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Human activities have altered, degraded, or destroyed many of the original tidal wetlands within the Gulf of Maine. Partners on this project include USGS, NOAA, Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve, University of New Hampshire, the States of MA, NH, ME, the Provinces of NB and NS, and the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment.Although emphasis is now on restoring these systems, the overall effectiveness of restoration efforts is uncertain. Contributing to this uncertainty are lack of a regionally coordinated mechanism for prioritizing restoration opportunities and lack of standard, scientifically defensible criteria for evaluating restoration success.
A bi-national (US and Canada) project was initiated in 1999 to address these needs, sponsored by the Global Program of Action Coalition for the Gulf of Maine. Partners on this project include USGS, NOAA, Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve, University of New Hampshire, the States of MA, NH, ME, the Provinces of NB and NS, and the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment. The goals of this project are to develop a comprehensive inventory of potential salt marsh restoration sites throughout the Gulf of Maine and to acquire a large data set by applying a common monitoring protocol to a regional network of restored and reference salt marsh sites. Comparisons of wetland characteristics between restored and reference sites will then be used to identify indicator variables of marsh function and to develop regionally applicable success criteria for restoration projects.
A workshop was held in June 1999, to develop uniform inventory and monitoring protocols needed to establish regional networks. The first workshop developed a model for inventorying potential salt marsh restoration opportunities in the Gulf of Maine. The inventory template consists of 14 data fields for site identification, disturbances and impacts to the system, the size, type, cost, and status of restoration actions, and personnel contacts. This template will be used to help populate a searchable database of potential and existing tidal marsh restoration projects in the Gulf of Maine watershed. This regional database will provide a basis for identifying those sites most appropriate for projects. The second workshop developed common, regionally applicable protocol for monitoring restored and reference salt marshes. The monitoring protocol is based on the comparison of a minimum set of standardized, core indicator variables among restored and reference sites both before and after restoration. Core variables are related to hydrology (tidal signal and elevation), soils and sediments (pore-water salinity), vegetation (species composition and abundance, plant height and density for species of special concern, and photo stations), nekton (species composition, density, biomass, and length), and birds (density, species richness, and feeding and breeding behavior). The protocols include sampling designs appropriate for data collection on a regional scale. Consistent application of the monitoring protocols throughout the Gulf of Maine will allow development of a rich database that can be used to identify the most robust indicators of restored marsh functions, suggest regionally applicable success criteria for restoration projects, and establish a range of reference values characterizing natural tidal wetland systems in the region.