Jamaica Bay took center stage recently, at a recent symposium organized to highlight efforts to improve this vast natural resource.
The city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) held a two-day ‘state-of-the-science’ symposium highlighting emerging research on a range of issues impacting the ecology of Jamaica Bay.
The event, held in Manhattan and at Kingsborough Community College, featured new research from several regional experts, including multiple studies on the mechanisms and drivers of marshland loss; presentations on successful, ongoing restoration pilots in Jamaica bay and other, similar water bodies; as well as an attempt to identify what new research is needed to address potential future threats to the bay.
“Jamaica Bay is home to thousands of species of plants and animals and one of New York City’s largest and most vital green spaces. Conserving the bay is a critical component of Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC initiative, and will likely have benefits that reach far beyond the boundaries of the bay,” DEP Commissioner Emily Lloyd said in a statement.
The 39-square-mile bay is a unit of the National Park Service and borders Brooklyn, Queens and Nassau County. Its watershed includes approximately 142 square miles of meadowland, marshes, dunes and forests and open water. The diverse habitats support 91 species of fish and 325 species of birds, reptiles, amphibians and small mammals.
Experts warn that in as little as five years time, the bay’s saltwater marsh islands could all but disappear. No single cause has been identified for the alarming loss, but preservationists like the Jamaica Bay Watershed Protection Plan Advisory Committee, which helped advise the DEP on its Watershed Protection Plan, point to four wastewater treatment plans that deposit cleaned waste into the bay, as a major contributor to the nitrogen problem.
The DEP’s two-volume plan, details the troubling conditions in the bay and offers a guide for its future management.
The bay is located within one of the most densely developed urban watersheds in the country–63,500 acres and home to more than two million people who collectively produce 250 million gallons per day of wastewater, all of which is discharged to the tributaries or open waters of the bay after treatment, according to the DEP.
Nitrogen release triggered by the wastewater is suspected as a cause of the bay’s diminishing water quality, and a culprit in the disappearance of the bay’s saltwater marsh islands.
The hope is that scientific understanding of trends leading to marshland degradation will inform the ongoing development of a comprehensive and effective strategy to improve the ecological health of the Bay.
“Marsh island loss seems to be attributable to many factors, and clarification of the role of these will help us assign scarce financial resources to effective solutions,” Lloyd said in a letter prefacing an update to her agency’s plan.
Since its introduction a year ago, Lloyd said DEP has already made some “significant progress” including advancing construction a combined sewage overflow (CSO) detention tank that will be on-line soon, and could “greatly improve water quality.”
Since 1994, the agency says it has invested more than $600 million to minimize the impact of CSOs and improve water quality, upgraded the bay’s four wastewater treatment plants to reduce nitrogen loading by more than 30 percent, and drastically expanded sewers in the Jamaica Bay drainage areas.
The two-day session culminated with a tour of Jamaica Bay on the North River, a DEP vessel. The tour was led by naturalist Don Riepe.
–Gary Buiso
