Image Copyright USFWS

An engineer, a politician, and a fish walk into a dam. The engineer says, “We could have built it bigger.” The politician says, “We should have built it cheaper.” Fish don’t talk, but if they did, they probably would have asked for a ladder.

Dams were built in the 18^th century to power mills, and in the 1940s to provide cheap electricity and irrigation opportunities – when they were considered great achievements of engineering that would benefit generations to come. Across the nation, dams have been utilized for energy production, flood control, irrigation, and water storage. But, if they are not appropriately planned, sited, and maintained  dams can have devastating impacts on fish populations.

In the early 1900s rainbow smelt supported a robust recreational and commercial fishery in the Northeast, but today NOAA Fisheries Service has listed them as a species of concern in this region. One of the problems in the Northeast has been the loss of suitable spawning habitat due to development like dams, which can prevent fish from moving upstream. But now there may be light at the end of the tunnel for rainbow smelt in southern Maine.

At the end of July, the Great Works Regional Land Trust (GWRLT) announced the removal of Shorey’s Brook dam and the restoration of the Shorey’s Brook on Raymond and Simone Savage Wildlife Preserve in Eliot and South Berwick, Maine.  Fish surveys are already showing rainbow smelt as far upriver as the former location of the dam and further upstream will be suitable for spawning habitat. If other dam restoration projects across the U.S. can be taken as indicators, rainbow smelt may soon be taking advantage of upstream habitats.

Larger scaled restoration efforts are also progressing in Maine. Earlier this summer, Talking Fish reported the demolition of the Great Works Dam on the Penobscot River in Maine – a restoration effort that will open thousands of miles of upstream habitat to Atlantic salmon and other fish for the first time in almost two hundred years. And, here at CLF we have been working to restore native alewives – an important prey species in both marine and fresh waters for many fish, mammals, and birds – to the St. Croix River in Maine. Read more about that work here.

The pressures on our fisheries are enormous, with overfishing, bycatch, pollution, ocean acidification, and habitat destruction all playing a part. We need a better way to plan in the face of all these different stressors. Partnering among local, regional, state, and federal stakeholders in the Northeast alone has culminated in 299 projects to improve and restore fish habitat in rivers, marshes, and estuaries.

New England’s need for habitat conservation and restoration is great, and other regions have similar challenges. Restoring damaged ecosystems to ecological and economic productivity is a fundamental component of the National Ocean Policy, and one more reason why the National Ocean Policy is right for New England.

July 31 – Local Summer Fisheries – Sea Scallops – In the last post of the Local Summer Fisheries series, read about sea scallops: one of the most valuable fisheries in the United States and a great success story in fisheries management.

August 1 – Bangor Daily News supports returning alewives to the St. Croix – In June, CLF attorney Sean Mahoney blogged about CLF’s lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in an effort to overturn a Maine law that has prevented the alewife, a forage fish crucial to marine and freshwater ecosystems, from accessing its native habitat in Maine’s St. Croix River. This week, the Bangor Daily News published an editorial expressing support for opening up the St. Croix River to alewives.

August 3 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, August 3 – This week in Fish Talk in the News: expected reductions in catch limits for New England’s groundfish stocks have fishermen and congressmen up in arms; public support for opening the St. Croix River to alewives; an update on the December, 2011 removal of Shorey’s Brook dam in Maine; NOAA fisheries plans to conduct a survey to better understand the social and economic impacts of fishing regulations on the east coast; a new piece of legislation to prevent seafood fraud; the Maine lobster crisis continues, even as the Maine Lobster Festival kicks off in Rockland; Sport Fishing Magazine interviews Obama about his administration’s plans for and achievements in fisheries management; the Gulf of Maine Research Institute releases a study on changing zooplankton abundances in the Gulf of Maine; and the New England Ocean Odyssey blog posts about the Atlantic wolffish.

The New England coastline has many faces, from the rocky slabs on Schoodic Point in Maine to the cascading sand dunes at the Cape Cod National Seashore. One of the coastal resources with which virtually all New Englanders are familiar, however, is salt marshes. Every coastal New England state is blessed with these resource areas. Some are high marshes that are flooded by salt water only infrequently at maximum high tides; others are low marshes that are flooded on every tidal cycle. These marshes are comprised of a variety of rugged marsh grasses and plants that are adapted to this complex environment, as well as mud flats that form below the lowest grasses and can only be seen at the lowest tides.

We say New England is “blessed” with these resources because marshes have been critical to human activities from the earliest days of human presence in New England. In pre-colonial days, Native Americans hunted on the marshes for birds, clams and fish, and the early European settlers harvested salt marsh grasses for hay and took advantage of tidal cycles to set up fishing traps that caught the then-abundant variety of coastal marine fish. Later settlers discovered that these marsh areas could be diked to create valuable upland farmland, a good thing for the struggling farmers but a significant ecological loss to New England.

A salt marsh in Sandwich, MA. Salt marshes perform a number of critical functions for our environment. (CLF photo)

These salt marshes, you see, perform a number of critical functions in our environment. They are essential habitat for a diverse number of resident and migratory birds and juvenile marine fish; they protect the uplands from ocean storms, reducing storm surges and mitigating the power of ocean waves; and they filter the water running off the land and remove sediments and pollution before that run-off reaches the sea. They are also a fundamental part of our New England landscape, as any review of New England art will reveal.

To make way for agriculture, housing, marine commerce, and major urban centers like Boston, Portsmouth, and Portland, thousands of acres of coastal wetlands were filled. Fairly reliable estimates are that the Gulf of Maine, for example, has lost roughly half of its original inventory of rich salt marshes. With sea level rise a certainty in the coming decades, increasing numbers of people will begin to understand the protective role that these marshes once played.

It is not too late to restore some of this lost natural heritage. CLF and other conservation groups around the country formed Restore America’s Estuaries (RAE) in 1996. RAE’s mission is to restore one million acres of wetlands, and we are well on our way. Each year, CLF places more than $100,000 with municipalities and citizen groups to pay for the costs of wetland restoration.  These projects remove dams and dikes and eliminate tidal restrictions, such as highway culverts, that choke many marsh systems of the salt water tidal flows that they need to survive. Through this work, we are making important strides.

On September 24^th, the nation is celebrating National Estuaries Day. We ask you to celebrate it with us: take a walk in an estuary (and pick up any trash that you see), go to your library and read Life and Death of the Salt Marsh—a natural history classic written by CLF Board member Dr. John Teal – join an Audubon Society in your state, visit CLF’s estuaries website page to learn about CLF’s restoration projects and support our work, teach your children about salt marshes, or just spend a sunrise looking out at the ocean over a marsh. New England is blessed by our salt marshes; take some time on September 24th to discover why.

To learn more about National Estuaries Day, visit the RAE National Estuaries Day website. To learn more about CLF’s work with RAE, click here.