a $14 billion effort was completed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that put a 350-mile ring of levees, 20-foot flood walls, gates and pumps around the greater New Orleans area to defend against the effects of a severe storm. The comprehensive system - outlined in the map below - is a marked improvement from the patchwork of levees and walls that were breached during Hurricane Katrina. This map also features some of the key areas the educators visited, including the Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge (A), Bayou Bienvennue (B), the French Quarter (C), the Lower 9th Ward (D) and one of the system's southernmost flood walls (E). For a larger view of this map, click here.



During the tour, the educators discussed with Reilly some of the problems facing the region. They began at Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge [as seen in pictures (17) - (19), its muds cracked from recent rains after a long spell of severe droughts in southern Louisiana]. Established in 1990, Bayou Sauvage encompasses approximately 25,000 acres in New Orleans. It is the largest urban wildlife refuge in the country and one of the last remaining marsh areas adjacent to Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne.

Lake Pontchartrain is part of the area’s estuary system north of New Orleans, which also includes Lakes Borgne and Saint Catherine. These spots, along with the eastern side of the city of New Orleans, are where much of the storm surge swept into New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

“New Orleans is in a bowl, so the [Mississippi] River is actually where the high ground is,” says Reilly. “So, when Katrina was happening, you could actually still walk along the River. They called it ‘The Isle of Denial” or ‘The Sliver By the River.’ There are also some ridges near the bayou that are high ground that didn’t flood.”

Historically, it was flooding from the Mississippi River that was the issue of concern. But, with all the modifications to the River’s hydrology in the last 100 years, “it’s changed to where we don’t have as much protection against hurricane storm surges,” says Reilly.

In the French Quarter, you might have seen some short-term flooding of rainwater. But, all of that went down really fast. “The real problems came from sitting water over time,” says Reilly. “So, there was minimal damage to the French Quarter and right along the [Mississippi] River. It was in the areas closer to where the levees breached throughout southeast Louisiana and Mississippi that the main thrust of damage occurred.”



Hurricane flooding in the modern era has been contributed to largely by die-offs of areas like the Cyprus Triangle, near the Ninth Ward, which is located in the easternmost downriver portion of the city of New Orleans. Such locales, including Bayou Bienvenue [as seen in (20), below] never recovered after the opening of the Mississippi River limited sediment transport to keep plants and grasses in place. This move also prevented freshwater from flushing out the land after flooding from severe storms like 1965’s Hurricane Betsy, which left considerable salt staining. All this has caused not only more flooding, but sinking as well.

“This land has been sliced and diced, with nothing to help build the land back up,” says Reilly. “So, there are a good number of dedicated dredging and restoration projects that continue to this day to help combat these issues.”

Adding additional stress to already troubled areas such as the former cyprus forests of Bayou Bienvenue are non-native species such as nutria, a semi-aquatic rodent introduced from South America that has literally eaten up Louisiana's coastline [as seen in (21), below, which was taken during the first NYSMEA/NYSG tour of this area in February 2011].

Nutria live in fresh, intermediate, and brackish marshes and wetlands and feed on vegetation that is vital to the area's coastline. Their "eat-outs" create opening in the marsh vegetation, and, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, they are currently affecting an estimated 100,000 acres of coastal wetlands. With Louisiana's coastal wetlands converting to open water at an annual rate of 25-35 square miles, nutria are an additional burden to an already stressed ecosystem.







One of the areas in the New Orleans area hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina, which set down in late August 2005 [(22, above], was the Lower 9th Ward. As seen in the diagram above, damage to the Lower 9th Ward was extensive - pre-Katrina houses noted in red, post-Katrina houses in black. With sustained winds of 130 miles per hour in New Orleans, this area accounted for 1,000 of the 1,836 total fatalities and more than 4,000 homes destroyed. And, with estimated damages in 2006 totaled $84 billion, some much needed help has continued to come in the form from Make It Right Foundation and Common Ground Relief, among others.



The educators visited one of the southernmost 20-foot flood walls [(23), above] from The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently-completed comprehensive system of levees, flood walls, gates and pumps around the greater New Orleans area. Another flood wall can seen around the Lower 9th Ward [see in the distance in (24), below]





During our visit to the Lower 9th Ward, we came across a mixture of damaged or abandoned homes [(26), below], empty house plots and homes currently under construction [(27), below]. NYSG's Larissa Graham, one of this year's tour facilitators, had a personal connection to the area's rebuilding, having traveled to New Orleans with a group of students from Virginia Tech in 2006, some six months after Hurricane Katrina. Graham was then a graduate student volunteering with Common Ground Collective. Here, in her words, is the work she took part in at a church on Egania Street [see (25), above].

"In Tyvex suits and respirators, we spent four days removing debris from the church and gutting it. The pastor would stop in on us every now and then and bring us Gatorade and water to thank us for our hard work. Once we were finished, the Common Ground staff that were with us said that there was termite damage and they weren't sure if the church would be saved. So, you can imagine why it brought tears to my eyes when I saw that it was reopened. The men rebuilding the house next door said that the pastor had just left for the day - seeing him would have been the icing on the cake. The rebuilding in the area has taken years and still has a long way to go. Although it's just one, little piece, it's nice to know that our hard work wasn't wasted."



