Ring Island Salt Marsh Resiliency Project

The Ring Island Salt Marsh Restoration project is one of three salt marsh restoration projects in southern New Jersey being funded by a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation Hurricane Sandy grant. The intent of these restoration projects is two-fold—to restore and enhance the chosen salt marshes and to investigate the utility and effectiveness beneficially reusing dredged material to restore salt marshes and stabilize shorelines. The marsh suffered from serious subsidence and erosion, leading to the loss of functional salt marsh habitat and consequently a loss of critical ecosystem services that are normally provided by healthy marshes. This restoration project arrested the subsidence-based marsh loss at the project site by filling interior areas of open water and increasing marsh platform elevation by placing dredged material pulled from the NJ Intracoastal Waterway. The dredged sediments were used to create open sandy habitat above the mean high-water line for endangered shorebirds to safely nest without danger of having their nest flooded.