Eelgrass Beds Are Improving

The East Hampton Town Trustees were briefed Monday evening on the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s plans to revegetate local waterways with native beach and marsh grass species, as well as clams, bay scallops, and oysters.

Eelgrass die-offs in the 1930s, resulting in a nearly 90 percent loss of the species in coastal North America, have been attributed to wasting disease, though the cause is uncertain. Brown tide blooms in the 1980s and ’90s contributed to additional losses, and more recently, climate change and declining water quality are believed to be further stresses. Eelgrass, which provides important habitat to finfish and shellfish, is slow to recover naturally, making human intervention critical in the re-establishment of eelgrass meadows to a self-sustaining level.

The cooperative extension’s marine program has helped to bring back eelgrass meadows in waterways here. At Monday’s trustee meeting, Kimberly Barbour, the program’s outreach manager, followed up her October 2015 visit with results of seed collection of another species, spartina alterniflora, an intertidal marsh grass, and detailed a proposal for new stewardship sites that the program hopes to establish this year.

“Last year, we started to expand the marine meadows program to include coastal species as well, trying to build native stocks of beach grass species,” she told the trustees. Approximately 159,000 seeds were collected from Sammy’s Beach and another 70,000 from Northwest Creek in East Hampton last fall, with viability measuring 49 and 37 percent respectively, Ms. Barbour said.

“We’re using all local stock,” she said. “We harvest from healthy meadows, but we take, very carefully by hand, the shoots we need to then transplant.” Efforts to propagate seeds in the marine program’s greenhouse, she said, have been less successful.

The seeds collected from trustee waterways germinated over the winter, Ms. Barbour said. “The next step in this, which is why I wanted to have an opportunity to ‘plant the seed,’ is to have you start thinking about locations within the town that may be in need of some revegetation, and to try to get the community involved in the growing of the seeds as well.” Through the marine program’s Back to the Bays initiative, “We are going to be propagating some of the seeds from the East Hampton stock we collected,” she said.

With money raised from events including the Race for the Bays on May 7 in Sag Harbor and the Back to the Bays 5k race the following week in Southold, marine program officials will develop the new stewardship sites. Potential sites include areas near Havens Beach in Sag Harbor and Ward’s Point on Shelter Island, and between Sag Harbor Bay and Northwest Harbor. The hope is to expand to sites in trustee waters, Ms. Barbour said, and to engage community businesses and individuals through financial support or hands-on assistance. She asked the trustees for guidance in those efforts. “We want to get information to local school districts” too, she said.

Cornell Cooperative Extension is also partnering with the Art Barge on Napeague to present several programs, starting on June 29 with an exploration of the nearby salt marsh and a discussion of salt marshes’ importance to an ecosystem’s health. Other programs will focus on pressing flora and algae “to create one-of-a-kind pieces of artwork”; light in the water column, the importance of shellfish to waterways’ health and in maritime history, and marine debris.