Rae Correll-Brown

IR I/Eng 10 GT
11/14/17

Telephone Interview with Matt Whitbeck, Blackwater Wildlife Refuge Wildlife Biologist on
October 20th, 2017.

RCB: Hello, this is Rae Correll-Brown

MW: Hi, it’s Matt Whitbeck at Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, how are you doing?

RCB: I’m well, how are you?

MW: Great, what can I help you with?

RCB: Well, thank you first of all so much for replying to my email. I’m doing a research course
at my school and I’m working on natural and artificial coastal infrastructure as a solution for sea
level rise and to promote coastal resilience, and I read online about Blackwater Wildlife
Refuge’s efforts to restore marsh elevation with sediment deposition and I wanted to ask you a
few questions about that.

MW: Yeah, sure!

RCB: I actually did read the article in the baltimore sun where you were specifically talking
about it. First, I was wondering how long you’ve been employing that strategy as a method of
restoring marsh elevation?

MW: Since December of 2016. It’s an expensive project, so it’s opportunistic, really. We’ve
used dredged material to restore marsh a number of times in the past, so we’ve mostly worked
with the army corps of engineers who have a navigation channel that they have to dredge. We
restore marsh where we’ve lost it because of erosion, because of sea level rise, we’ve essentially
restored mash from open water. These projects occur sporadically, maybe every two years a
small project, maybe five or ten acres restored. And what this specific project is, this thin-
layering, is different about this is that we are essentially adding sediment to the surface of an
existing marsh to raise elevation. And that’s the first time we’ve done this, the first time really
anybody has done this whole thing.

RCB: And I’ve read initially the plants tend to get flattened under the new sediment but they
tend to come back higher and stronger than before, is that what’s happened in your experience
too?
MW: Yeah, we’re actually amazed at how fast these plants came through. When the Baltimore
Sun article came out in January, we had just finished the placement of that material. I think the
material was actually being placed. And so, we were really prepared, you know, you put 26,000
cubic yards of material into a marsh, and we were prepared for it to look rough for at least two
growing seasons. We were shocked at how fast. One of the main plants we have out there is the
three cornered grass, it’s actually a sedge. And what we found is, we finished placing material
around christmas, in 2016. And by March, April of 2017 really I mean, just 4 months after we
stopped placing material. That three square essentially grew up through the layers of sediment
that we had added and re-established itself on that new marsh platform. So I would say, ah, we
are still doing all of the surveys, but I would estimate that anywhere from around 75% of project
area essentially vegetated on its own.

RCB: What was your specific goal for the success of the project, like how much elevation did
you want to gain?

MW: Yeah, we did, we did. So one of the things that makes this project fundamentally different
from all the restoration work that we’ve done in the past is that we had a very clear idea of what
our marsh elevations needed to be. So there was a publication, it was published in the journal of
ecology in 2012 by Matt Kiruan and Glenn Guntensterg. So the two of them put a paper out
there, their study was literally done a few hundred meters from our project area and their goal
was to try to figure out what elevation maximizes the ability of the marshes to produce
belowground biomass. So the way that these marshes have been gaining elevation since the peak
of the last ice age is through the accumulation of roots and rhizomes, you know, that
belowground biomass that essentially has to bulk up and bulk up over centuries to keep
pace with the rising waters. So what this project does that is actually pretty cool is that we
added about 15 cm on average, so at a very basic level that will give your marsh 15 cm of sea
level rise and subsidence that it can withstand, but what’s really cool about this project is that
you’re not only getting that 15 cm of raw elevation, you’re also enhancing the marsh’s ability to
build it’s own elevation in response to sea level rise. And so that’s why our elevation target was
30 cm, that’s why the elevation is so critical.

RCB: And how does the sediment deposition actually encourage the marsh to build it’s own
elevation in addition to the part that you’ve added?

MW: So these marsh plants are all your classic salt marsh obligate plant species. They are all
plants that are adapted to the physiological stress of live in a tidal saline environment, but they
can only take so much drowning before they are drowned and convert to open water. So what
that paper tells us is that when the marsh elevation in our tide range is around 30 cm, those
plants can produce lots of roots and all those roots will essentially bulk up the marsh and allow it
to increase its elevation over time, whereas the current elevation of the marsh is right around 10-
15 cm. It’s still vegetated, but at the bottom end of its growth range. These plants are in the
process of drowning out. So even if the marsh is vegetated now it’s not long in this world
because it’s in a low elevation for our tide range. So right now there was just another major
disturbance and the plants are adjusting themselves. The three square is doing really well. The
other plants like the smooth cordgrass and the marsh cordgrass are still establishing themselves,
but once they get themselves re established at this new elevation platform, then increased
elevation should allow for much more vigorous growth. So there is a short term disturbance to it,
but over the next 5-10 years we expect these plants to produce much more belowground biomass
and much more vigorous growth than they did at their pre-construction elevation.

RCB: And what are your plans for monitoring these plots in the future? How do you monitor
them now and how do you plan to do so moving forward?

