The Next Steps

Addressing A Need for Salt Marsh Monitoring in Rhode Island

In June 2001, the Partnership for Narragansett Bay, through the Coastal Institute of the University of Rhode Island, held a public workshop on environmental monitoring in Rhode Island. A statewide database containing over 90 monitoring projects related to air, land, and fresh and saltwater ecosystems, had been compiled for the first time for presentation and review at the workshop (Berounsky, 2002). These projects originated with the efforts of volunteer and non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, and federal, state, and local governmental agencies.

The workshop resulted in the identification of significant gaps in the monitoring data. A recommendation to address this finding was to develop new monitoring programs for, among others, habitat mapping, including the mapping of salt marshes. The recent work completed by the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program and its partners to map coastal wetland and buffer zone trends provides missing monitoring information on salt marshes in a 40-year study interval for the Bay estuary. The measurements of the gains, losses, and change in the classification of coastal wetlands and surrounding land use from the 1950s and 1990s offer information on the relative condition of the wetlands between then and now. In addition, the project provides quantifiable data on change in acreages as well as the causes of change based the interpretation of aerial photographs from two time periods. The next step would be to add the data from the bay coastal wetland and buffer zone trends project to the Rhode Island Environmental Monitoring Database.

National Wetlands Monitoring and Assessment of Wetlands

The Federal Clean Water Act requires that states and territories protect and restore waters of the state which include freshwater and tidal wetlands. The National Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Workgroup consisting of state, tribal, and USEPA agency staff is developing a three-tier framework for the monitoring, assessment, and reporting of the condition of salt marshes (Carlisle, 2003). The USEPA recommends that the New England states apply this strategy which offers an organizational model for assessing the extent, distribution, and condition of salt marsh wetlands. In addition, the adoption of the framework would help develop a foundation for consistent reporting on monitoring results.

The USEPA ‘s Atlantic Ecology Division (EPA-AED) is working cooperatively with the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program on a pilot project to apply the three level coastal assessment project to the collaborative coastal wetlands work in the Bay estuary. The Estuary Program provided the geographic information system data sets from the inventories of coastal wetlands, surrounding land use and land cover, degraded coastal wetlands and potential restoration sites, and historical coastal wetland trends. A Tier 1 landscape level assessment is nearing completion.