Dear DIPP Stakeholders, 

We hope you've been enjoying your summer so far. Below are some updates on various activities related to the Deal Island Shoreline restoration project and ditch maintenance work, as well as updates from the CB-NERR Monie Bay Reserve Team. There have been a number of news articles written over the summer about the Deal Island Peninsula area and project activities, which you can access below. We look forward to seeing many of you at the upcoming Labor Day Festival on September 1-3. Stop by the DIPP table and say hello! 

Sincerely, 

The DIPP Team

Deal Island Shoreline Reconstruction Project Update

Also, in case you haven't seen it, the Daily Times recently published an article that describes some of the other baseline monitoring being conducted by MD-DNR's partners at George Mason University and The Nature Conservancy alongside the shoreline project.

Student Group from Living Streams International Visits the Deal Island Peninsula

A group of college students and their mentors from Ohio, the Dominican Republic, Pakistan, and elsewhere visited the Deal Island Peninsula in July to learn about DIPP's work to build resilience on the Peninsula through collaborative learning and network building. Liz Van Dolah led the tour, which included a stop by Island Seafoods and the skipjack Kathryn to learn about the importance of watermen livelihoods; a visit to the Joshua Thomas Chapel to learn about the value of faith in supporting local resilience; and lunch at Wenona Harbor, where the students had the chance to try soft crab sandwiches. The group also visited the Deal Island Shoreline and Macedonia Church in Dames Quarter to discuss some of the erosion, flooding, and marsh encroachment issues that are impacting the Peninsula. Special thanks to Andrew Webster, Danny Ray Webster, and Dawn Whitelock for sharing their insights and time! 

The crew of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERRS) has been busy this season with routine long-term marsh habitat monitoring and an exciting new project. The Monie Bay Reserve is one of eight reserves across the country selected to participate in a NOAA Science Collaborative funded research project investigating the effect of thin layer placement as a form of beneficial dredge re-usage to protect our marshes from future sea level rise. Quite a bit of research on marsh resiliency has been conducted in recent years among NERRS Reserves across the country. We are now moving beyond studying resilience to actively testing strategies to enhance it. The participating reserves across the nation will each conduct replicated restoration experiments examining the effectiveness of thin-layer sediment placement as a climate adaptation strategy.

Why Thin Layering?

Tidal marshes provide key ecosystem services to both people and wildlife, providing coastal residents with protection from storm surge, and habitat benefits for commercial and recreational fisheries, birds, and other wildlife. However, these important ecosystems are increasingly threatened by sea level rise, which is anticipated to outpace marshes’ natural ability to increase its elevation through the accumulation of organic plant material and sediment. The goal of thin layer placement is to help a marsh increase its elevation to keep pace with rising waters. Thin layering utilizes sediment material from dredging operations to spray a slurry of sand or silt over the surface of a sinking marsh, producing a “thin layer” that mimics this natural process and gives the marsh an elevation “boost.”

Beneficial use of dredged sediment to enhance coastal resilience is of interest in many coastal states working on marsh adaptation strategies, as it has the potential to help maintain and enhance valuable marsh habitat as well as solve an expensive dredge material transport and storage problem. However, there are still a number of questions researchers have: how thin should this thin layer be? How will the marsh vegetation and wildlife be impacted? Does the type of sediment matter?

The goal of this study is to find answers to some of these questions to allow future thin layering projects to move forward efficiently and in places where they will be most effective. This project is conducting replicated restoration experiments at several reserve sites across the nation, including in an area near Monie Bay Reserve, to understand how effective thin-layer sediment placement is as a marsh adaptation strategy.

Testing Thin Layering in the Deal Island Wildlife Management Area:

Each participating Reserve has chosen a marsh site in need of a little help. In Maryland, the selected site is within the Deal Island Wildlife Management Area, just outside of the Monie Bay complex. In June, five experimental blocks of treatment plots were set up in the high marsh and five in the low marsh. Each block will contain five plots (small areas less than 1 meter squared). Two of these plots will be controls (i.e., an example of marsh conditions without any thin layer sediment addition). The three remaining treatment plots will represent different strategies of thin layer placement, which will allow us to test different sediment types and layer thickness -- two factors we predict are important in shaping the effectiveness of thin layering projects. Over the next three years, we’ll be observing changes in vegetation, elevation, and sediment characteristics in each of these plots and comparing these findings with simultaneous experiments being conducted in seven other marshes across the country.

We are very excited to see the results of this experiment both in Maryland marshes and those across the country. We hope to use these results to better inform land managers and others in the field on how best to use thin layer placement to help protect marshes, and the ecosystem services they provide to the those who live, work and recreate within them.

 This maintenance will help alleviate the standing water issue and hopefully allow the water levels to be lower and the water to effectively move through the system.  Residents near this ditch area should be aware that there may be driveway culverts that will need to be replaced. If this is needed, DPW will work with community/property owners to figure out a cost effective way for replacement.  The immediate next step is for DPW to apply for the necessary permits with the MD Dept of the Environment. They plan to submit their permit application by September 15, 2018. Any questions about this work should be directed to John Redden, the Director of Somerset County Public Works (jredden@somersetmd.us). 

In the News

• "DNR Grants Money to Towns on Delmarva to Help with Flooding Issues"

(WBOC 16, June 19, 2018) 

• Deal Island Shoreline Restoration Coming Soon"

(Brook Reese, WBOC 16, June 21, 2018)

• "Portrait of an Island Part I: What used to be home"

(Caitlyn Johnstone, Chesapeake Bay Program, June 20, 2018)

• "Portrait of an Island Part II: What binds us together" 

(Caitlyn Johnstone, Chesapeake Bay Program, June 28, 2018)

• Portrait of an Island Part III: What the water brings"

(Caitlyn Johnstone, Chesapeake Bay Program, July 23, 2018)

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