Author: nrpa@narrowriver.org

2015 NRPA Lesa Meng College Scholarships

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Congratulations to this year’s NRPA Lesa Meng College Scholarship recipients:

Jacob Baretta, a graduate of South Kingstown High School, will be attending the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He plans to study Oceanography/Marine Biology. He is a member of the National Honor Society and the Italian Honor Society. Jacob has been a volunteer for Save the Bay, a varsity baseball player on the SKHS team, and a volunteer and mentor for the South Kingstown Little League.

Dean Kareemo graduated from North Kingstown High School where he was a National Honor Society member, a member of the NKHS Symphonic Band and a guitar player for his own blues band. Dean will attend the University of Rhode Island and major in Pharmaceutical Sciences and Molecular Biology. Dean is a volunteer for Clean Ocean Access, participating in many beach clean-ups.

Jack Hall, a graduate of Narragansett High School, will study journalism at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. For the past three years, Jack has been a river monitor at Middlebridge for the NRPA River Watch program. He has also been an active participant in the Narragansett Chapter of the Future Farmers of America.

Erin Chille, a graduate of North Kingstown High School, will study Wildlife Conservation and Biology at the University of Rhode Island. Erin was a member of the R.I. Envirothon Team and President of the NKHS Science and Math Investigative Learning Experience (SMILE) team. She is a Girl Scout lifetime member and a Gold Award recipient.

On Pettaquamscutt Series Wraps up with Talk on Marsh Adaptation

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March 2015

For the third and final presentation of the 2015 On Pettaquamscutt winter speaker series, Wenley Ferguson of Save the Bay and Nick Ernst of USFWS explained the various strategies for marsh adaptation being used in Narrow River and throughout the Narragansett Bay Estuary.

Some of the tools in the Narrow River strategy include:

  • Dredging in selected locations to improve channel flow and promote eel grass growth
  • Marsh edge protection using coir logs and bagged oyster shells (a method also being evaluated near Middlebridge)
  • Digging runnels and repairing existing ones to improve surface drainage.

Pilot Program at Middlebridge Tests Methods for Enhancing Marsh Resiliency

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On March 23, the R.I. Coastal Resources Management Council and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service began a marsh restoration pilot study on the marsh just south of Middlebridge. The pilot is comparing two methods of “thin-layer deposition” in which a layer of sand is used to raise the elevation of the marsh surface and thus enable the marsh to keep up with sea level rise.

The pilot will compare the results of two 50 by 100 foot plots where roughly four inches (100 cubic yards) of sand were added.

With the hydraulic method used for the first plot, water, air and sand were combined in a tank and pumped onto the marsh.

In the second plot, the layer of sand was spread using a Bobcat loader.

USFWS scientists will be measuring sediment levels, vegetation response and peat compression (soil bulk density) throughout the year to help inform suggested methods for larger scale thin-layer deposition of material dredged from Narrow River later this year.

The work is part of a multi-prong USFWS effort to restore estuarine conditions in the John H. Chafee National Wildlife Refuge in the Narrow River to enhance resiliency against sea level rise, climate change and future storm events.