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Worcester County, Maryland
Funded in FY2024 through the National Fish Habitat Partnership Program
The Maryland Coastal Bays Salt Marsh Team, consisting of resource agencies and NGOs will restore degraded salt marshes in the Maryland Coastal Bays. This project aims to improve fish habitat, water quality, and coastal resiliency by reversing human impacts and restoring salt marsh processes on 39 acres on two private properties. The designs include four restoration techniques: sediment addition to nourish degraded marsh from grid-ditching, filling man-made ditches, creating meandering channels for drainage, and planting marsh grasses to revegetate pools. This first-of-its-kind marsh restoration in the Coastal Bays will serve as a template for future efforts.
Maryland Coastal Bay marshes have experienced widespread internal ponding and associated vegetation loss and subsidence. This is largely due to extensive grid-ditching from the 1930’s and is exacerbated by sea level rise. The side cast material from the grid ditching created low profile levees along the ditch banks causing internal ponding of water in the marsh. Ponded water along with chemical changes in the marsh soil to a lower pH caused vegetation to die. Several thousand acres of marsh in the Maryland Coastal Bays has been lost to internal ponding of water caused by the ditching. Impacts from ditching and lost acres of vegetated marsh results in degraded habitat and loss of other marsh function.
Text and images provided by the Delmarva Resource Conservation and Development Council