A salt marsh restoration project that will get under way soon near the New Brunswick/Nova Scotia border was given a $40,000 boost last week by the provincial government.
The funds, which will come from the Environmental Trust Fund, will be used towards restoring approximately 40 acres of unused agricultural land back to saltwater marsh along the Bay of Fundy coast.
Bernard LeBlanc, Minister of Justice and Consumer Affairs who made the announcement on Friday morning at the Beaubassin Research Station in Aulac on behalf of Environment Minister Rick Miles, called the project a “positive and dynamic” step forward in protecting the province’s resources in face of climate change and sea-level rise.
“This project involves the controlled breaching of sections of agricultural dikes on the Beauséjour marshland,” said LeBlanc. “It will help develop best-management practices for future dike realignments in the Bay of Fundy and will restore about 40 acres of salt marshes.”
The half-million dollar project is a partnership between Ducks Unlimited (DU), three Maritime universities, a trio of New Brunswick government departments – environment, transportation and agriculture – and the federal fisheries department.
The land that will be reclaimed has been behind dikes for several hundred years, a result of Acadian (then later Yorkshire and Loyalist) settlers building the barriers to convert the saltwater marshes into fertile farmland in the 1700s, explained Kevin Harris, DU’s national board director for New Brunswick.
“They wanted to use these lands for farming, so they drained them and then dyked them,” said Harris.
More than 65 per cent of New Brunswick’s coastal wetlands have been impacted by the extensive dike systems, he said, resulting in not only a loss of wildlife habitat but also damaging the “natural buffer” (to prevent erosion) between land and sea that only the salt marsh can provide.
Mark Gloutney, manager of DU’s science program in eastern New Brunswick, said a key part of the marsh restoration project will also involve monitoring and research, which will be conducted by students and professors from Acadia, Mount Allison and the University of New Brunswick.
“We want to study how the vegetation comes back and how the bird and fish populations respond,” said Gloutney, noting species that have been affected by the loss of salt marsh habitat have been the black duck and willet.
He anticipates that the “controlled breaching” of the dikes will help re-establish the salt marsh community on those 40 acres along the coast, which will hopefully once again provide a buffer to protect the new dikes that were built inland to guard the Trans-Canada highway, the rail lines and private property.
