History, Ecology, and Restoration of a Degraded Urban Wetland Volume 2, Number 1 • December, 2004
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A PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ON THE BIOLOGY OF URBAN AREAS ISSN 1541-7115 History, Ecology, and Restoration of a Degraded Urban Wetland Volume 2, Number 1 • December, 2004 1000 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn New York 11225 • 718.623.7200 http://www.urbanhabitats.org/ Editors Steven E. Clemants Vice President for Science, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Codirector, Center for Urban Restoration Ecology Janet Marinelli Director of Publishing, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and Member of the Steering Committee, Center for Urban Restoration Ecology Gerry Moore Director of Science, Brooklyn Botanic Garden Associate Editor Niall Dunne Brooklyn Botanic Garden Copy Editor Joni Blackburn Brooklyn Botanic Garden Website Alison Dorfman Patrick Whittaker Brooklyn Botanic Garden Publisher The Center for Urban Restoration Ecology A collaboration between Rutgers University and Brooklyn Botanic Garden A PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ON THE BIOLOGY OF URBAN AREAS ISSN 1541-7115 History, Ecology, and Restoration of a Degraded Urban Wetland Volume 2, Number 1 PagePagePage 111 IInntrotrodductiouctionnIntroduction Erik Kiviat, Guest Editor PagePagePage 333 The Meadowlands Before the Commission: Three Centuries of Human Use and Alteration of the Newark and Hackensack MeadowsAlteration Meadows Stephen Marshall, P.O. Box 524, Lincoln Park, New Jersey 07035 PagePagePage 282828 Biodiversity Patterns and Conservation in the Hackensack Meadowlands, New Jersey Erik Kiviat¹ and Kristi MacDonald² ¹Hudsonia Ltd., P.O. Box 5000, Annandale, NY 12504 ²Ecology and Evolution Program, Rutgers University, 1 College Farm Road, New Brunswick, NJ 08901 PagePagePage 626262 Species Composition and Food Habits of Dominant Fish Predators in Salt Marshes of an Urbanized Estuary, the Hackensack Meadowlands, New Jerseyan Jersey Melissa J. Neuman¹, Guillermo Ruess², and Kenneth W. Able² ¹National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Marine Fisheries Service, 501 W. Ocean Blvd., Suite 4200, Long Beach, CA 90802-4213 ²Marine Field Station, Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, c/o 132 Great Bay Blvd., Tuckerton, NJ 08087-2004 PagePagePage 838383 Spartina alterniflora and Phragmites australis as Habitat for the Ribbed Mussel, Geukensia demissa,,, i ininn S SawSaaww M MillMiillll CreekC Crreekeek of NewN Neeww Jersey’JerJersseyeyJersey’’’ss Hackensack Meadowlandss Meadowlands Marion McClary Jr., Fairleigh Dickinson University, School of Natural Sciences, 1000 River Road, H-DH4-03, Teaneck, NJ 07666 PagePagePage 919191 Influence of Sediment Characteristics on Heavy Metal Toxicity in an Urban Marsh Carolyn S. Bentivegna, Joy-Elaine Alfano, Sean M. Bugel, and Katarzyna Czechowicz, Department of Biology, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ 07079 PagePagePage 111122112 Hyperspectral Remote Sensing of Habitat Heterogeneity Between TideHyperspectral Tide-Tide---RestrictedRestRestrictedrictedRestricted and Tideand Tide-Tide---OpenOpen Areas in the New Jersey MeadowlandsOpen Meadowlands Francisco J. Artigas¹ and Jiansheng Yang² ¹Meadowlands Environmental Research Institute, 1 DeKorte Park Plaza, Lyndhurst, NJ 07071 ²Center for Information Management, Integration and Connectivity, Rutgers University, 180 University Ave., Ackerson Hall, Room 200, Newark, NJ 07102 PagePagePage 130130130 Evaluating Urban Wetland Restorations: Case Studies for Assessing Connectivity and FuFunctionnctionFunction iii Lisamarie Windham¹, Mark S. Laska², and Jennifer Wollenberg ¹Lehigh University, Earth Sciences Department, Bethlehem, PA 18015 ²Great Eastern Ecology, Inc., 227 W. 17th Street, New York, NY 10011 Page 147 Historical and Current Ecology of the Lower Passaic River Timothy J. Iannuzzi and David F. Ludwig, BBL Sciences, 326 First St., Suite 200, Annapolis, MD 21403 Page 171744 Floristic Investigations of HistorHistoricalical Parks in St. Petersburg, Russia Maria Ignatieva¹ and Galina Konechnaya² ¹Landscape Architecture Group, Environment, Society and Design Division, P.O. Box 84, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand ²V.L. Komarov Botanical Institute, Russian Academy of Science, 2 Professora Popova St., St Petersburg, 197376, Russia iv URBAN HABITATS, VOLUME 2, NUMBER 1 • ISSN 1541-7115 The Hackensack Meadowlands: History, Ecology, and Restoration of a Degraded Urban Wetland http://www.urbanhabitats.org The Hackensack Meadowlands: History, Ecology, and Restoration of a Degraded Urban Wetland The Hackensack Meadowlands (also called the Hackensack Meadows or New Jersey Meadowlands), broadly defined, comprise a large area of tidal and nontidal wetlands, wetland fill, and small natural uplands associated with the estuary of the Hackensack River from the Oradell