A new ASBPA white paper from an interdisciplinary team, including our partners at Jacobs and NOAA, explores the potentially beneficial use of dredged sediment in coastal marsh restoration.
Coastal marshes across the world, and even within the U.S., are an extremely diverse set of ecosystems with unique hydrology, geology, and climate. Restoration efforts must be carefully designed for each case. The paper outlines the current state of knowledge surrounding beneficial use of sediment placement in coastal marshes, and discusses both current placement methods and best management practices (BMPs).
The authors break the techniques down by region, exploring the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, South Atlantic, Gulf Coast, California, Pacific Northwest, and Noncontiguous U.S. separately. Following this, the paper looks at elevation, resilience to sea level rise, vegetation, hydrology and ecology as factors influencing restoration projects, as well as community engagement and regulatory compliance. By breaking down this information into finer points and rebuilding them as a project framework, the authors aim to advise the coastal managers who create these restoration projects and improve project success.
“Adaptive management is a structured, iterative decision-making process designed to optimize project outcomes in spite of uncertainty (Holling 1978). This approach is quite common in many field sciences, where one must simply “learn by doing” (Robinson 2020).”
In the final paragraphs of the paper, the authors describe the importance of outlining goals and BMPs during a project’s conceptualization. As beneficial use projects become more common, it is important to learn from the experiences of others to improve understanding of this method of wetland restoration.
Read the full paper here.
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