MW: Yep, so we’ve got really four or five key components. The first one is we have vegetation,
we’re monitoring that in a couple different ways. We’ve got plot-based monitoring and then
we’re also really doing it through remote sensing. This gives us really high resolution data for a
subset of the marsh based on the plots, and the remote sensing gives us a vegetation map that’s a
little coarser in resolution but a vegetation map for the entire project area. We did that before
construction and we’ll do it again in 3-4 years after the plants have re-established themselves. So
we’ll be able to quantitatively assess changes in vegetation over time. We are also using
migratory bird data, we collected data before and we’ll collect data after. We’ve got these things
called ingrowth bags, which are these little cores of sod that you put into the marsh and can
extract at a later date and measure the roots growing into those bags, and that’s a way of
measuring belowground biomass production so we have that before and after and we’ll be able to
see if this increased elevation has in fact ramped up our belowground biomass production. And
then probably the most important is we have SETs, or surface elevation tables. If you google
SETs or USGS, USGS has a great website on these SETs and the theory behind them.
Essentially, its a 9’16 inch steel rod that’s driven down into the marsh at a point of refusal and
you can measure to a very very high level of precision elevation change relative to the bottom of
that rod over time. So we’ll be able to see whether we did in fact raise marsh elevation over time
in a treatment area vs a control area. Um, so let me think. We have birds, below ground biomass
vegetation, marsh elevation trajectory, those are the main ones, those are the ones that will be
measured on an annual basis over the long term. And then we also have some things that are just
post-construction assessments. So measuring chemistry, we want to know if we have any
reduced sulfides in the soil that can cause the pH to collapse so we do some soil analysis. We
wanna know what the final elevation is, so we’ll be using RTK(?) to essentially get a high
resolution digital elevation model for the project area, we did that before and we’ll do it again
after to that we can measure change. So yeah, some of the monitoring short term and some of it’s
gonna be much longer term on the 5-10 year scale.
RCB: 5-10 years. And I know that in recently recreated marshes they can have problems with
invasives like Phragmites colonizing the marsh. Did you have any issues with that after you
added the elevation and the new sediment?

MW: No, so we did have a couple little individual stems pop up. We treated those with
herbicides, got a handle on those, and it’s just one of those things that we’re gonna have to keep
an eye on. Every year we’re gonna have to go out there, at least for the next 3-4 years, and make
sure nothing established itself. When Phragmites first tries to establish, the plants are very
vulnerable to herbicides and fairly easy to kill. But if you let it go, they quickly spread and
establish a dense, well established root system that makes them nearly impossible to get out. So
it’s one of those things that we committed to that after this project we’re gonna have to spend a
day - now it’s only a day a year, not a lot, but you’ve gotta get out there every spring and early
summer and go over it real quick to make sure nothing has established. But if you do that, it’ll be
ok.

RCB: Do you have any specific monitoring strategies to track the spread of Phragmites?

MW: No, like I said, it’s only 40 acres, so you can keep a pretty good eye on it, walk it and get a
sense of what’s out there. Our strategy is to walk it every spring/early summer and treat every
little clump of phragmites we see, that’s essentially our monitoring strategy for it.

RCB: Have you seen a significant amount of marsh migration further back onto the shores since
you started working at Blackwater?

MW: Oh yes, you know, these thin layering projects are a great way, and I think, though we’ll
see what the monitoring says over time, it seems like these projects a good way to kinda hang on
to really high priority marshes, especially marshes where you have high populations of black rail
and marsh sparrow and that kind of stuff, clearly in the face of sea level rise and subsidence, the
upslope migration of wetlands is where most of the marsh is gonna be midcentury and by the end
of the century. Acre for acre, most of the marsh is going to be created through upslope migration.
We did a DIF exercise with Salisbury a few years ago. They compared 1938 imagery to 2006
imagery, and between those two time periods they documented over 5,000 acres of tidal marsh
on the refuge converting to open water, so massive amounts of marsh loss. But what was really
interesting about that study and what was really new to us was that in the same time frame we
had 3,000 acres of upland convert to tidal marsh. So there’s strong evidence that these marshes
have migrated upslope in the past and really anywhere you go in Dorchester county you see dead
trees with marsh underneath it, it’s obvious that this is happening now and based on our SLR
models we can fairly confidently predict that it’s gonna happen in the future. So we’ve spent a
lot of time thinking up how land protection should be employed in a way that will protect
marsh migration corridors expect marshes to be in in 2080 and 2100 so [migrating
marshes] don’t come across seawalls, and bulkheads, and levees and are allowed to
migrate.

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-15 Min Mark- the interview lasted for 6 more minutes, during which we discussed the cost
efficacy and efficiency of thin-layer sediment deposition.

Rae Correll-Brown
IR I/Eng 10 GT
11/14/17

Interview Reflection
For my first interview, I thought that this one went pretty well. Although I was nervous and
sounded a bit nervous throughout the interview, I learned some great information about a
specific marsh conservation strategy that can be applied to the creation of marshes as part of a
living shoreline. For my next interview, I want to plan what I say between questions a bit better.
When Mr.Whitbeck finished speaking, I would rather awkwardly transition straight to the next
question rather than making a small comment or compliment on the statement that he just made.
Additionally, I would like to talk a bit more slowly. Finally, I would like to clean up and plan the
introduction of my topic to make it sound more professional and cohesive. Thinking of questions
to ask and actually asking them in the interview were not too difficult. Plus, this interview was
easily and quickly scheduled. The most difficult part of the process was actually picking up the
phone and placing the call, which made me anxious.