Dam south to Newark Bay. Three centuries ago, the Meadowlands were predominantly a mosaic of Atlantic white cedar swamps, salt marshes, and other wetland and upland habitats. Today they are a system of fragmented and contaminated urban wetlands dotted with dumps, crisscrossed by highways, railroads, pipelines, and dikes, and closely surrounded by dense industrial, commercial, and residential development a few miles from Manhattan. Yet these degraded ecosystems are a magnet for migrant and breeding marsh, water, and shore birds and are inhabited by a moderate diversity of fish and other animals. They are also home to rare plants and have a moderate to high rate of marsh-plant productivity. Moreover, people are increasingly using the Meadowlands for recreation, nature tourism and study, and scientific research. This issue of Urban Habitats presents seven studies of the Meadowlands and one study of the neighboring Passaic River. These studies range from an examination of the heavy metal molecules contaminating Meadowland marsh sediments to a characterization of the entire Meadowlands region using remote sensing technology. The papers are drawn from recent research presented at the Meadowlands Symposium, a conference held in October 2003 in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Hosted by the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission and the Meadowlands Research Institute, and cosponsored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Hudsonia Ltd., and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, this conference was attended by more than 200 researchers, natural resource managers, policy specialists, and graduate students—most of them actively involved in the study or management of the Meadowlands. The diverse nature of this collection of papers tells us much about the complexity of studying, conserving, and managing the Meadowlands. The data herein, along with other current research, will help us to improve landscape preservation, biological conservation, wetland restoration, and water management in the Meadowlands, as well as in other urban wetlands. Many studies done in the Meadowlands recently and in years past have of necessity focused on one or two sites, a few sampling stations, or small sets of samples (e.g., plots, gill-net collections, bird counts, cores for pollen analysis). But each individual site or sampling station in nature is different, and often dramatically so where both intensive human activity and changing tides and salinity add more variables to already complex landscapes. Studying one or two sites in the Meadowlands is often a good start, but it does not necessarily generate data that are representative of the entire system—or of nearby urban reed-marsh complexes such as the Arthur Kill drainage, Jamaica Bay, or Delaware Bay. Spatial and temporal replication of these studies will help determine which results can be generally applied, and how plants, animals and ecological processes vary with the seasons, sea-level rise, contamination, salinity, and other environmental factors. Similarly, many studies in the Meadowlands have focused on just a few groups of organisms, not the entire range of species from bacteria to vertebrates, and studies of one group do not necessarily predict the species list and ecological functions of another. Further research spanning a broader spectrum of taxonomic groups is needed. - 1 - URBAN HABITATS, VOLUME 2, NUMBER 1 • ISSN 1541-7115 The Hackensack Meadowlands: History, Ecology, and Restoration of a Degraded Urban Wetland http://www.urbanhabitats.org Several challenges of development and environmental management loom over the Meadowlands: converting inactive landfills to golf courses while maintaining habitat for a broad spectrum of native plants and animals; managing floodwaters to reduce damage to property and infrastructure; controlling mosquitoes to reduce nuisance and the risk of disease; designing, implementing, and maintaining wetland mitigation projects that demonstrably replace wetland functions and values lost to development; and managing and restoring plants, animals, and ecological functions in open-space preserves. The research presented in this issue, as well as other research being conducted in the Meadowlands and in urban wetlands elsewhere, will help us meet some of these challenges and formulate other questions as decisions are made. Many human societies have evolved and flourished, and some have perished, in wetland regions of the world. Wetlands provide ecosystem services, food, travel routes, refuges, fertile soils, raw materials, and other resources to humans, but they also present risks of flooding, land subsidence, and disease. Wetlands that are misunderstood and mismanaged during the process of development and urbanization may become more hazardous than provident. The Hackensack Meadowlands and other urban wetlands around the world hold the knowledge we need to live in balance with wetland