There’s a reason the state is known as the Ocean State. Rhode Island’s total shoreline is 400 miles long, an impressive amount of coast for the smallest state in the country. But the large amount of coastal area means many parts of the state are susceptible to environmental issues like flooding, coastal water contamination, and dune erosion.
As part of an ongoing effort to protect Rhode Island’s marine habitats, Save the Bay is working throughout April to restore dune habitat across the state via planting American beech grass. The sites Save the Bay is working on include Tiverton’s Fogland Beach, Westerly Town Beach, Third Beach (in conjunction with the Norman Bird Sanctuary and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), Warwick’s Oakland Beach, Narragansett Town Beach, and Easton’s Beach in Newport. The nonprofit worked with volunteers April 17-19 to plant 22,000 beach grass plants at Narragansett, and they are projected to plant 9,450 plants at the Easton’s Beach dune restoration event on April 22. “Overall, on the six projects I am working on with municipalities this spring, we’ll plant 64,000 plants,” boasts Wenley Ferguson, Save the Bay’s director of habitat restoration.
The Easton’s Beach restoration project is over a decade old. “We’ve been collaborating with the city [of Newport] on this project since the first pilot planting project in 2012,” explains Ferguson. Save the Bay restored the same dune at Easton’s Beach post-hurricane Sandy in 2013, and it help up well for the last ten years. Now it needs more support.
Major erosion occurred to the Easton’s Beach dunes after three large storms in December and January. “There was significant erosion, significant wave action, high tide, and that whole dune got carved away again,” laments Ferguson. These back-to-back storms were the largest storms Rhode Island has faced since hurricane Sandy, she references. Like the dune restoration effort post-Sandy, Newport is adding sand to what had eroded in addition to the planting, but the one-day project isn’t a quick fix. “We built the base of the dune back over two or three years” after Sandy, Ferguson says, and after planting this year, Save the Bay will continue to monitor the dune’s restoration progress through the seasons – “the storm season, hurricane season, and what seems even more damaging in this day and age are the Nor’easters that come through.”
Luckily, Save the Bay worked with Newport to receive a new permit to restore the beach and community support is high, both through volunteer workers and educational programs. Schools from East Providence and Cheriho will participate in the dune restoration planting work on April 30. “We’ve been working at Easton’s for the last decade with students of all ages, from third graders to high school students to college students and also community members,” Ferguson says. It also helps that planting beach grass is a relatively easy restoration project. “Third graders can very easily plant beach grass because all you have to do is stab a trowel into the sand and make a little indentation. You don’t even dig.” After creating a depression in the sand, “place the beach grass about halfway down and tamp it in, and then you’re done with planting! That’s how you can plant so many in a day.” Regardless of ease, all planting should be conducted with permits and under supervision of organizations like Save the Bay.
Planting American beech grass has multiple purposes when it comes to dune restoration. For one, it acts to stabilize the dune and capture sand that blows on the wind. “The sand at Newport and Narragansett is very fine, and it blows,” Ferguson explains. “Wave energy carved away the dunes, but the sand can heal some of the dunes by blowing around. If there’s no grass, there’s nothing to capture it, stabilize it, and build up the elevation.” The additional elevation of the dune acts as a berm when the next storm hits the coast, preventing flooding and making it protective for other habitats and infrastructure that abut the beach. The grass also acts as a “pioneer species” once the dune is re-established. The first step in ecological succession, after the grass repopulates and recreates the dune ecosystem, other types of vegetation can grow in, like beach plum and seaside goldenrod, “which isa key pollinator species for monarch butterflies when they migrate through in the fall,” says Ferguson. “You wouldn’t necessarily plant seaside goldenrod as a plant to trap sand, but once you get a dune established, seaside goldenrod can grow in that habitat.”
Dune erosion is a natural occurrence, but bolstering these dunes with native beach grass will help habitat restoration, prevent flooding, and to slow down the erosion. Despite the destruction of the storms, the effects of erosion, trash, and contamination impacting local beaches, Ferguson finds it “encouraging” that there is so much community responsiveness and support. People want to help. “Every single project we have has been at capacity. We have a waiting list to do this work. People were out there today [for the Narragansett planting] with winds 10 to 20 mph off the water, and the temperature was in the high thirties, and we still had probably 40 volunteers working under those conditions.” And the volunteers are not just town-natives. Ferguson lists off communities like Woonsocket, Providence, Cumberland, Pawtucket, and even areas of Massachusetts and Connecticut among the representatives showing up to work. “We want to build stewards of these coastal habitats and public access sites, and what better way to do so than to involve them in the restoration activities.”
To sign up to volunteer for different restoration projects across the state or get notified about future volunteer opportunities, visit volunteer.savethebay.org.
