Researchers find that urbanization is weakening the New York City shoreline.
Historically, salt marshes have not only served as ecological nurseries for fish, birds, and other wildlife—they’ve been stalwart defenses against coastal storms. But recently, coastal development coupled with accelerated sea level rise has threatened wetlands across the globe. Among them are the salt marshes in New York City’s Jamaica Bay, an 18,000-acre estuary bordered by Queens and Brooklyn.
Using sediment cores to trace the evolution of Jamaica Bay’s wetlands, a team led by researchers within Columbia’s Earth Institute finds that urbanization is weakening the shoreline and starving the marshes of vital mineral sediment, causing their gradual but dramatic erosion. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also offers strategies to restore and preserve these important natural systems in Jamaica Bay and elsewhere.
“We knew that these marshes were disappearing, and there were lots of reasons people had proposed as to why,” said Dorothy Peteet, lead author and senior research scientist at NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, “but no one had actually looked at the organic and the inorganic part of it to see why the marshes are fragmenting.”
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Image via Prceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
