Getting to the Bottom of Marine Conservation

Port Susan Bay
Restoration of The Conservancy's Port Susan Bay preserve involves removing invasive plants, such as Spartina,
and coaxing back native fish.
© Natalie Fobes

Getting Its Feet Wet
Although private ownership of submerged land is the exception rather than the rule, it was this rarity that set the stage for leasing in the state of Washington. In 2001 the Conservancy completed 11 years of talks that ended with the purchase from a private individual of a preserve in Port Susan Bay—one of the largest private acquisitions of estuarine or nearshore habitat for conservation in the state’s history. An hour’s drive north of Seattle, the preserve contains 160 acres of diked uplands and nearly 4,000 acres of estuarine wetland, tidally influenced channels, and mudflats straddling the southern and northern mouths of the Stillaguamish River.

On a drizzly day in September, Roger Fuller, a Conservancy landscape ecologist, sloshes through the Port Susan Bay preserve’s tidal flats at low tide. Along with the pattering of rain, the sound of rubber boots slurping in and out of the mud dominates. In one direction are the foothills of the Northern Cascades; in the other, the Olympic Mountains loom through low clouds in the west. “Around here they say that negotiations can only start after 500 cups of coffee—and it’s the last five that count,” Fuller says. The years of negotiations paid off: “Very few entities own estuarine habitat at a sufficient scale to allow experimental approaches to the whole ecosystem,” he says.

With its diversity of tidal habitats, Port Susan Bay is one of the most important stops for migratory birds along the Pacific Flyway. And though 85 percent of its historic tidal marsh was significantly altered by dikes built for agriculture in the late-19th and 20th centuries, the preserve and adjacent areas are still home to a multitude of fish, including threatened chinook and three other types of salmon.

Restoring Great South Bay
Marking the conservancy’s foray into Protecting Underwater Land, the bay is on the road to recovery.

Boat
© Carl Lobue/TNC

In 2002, with shellfish production at an all-time low, The Bluepoints Oyster Co. donated 11,500 acres of underwater land to The Nature Conservancy. The property—essentially the bay’s bottom—covers 20 percent of Great South Bay along Long Island’s south shore. The transaction represents one of the largest of its kind. Last year, the Conservancy acquired another 1,500 acres. With the 13,000 acres of submerged land, the aim of the Conservancy and its partners in the Bluepoints Bottomlands Council is simple but lofty: restore Great South Bay’s ecosystem. The restoration process began with a Conservancy survey of some 20 square miles—to determine hard-clam abundance and sediment distribution and make an inspection of the property. The Conservancy found that the number of once-prominent hard clams—which, by filtering water, did much to clean the ecosystem—had been substantially diminished.

Historically, the Great South Bay carried a lion’s share of the U.S. clam industry, and as recently as 1976, when Long Island’s bay men collected more than 700,000 bushels, the area was responsible for more than 50 percent of the nation’s harvest. By 2003, those numbers were down 99 percent, and the ecosystem was in a death spiral. Overharvesting and pollution had decimated the clams, which meant that water wasn’t being filtered, which in turn caused a disruption in the food web followed by harmful algal blooms, shaded-out eelgrass meadows and limited clam survival.

The Conservancy decided to bolster the bay’s clam numbers by transplanting mature cherrystone and chowder clams to spawning sanctuaries on the Bluepoints property. Shellfish dropped from the surface sink to the bottom and then dig into the sediment and around eelgrass. Divers then inspect the transplants along underwater transect lines. Water samples and about 20 clams are collected every week to measure presence of clam larvae and reproductive tissue.

By summer, the Conservancy expects to have transplanted nearly a million clams with enough density to promote successful spawning. But success will take a while, says Marci Bortman, a Conservancy marine conservationist on Long Island. “It takes years to grow clams, and if conditions are poor, it takes even longer. But all the work will be worth it—the clams are a keystone species and the engineers that drive the ecosystem.”

The Conservancy believes that restoring this ecosystem can lead  to untangling a world of marine issues nationally. “The exciting thing about our work at Bluepoints and in the estuaries of Long Island is that it signals a new hope for the future,” says Paul Rabinovitch, the Conservancy’s executive director on Long Island. “It is thrilling to know that this is one of the most ambitious—and possibly the largest—shellfish restoration projects ever attempted in the U.S., but it is even more exciting to know that we are inspiring hope among a whole new constituency of coastal communities, bay men and agencies.” —A.C.

Learn more about Great South Bay.