Now, we're heading further south for a habitat restoration planting at the Port Fourchon Maritime Forest Ridge and a return visit to a very unique mature maritime forest on Louisiana's Grand Isle.

At to the 'Center' of Plant Restoration

By Paul C. Focazio, Web Content Manager, New York Sea Grant

Louisiana is where you'll find 30% of the lower contiguous U.S.'s coastal wetlands. This translates to about 7,000 square miles of some of the most diverse habitats in the world and constitutes the largest adjoining wetland system in the lower 48 states.

Coastal wetlands like these are vital, protecting against storm surge, or the rise of water associated with a hurricane or other storm, plus tide, wave run-up and flooding. They also help maintain water quality and provide habitat for wildlife. These and other coastal environments generate billions of dollars annually through such industries as commercial fisheries and tourism.

So, it should come as no surprise that there's considerable concern over these fragile environments disappearing at an alarming rate. Louisiana marsh loss accounts for over 90% of the nation's total. According to data provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), Louisiana loses an average of 25-30 square miles of coastal marsh each year. Since the mid-1950's, nearly 1 million acres of coastal marsh have been lost, most of which has been converted to open water. And, if the current rate of loss isn't slowed, an additional 800,000 acres of wetlands will disappear by 2040, and the Louisiana shoreline will advance inland as much as 33 miles in some areas.

That's why places like the Golden Meadow Plant Materials Center (GMPMC) in Galliano, Louisiana are so important. GMPMC is a leader in coastal wetland ecosystem restoration. The Center develops plants and procedures to reverse the loss of coastal wetlands in the service areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Golden Meadow is one in a network of 27 USDA Plant Materials Centers across the country under the NRCS's Plant Materials Program. These centers serve as learning sites to stimulate and foster an understanding of the importance of plants in the environment and their role in conservation programs.

In New York, there's Big Flats Plant Materials Center located in Corning (about an hour south of Cornell University in Ithaca), which provides plants in the Northeast region - New York, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. These plants include ‘Niagara’ big bluestem, ‘Glacial Lake’ butterfly weed, ‘Keystone’ buttonbush, Glacial Lake Albany Germplasm wild lupine and ‘Golden Jubilee black-eyed Susan.

During their five-day trip in southern Louisiana with NYSMEA and NYSG, the educators stayed and volunteering at GMPMC [see pics 1-3 below], which is located within the Barataria-Terrebonne Estuary, one of the largest and most productive estuarine systems in the United States. The Estuary spans a 4.2 million acre region between the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers, whose preservation and restoration has been the mission of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program (BTNEP) since 1991.

BTNEP is one of 28 nationally-significant U.S. estuaries identified under the Clean Water Act. In New York, there are several nationally-recognized estuaries, including the New York-New Jersey Harbor & Estuary, Peconic Estuary, and the Long Island Sound (LIS), the latter of which is supported by NYSG via its LIS Study (LISS) Educator Larissa Graham. See NYSG's LISS news archive for some recent initiatives and, for more on estuaries, see the Environmental Protection Agencies' National Estuary Programs Web site.






"Our main objective is providing habitat restoration plants to reduce coastal erosion," says GMPMC's Garret Thomassie [pictured in (4) above]. As Thomassie explained to the educators, the Center develops a variety of plants for coastal wetland remediation, restoration, and enhancement - such as inland saltgrass (5), Pelican black mangrove (6), seashore paspalum (7), Gulf cordgrass (8), switchgrass, red mulberry and Gulf bluestem, Gulf Coast marsh hay cord grass, among others.



The reason for the Center's plant varieties [some more of which are seen in pics (9) - (11)] is that each of the grasses, trees and shrubs have different salinity tolerance levels to accommodate the different sands and soils found in the surrounding environments, which include salt marsh, brackish marsh, tidal freshwater marsh and swamp, mangrove swamp, beaches and dunes.

"We try to make these plants more easily available so that people aren't going into these fragile environments to harvest plants for restoration efforts," said Thomassie.




Part of the process in cultivating plants at the Center involves harvesting seeds [see pics (12) and (13)], which are then planted in trays with soil for germination using, among other equipment, a needle seeder [pictured in (14)]. After these trays have grown the intended plants [such as Gulf bluestem, pictured in (15) - (18)], they are then clipped and propagated to increase their amounts. A full table of Gulf bluestem [as pictured in the Center's greenhouse, (16) - (18) will be enough to satisfy the approximately 20 commercial growers who have requested about 100 plants each for this spring.







As Thomassie showed the educators [as seen in pics (19) - (23)], propagating these restoration plants involved clipping them, placing several in each of the tray's sections and then trimming the clippings to spur additional growth and increase their chances for survival.



After an afternoon of working on the Gulf bluestem propagation project, numerous trays were filled by the educators [as pictured in (24)], which greatly helped the Center to fulfill the upcoming requests of commercial growers.



For more on plants for coastal restoration in the Gulf Coast region, check out NRCS's Web site. And for wetland loss and restoration efforts in southern Louisiana, visit www.lacoast.gov/landloss. Click over to see how you can "Get Involved," either in southern Louisiana or in your area, and check out the "Education" section for teacher and student resources and wetlands videos.