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Written on: September 16th, 2019 in Living Shorelines
On a warm July morning not long after the official start of summer, some 2 dozen volunteers gathered at Sassafras Landing, an unimproved boat launch popular with kayakers and duck hunters inside the Delaware Division of Fish and Wildlife’s Assawoman Wildlife Area (AWA) near Frankford. Their mission: transplant nearly 5,200 plugs of native marsh grass onto what otherwise appeared to be a pristine white sand beach.
Written on: September 16th, 2019 in Outreach
If you spend a lot of time traveling around Delaware, you’ll notice that northern Delaware is very different from the rest of the state. That’s because Delaware is made up of two distinct geologic regions. The northernmost part of Delaware is within the Piedmont region, while the rest of Delaware lies within the Coastal Plain region.
Written on: September 16th, 2019 in Wetland Assessments
Wetlands work is not for the faint of heart. I won’t sugar coat it for you. Its dirty. Its messy. Oftentimes pretty buggy (even though we really lucked out this year). Yep. Wetlands can be all of those things. But – they are also so much more.
Written on: September 6th, 2019 in Wetland Assessments
When a power company needed to replace a utility pole in a wetland area that was a part of a national vegetation monitoring program within the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve (DNERR), staff at the Reserve worked closely with the power company and with other state agencies to maintain the integrity of the datasets being collected, but also took the opportunity to begin a study on how the marsh would recover naturally from the disturbance.
Written on: May 15th, 2019 in Outreach
by Alison Rogerson, Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Program In our Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Program we speak so often about the ecosystem services that wetlands provide or the beneficial functions wetlands perform daily. We rattle them off in varying order “provide vital habitat for plants and wildlife, improve water quality, protect our coasts, act like […]
Written on: May 14th, 2019 in Wetland Animals
Guest writer: Clare Sevcik, DNREC’s Nonpoint Source Program There are so many charismatic animals that make Delaware waterways their home. Most people living in Delaware can easily recognize a few of the most popular species: bald eagles, osprey, blue crabs, horseshoe crabs, beavers, river otters, and many more. But there are many more animals living […]
Written on: May 14th, 2019 in Wetland Assessments
by Alison Rogerson, Wetland Monitoring & Assessment Program Our Roots In 1998 the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s (DNREC) Environmental Scientist, Amy Jacobs (now with The Nature Conservancy), took part in a grant project held by the Delaware chapter of The Nature Conservancy and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. This project developed […]
Written on: May 8th, 2019 in Wetland Animals
by Erin Dorset, Wetland Monitoring & Assessment Program Birding is always exciting in Delaware. While some bird species are year-round residents, many others are migrants traveling along the Atlantic Flyway. This keeps things interesting, as it allows birders to see a very wide variety of species throughout the year. A lot of these awesome birds […]
Written on: March 11th, 2019 in Outreach
by Brittany Haywood, DNREC Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Program One part of our job is going out into the public and explaining simply our research and the benefits of wetlands. We often use the saying, “wetlands are like sponges” to describe their ability to absorb water, but recently we’ve been asked exactly how that is […]
Written on: March 11th, 2019 in Wetland Restorations
Guest writer: Jules Bruck, University of Delaware Great things come naturally in Laurel, Delaware including the new green infrastructure treatments that are popping up along the Broad Creek – home to the future Laurel Ramble. This past summer the Sussex County Conservation District broke ground on a parcel of land in the center of the […]