Working with an array of partners, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Community-based Restoration Program, the Conservancy is restoring critical habitat on its preserve—both above and below water. Intensive efforts are under way in the marshes to control invasive Spartina (cord grass) and Phragmites (common reed), which threaten native vegetation. The Conservancy and the Stillaguamish Tribe also plan to drop long wooden pilings with steel tips from helicopters onto the mudflats. Imbedded in a v-formation, the pilings will help catch driftwood from upstream forests.

The resulting logjams will provide habitat for fish, create stream channels for salmon and catch sediment to form new marshes.

Beyond the need to re-establish Port Susan Bay in its vital role as a home and nursery for a range of species, the preserve is significant because of the Conservancy’s role as primary steward on the property and the experimentation and pilot studies that accompany such a position. As well, Port Susan Bay acts as an incubator for partnerships the Conservancy is cultivating with local communities, government agencies, universities and Native American tribes.

Still, just as important was Port Susan’s role as icebreaker for the Conservancy and the state in the realm of aquatic leasing. “The purchase was a green flag and a real driving force,” says Paul Dye, former marine conservation coordinator for the Conservancy in the northwest region and one of the contacts between the organization and the state of Washington during the initial lease talks. “Even within the Conservancy, people were cautious about what to do next because some didn’t want to dig any dry wells, so to speak. After Port Susan, we knew [we] were really interested in getting involved.”

A Confluence of Circumstances
As luck would have it, at approximately the same time the Conservancy’s Mike Beck was exploring the possibilities of leasing submerged lands for conservation purposes, the very man who could make such a lease possible was devising a plan of his own. What began as a flash of inspiration for Jay Udelhoven, the assistant division manager in charge of aquatic resources policy and program development for the Washington Department of Natural Resources, precipitated a philosophical shift for a state governmental agency, with potentially profound effect.

“In October 2000 a constituent asked me if he could lease an area of state-owned aquatic lands—that had been encumbered by a finfish netpen—to preserve the site in its natural condition,” remembers Udelhoven, who is something of a governmental Renaissance man, having served in both the Army and the Peace Corps. At the time, the state Department of Natural Resources, which manages Washington’s state-owned aquatic lands, leased those lands according to only three of its primary mandates: public use and access, water-dependent use, and renewable-resource use. The agency was not leasing submerged land to ensure environmental protection—the other of its four primary mandates. “I thought to myself, ‘It’s ironic, you’re not supposed to lease to protect … you have to lease for purposes that impact,’” says Udelhoven. “But later I began to think, ‘If someone wants to lease to protect, at least it’s legitimate.’ And for the most part, all of the necessary statutory mechanisms are in place to make it happen.”

By that point, Beck had organized a workshop in New York focusing on conservation leasing—the first conference of its kind. He asked Conservancy officials in Washington state to invite a representative from the state Department of Natural Resources. The representative turned out to be Udelhoven. “It was a ready-made situation,” says the Conservancy’s Dye. “Mike [Beck] had asked me to forge a relationship and see if I could find anyone interested, and when I started to tell Jay [Udelhoven] our idea, he just looked at me and said, ‘It’s really funny that you say that, because I have been thinking the exact same thing.’ That was really the dumb-luck part, because without that chance interest, the idea could have easily sat on some bureaucrat’s desk for a long time.”

With a state partner willing to make a philosophical shift from allowing public lands to be used for revenue generation to allowing them to be used for restoration and conservation, the time needed to realize the lease was drastically reduced.

In 2003 the Conservancy—after raising private funds and receiving the grant from the Russell Family Foundation—sponsored Washington State University and the Department of Natural Resources in the development of a training session that provided instruction to approximately 50 staff members in the department. Among other things, the session introduced lease documents and fleshed out questions about operations, maintenance and monitoring for conservation leases.

Udelhoven is the first to admit that conservation leasing represents a conceptual leap for the state agency. While some in the Department of Natural Resources are wary of placing more management in the hands of private conservation organizations, others believe it’s an idea whose time has come. And it facilitates the flow of private conservation and restoration dollars, which the states themselves aren’t able to raise. “The pilot lease with the Conservancy shows that we’re willing to try new and different ways to keep that commitment [to conservation], and that it is possible to fulfill more than one mandate at once,” says Doug Sutherland, Washington’s Commissioner of Public Lands. “There are bound to be conflicts,” Sutherland continues. “At some point, there may well be two different interests wanting to lease the same piece of ground. This is new, and for some folks it’ll take some getting used to.” But, he adds, “if other states follow suit, folks will say we were on the leading edge. Some may say we went off on a wild goose chase. Either way, we are out there testing what’s possible, looking at new ways to fulfill our commitment to conservation in a changing world, and what we find––for better or worse––may help other states with their programs.”

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