fisheries

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Rethinking resilience on Staten Island

Living Breakwaters will bring many coastal benefits, but direct flood protection is not among them.

When Superstorm Sandy hit Staten Island at the mouth of New York Harbor, the storm surge rose to 16 feet and 24 people died. Eight years later, the island is inching ahead on raising new seawalls and rebuilding dunes and buying out properties in the zones that can’t be protected.

And launching Living Breakwaters, a pioneering “nature-based” project off the town of Tottenville in the southwestern corner of Staten Island, which is finally out for construction bids.

Living Breakwaters will install a set of eight meticulously designed, partly submerged structures aimed to reduce shoreline erosion and storm waves, help to restock local finfish and shellfish populations, and offer opportunities for community learning about marine ecosystems and social resilience.

The $60 million project originated in the Rebuild by Design competition held by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development after Sandy, said project leader Kate Orff, speaking at a University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science webinar on November 5.

“What’s truly innovative about this project is it aims to be combinatory,” said Orff, founding principal of SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design studio in New York. “It combines risk reduction of a physical breakwater with fostering an active shoreline culture, rebuilding the shoreline, and rebuilding the three-dimensional ecological substrate through active oyster restoration.”

What Living Breakwaters won’t do is keep out floodwater.

Instead, they will work in tandem with a dune restoration project, one of whose goals is flood reduction.

“Just stopping flooding is only one of maybe 10 different concepts that we have to think about when we think about purpose,” Orff said. “If one were to build a four-foot linear seawall in this area, with any intense rain event the entire town of Tottenville would get flooded out.”

The breakwaters are configured to bring down the crests of waves coming from the east and southeast, the most common direction in storms. The structures also will minimize shoreline erosion, which is primarily driven by day-to-day waves, and help marine ecosystems recover more quickly after storms.

The design goal is to handle storms with up to 30-inch sea-level rise. “One of the nice things about breakwaters is they don’t stop functioning with sea-level rise,” commented Joseph Marrone, associate vice president and area lead for urban and coastal resiliency at the international engineering firm Arcadis. “They’ll still provide wave reduction and erosion reduction… along with the ecological benefits.”

Built with a mix of hard stone and “bio-enhancing” concrete, the breakwaters will incorporate precast tide pools and other components tailored to provide niche habitats for many marine species. Additionally, “we worked with the Billion Oyster Project and educators on shore to advance the idea of oyster gardening and rebuilding the historic reefs that were once part of this ecosystem,” Orff said.

She sees bringing back such ecosystems as an obligation in resilience projects.

Moreover, it’s critical to test these natural and nature-based measures at scale. “A 20-by-20-foot bed of wetlands won’t have a lot of impact relative to risk reduction, but larger contiguous systems absolutely will,” she said.

“As we are looking more towards natural nature-based features, because we are looking now simultaneously at the climate crisis, sea-level rise, more rainfall, et cetera, we’re also looking at a crisis of biodiversity,” Orff emphasized. “We need to begin to think about all of these things at the same time.”

And to plan more proactively, “because otherwise we’ll get constantly caught in this disaster response framework,” she said.

Resilience roadmaps should stop focusing solely on protecting today’s built shorelines, Orff suggested. Instead, they can reflect how those dynamic coastal environments might benefit from layered solutions “that can keep people safer and can also keep our shorelines living and alive and suitable for marine life,” she said. Among the options, nature-based measures often may be much better suited for the wild complexity of future environments and events.

Orff also calls for a common blue-sky vision in which the almost endless groups of coastal stakeholders all march in the same direction. “When we’re just working at this tiny scale and fighting the small battles, it feels like we’ll never add up to enough to really meet the climate crisis and ecological crisis that we’re facing,” she said.

Great August 2021 snapshot in the New Yorker: Manufacturing Nature.

Images courtesy SCAPE and Arcadis.

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Hot water for fisheries management

As climate change deepens, we’ll need to understand entirely new marine ecosystems.

Here’s the good news: Since 1990, the catch of Maine lobsters has quintupled.

Okay, the rest of the news, as in other stories about climate change, is not so good.

The bumper crops of lobsters apparently have been driven by warming in the Gulf of Maine. Sea surface temperatures have climbed about four times as much in recent decades in the Gulf as in the global ocean average, according to Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

Lobster populations have moved northeast from southern New England waters,  Pershing said, speaking at a Metcalf Institute seminar on climate change held in Cambridge last Saturday. The shift has been a boon for Maine but a bust for fisheries south of Cape Cod.

Warmer water in the Gulf also has knocked down populations of other marine life, including some we eat (or once ate) such as northern shrimp and cod.

For hundreds of years, cod in the northwest Atlantic was one of the world’s richest fisheries. Back in the 1970s, my older brother took a trip to Georges Bank as a whale watcher on a giant Russian factory ship. At night, the sea looked like a city, dotted with the lights of dozens of fishing vessels busily sucking up cod and everything else on the seafloor.

Cod never recovered. The U.S. soon took control of our waters out 200 miles and managed the seafood take as well as it could. But most of the cod we eat now comes from China or Iceland.

Today climate change is delivering not just disruptions in ocean temperature and circulation patterns but acidification, extreme storms, loss of mangroves and marshes… As fisheries are disrupted around the world, the familiar difficulties of managing them get worse.

