8. Jamaica Bay is home to both JFK Airport and a wildlife refuge. At times, bird strikes have posed a danger to aircraft. In fact, an Air France Concorde jet once “ingested” some Canada geese as it was landing at JFK, causing two of the engines to blow out. Although the plane landed safely, the incident caused $7 million in damage.
Question: What are some things that Don Riepe (the Jamaica Bay guardian) described that have been done at the airport to reduce the possibility of bird strikes? Does this dramatic clash between nature and the city remind you of anything?
9. New York City was once surrounded by salt marshes like the ones you saw in Jamaica Bay---emerald green patches of cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) underlain by peat. The early Dutch colonists called cordgrass “salt hay” and used it as feed for their cows on farms in Brooklyn and Queens. Since colonial times, the area of salt marsh in New York City has declined by nearly 90 percent—largely due to urban development and landfilling. The story is similar up and down the East Coast: Boston has lost more than 80 percent of its salt marshes, whereas New England overall has lost nearly 40 percent. It is only in recent decades that the biological value of salt marshes has been recognized.
Some of these values were outlined in a report issued in 2007 by the Jamaica Bay Watershed Protection Plan Advisory Committee:
--Jamaica Bay’s marshes provide critical wildlife habitat for more than 80 fish species and for nearly 20 percent of the continent’s species of birds that visit the bay every year as they traverse the Eastern Flyway migration route to their breeding grounds further north. Saltwater marshes not only serve as nursery sites for finfish and shellfish, but also for feeding, spawning, and refuge from predators.
--Endangered and threatened species like peregrine falcons, piping plovers, and the Atlantic Ridley sea turtle reside in or visit the bay, along with more than 325 kinds of waterfowl and shorebirds (62 of which are confirmed to breed in the bay).
--Jamaica Bay’s wetlands mitigate flooding and provide shoreline erosion control for homes and businesses in Brooklyn and Queens. The neighborhoods surrounding Jamaica Bay are home to more than 500,000 New Yorkers and the marshes serve as coastline buffers from waves, tides, winds, and floods, and can help reduce coastline erosion and property damage during storm events. Marsh grass can decrease wave energy 10-fold and, due to its unique properties, even trap sediment instead of eroding during storm events.
--The bay’s wetlands act as the ecosystem’s kidneys to filter out pollutants in the water. Wetlands act as nutrient buffers for coastal waters, capable of transforming large quantities of organic pollutants, suspended solids, and metals from runoff and wastewater effluent into organic matter, and thus act as sinks as organic matter is buried through marsh accretion and as bacterial denitrification releases nitrogen gas into the air. This cycling is important because overabundance of nitrogen and organic matter spurs the growth of algae blooms that turn the bay’s waters murky. As the algae die, sink to the bottom, and decompose, the water’s oxygen levels drop, killing any aquatic life unable to swim away.
--The four city sewage treatment plants that surround the bay discharge more than 250 million gallons of treated wastewater containing 30,000 to 40,000 pounds of nitrogen into the bay every day. This is far too much nitrogen for the bay’s current wetlands to assimilate – one estimate puts the removal capacity of existing marshes somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the total nitrogen inputs.
--Salt marshes have the highest primary productivity of any floral community; moreover, the algal and phytoplankton communities they support significantly contribute to overall rates of carbon fixation, which helps reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Each acre of Spartina grass produces ten tons of organic matter annually, which then enters the food chain to provide fuel for higher orders of organisms.
--The marshes serve as a recreational haven and living laboratory . . . Groups like the American Littoral Society provide educational programs about the bay’s resources to schools and civic groups.
The report went on to say:
Please read "Nitrogen and the Rapidly Dwindling Jamaica Bay Marshes" from the New York Times and then answer the following questions.For at least a decade, it has been recognized that Jamaica Bay’s tidal wetlands are rapidly disappearing. In 2001, analysis conducted by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) showed that between 1924 and 1999, half of the bay’s vegetated marsh islands disappeared.
Even more alarmingly, DEC determined that the rate of loss had been increasing over time.
Between 1994 and 1999, for example, the rate of loss had nearly doubled from that of 1974-1994; assuming that rate of loss continued baywide into the future, it was calculated that the marsh islands would completely vanish by 2024.
Question A: Compared to rain forests and coral reefs, the ecology of salt marshes is not widely known. In fact, most New Yorkers are not even aware that salt marshes exist here, let alone the threats they face. Why do you think that is? Based on your trip through the bay (and any other experience you have), what might you tell people about salt marshes to explain their significance?
Question B: On the surface, the article from the New York Times describes a debate about the causes of the salt marsh decline, but there is also an underlying debate about resources—for example, how much money can or should be spent to keep the bay clean. What is your take on this? Can the conflicting demands on Jamaica Bay be reconciled? How definitive do you think research on the causes of marsh decline should be before action is taken?