POINT PLEASANT — While Earth Day was being celebrated over in Riverfront Park, American Littoral Society members, alongside several borough volunteers, worked in the windy marsh of Slade Dale to help restore its shoreline.
Residents may have mistaken the season as Christmas with the smell of evergreens in the air, as over 700 holiday trees were collected last season by the Point Pleasant Department of Public Works, stored at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church and delivered to Slade Dale Bird Sanctuary.
Slade Dale — located along the north branch of Beaverdam Creek, a tributary of the Metedeconk River — is a 13-acre bird sanctuary that can be accessed via Sea Point Drive off Dorsett Dock Road in Point Pleasant. Historic aerial imagery shows the shoreline has eroded approximately 300 linear feet since 1930, according to the Littoral Society.
Capt. Al Modjeski, habitat restoration program director, said this is the ninth year of “bringing Christmas to the spring” in Point Pleasant.
“We get all these Christmas trees to fill these breakwaters every year to help protect this marsh,” said Capt. Modjeski. “The goal will be, when they dredge Beaverdam Creek, to use some of the material and place it on a platform behind these breakwaters.”
The group collects old Christmas trees from around town and places them in breakwater boxes, just off the shoreline of the marsh, to slow the rate of erosion and help build back the shoreline. The trees break down over the course of the year, settling and replacing shoreline lost to the many years of erosion.
On top of the Christmas trees, the Littoral Society placed stakes made of coir logs, made of coconut fiber stuffed with brush. These act as erosion barriers, along with spartina plants, otherwise known as cordgrass, which are planted along the shoreline.
“What you can see is pretty much the marsh has (receded), which has led to saltwater intrusion underneath that marsh platform,” said Capt. Modjeski. This intrusion creates a “ghost forest,” an area of dead trees in former forests, typically in coastal regions where rising sea levels or tectonic shifts have altered the height of a land mass. In this case, as the shoreline continues to recede, the trees begin to soak up saltwater, which poisons and eventually kills them.
The captain added, “If we are able to pull this shoreline out and stop that intrusion, we might be able to replant some of these trees.”
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