We don’t really know how to model newly emerging marine ecosystems, Tatiana Rynearson of the University of Rhode Island remarked at the Metcalf session. We lack the years of data needed to understand the fluctuations in conditions and populations, as Jorge García Molinos and colleagues pointed out in a 2015 paper.

Our need for long-term ocean monitoring and related research couldn’t be clearer, but climate change research is under heavy attack in the U.S.

Fortunately, compared to most of the waters of the world, we do have good historical information on Gulf of Maine waters and seafood. And while lobsters are a luxury food, they offer a positive example for management.

Unlike the case in some other states, Maine fishers must toss back lobsters that are too big as well as too small. Simulations have shown that saving the big ones has helped the shellfish survive the fishing onslaught in the Gulf, where 90% of legal-size lobsters are caught each year, Pershing said.

The saga of Maine lobsters, of course, rolls on. The catch dropped significantly in the last two years, and the highest landings keep moving north.

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Ark de Triage

What should we prioritize to try to save from the flood tide of extinction?

Big_Ark_in_Dordrecht_3

“The world is on fire, and we have to do something about it,” said Kate Jones, an ecologist with University of College in London.

Jones was one of the speakers at two Harvard panels last month about the species extinction perils of our Anthropocene age: climate change, overfishing and overhunting, pollution, loss of habitat, invasive species, sea level rise, ocean acidification and all the ugly rest.

Extinction threats are not like a field of bullets hitting everything equally, noted Jones, speaking at a session on Human Imprints on the Tree of Life. Primates are at greater risk than most mammals. Amphibians, palms and corals are particularly vulnerable. Ditto species on islands. Animals with large body sizes, long lives and small ranges are vanishing. Along with, of course, so many other forms of life.

Facing this global storm of extinction with severely limited resources, what should conservation groups and governments prioritize?

One framework for decisions is to safeguard plants and animals with particular values to humans, as food, fuel, eye candy or just insurance for the future, the scientists said. Another framework is to consider the tree of life—protecting genetic diversity so that we can better understand biology and maybe exploit that understanding down the road. (Saving, for instance, the ginkgo tree, full of idiosyncrasies after branching off from other trees 100 million years ago.)

Habitat protection initiatives don’t always follow these outlines, naturally enough. As one audience member noted, many projects in Britain aim to preserve butterflies that remain happily common elsewhere in Europe.

“Most conservation is local, which is fine,” said Ana Rodrigues of the French National Center for Scientific Research. But very few resources work at a global level, Rodrigues emphasized.

One of the few is the Evolutionarily Distinct & Globally Endangered (EDGE) program led by the Zoological Society of London. “We can take attention away from charismatic megafauna like pandas, which are cute and fluffy with big eyes,” remarked Jones. Instead, attention can be paid to offbeat creatures like the pink fairy armadillo. (“It’s another poster child but I think it’s spreading out the love.”)

“We’re in deep trouble,” said Yale botanist Michael Donoghue. “We have to act quickly. The problem is, there are too many things we value.”

Many forms of ecological damage have spread surprisingly quickly across vast areas of ocean, noted biologists at an Ocean Evolution Today seminar. Jellyfish are on the march  as we vacuum up commercial finfish. Two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef’s coral died off in two years. “In the Arctic, ice algae is disappearing and the entire food web is compromised,” commented Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia.

All too often this marine damage is invisible to most of us, said Boston University’s Randi Dawn Rotjan. Even survival stories can be worrisome–for instance, the killifish that have evolved to shrug off PCB-laced harbors.

More generally, “I’m worried that my children will jump into the water and not know what they haven’t seen,” Rotjan said.

“The most important ecosystems on the planet are almost unknown,” pointed out Bruce Robison of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. One case in point: the ocean animals that migrate in “uncountable numbers” up toward the surface at night and then back down during the day, which brings carbon out of the surface waters.

Or we can think of the seafloor hot water vents discovered 40 years ago, which stream out key nutrients and may act “like the ocean’s multi-vitamins,” said Harvard’s Peter Girguis. Life throughout the sea, he added, “is linked to things that happen in the deepest darkest parts of the ocean.”

The scientists applauded the spread of marine sanctuaries, which can provide significant safeguards if established (and enforced) on sufficient scale. So far, sanctuaries have grown most notably in sparsely populated stretches of the Pacific. (The Republic of Kiribati’s Phoenix Islands Protected Area is a coral archipelago the size of California with exactly 24 people, living on one island, Rotjan said.) The High Seas Alliance aims to extend this strategy with protected areas in the no-man’s-lands of the open ocean.

Another positive sign is the rapid growth of sustainable aquaculture, to supplement and replace capture fisheries.

And we also can see payoffs of local and regional marine renewal efforts, such as the massive cleanup of Boston Harbor. Last month, out with a boatful of biologists for a conference hosted by Northeastern University, we were cheered to see harbor porpoises calmly working the clean waters of the Mystic River, in what not long ago was the dirtiest harbor in the U.S.

Top, the “life-size” version of Noah’s Ark built by Johan Huibers of the Netherlands. Bottom, clockwise from panda: Ice algae, pink fairy armadillo, ginkgo berries, mussel.