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Depression-era drainage ditches emerge as sleeping threat to Cape Cod salt marshes
Date:1/25/2013

Cape Cod, Massachusetts has a problem. The iconic salt marshes of the famous summer retreat are melting away at the edges, dying back from the most popular recreational areas. The erosion is a consequence of an unexpected synergy between recreational over-fishing and Great Depression-era ditches constructed by Works Progress Administration (WPA) in an effort to control mosquitoes. The cascade of ecological cause and effect is described by Tyler Coverdale and colleagues at Brown University in a paper published online this month in ESA's journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

"People who live near the marshes complain about the die-off because it's not nice to look at," said Coverdale. "Without cordgrass protection you also get really significant erosion, retreating at sometimes over a meter a year." The die-back is ugly, but it is also a substantial loss of a valuable ecological resource.

When fishermen hook too many predatory fishes out of the marsh's ecosystem, the fishes' prey go on fruitfully multiplying, unchecked. The reverberations down the food chain can result in uncomfortable environmental changes for human residents. The problem for Cape Cod is the native purple marsh crab (Sesarma reticulatum), which burrows in the mud along the inner shorelines of the marshes, and dines almost exclusively on the tall and fast-growing low marsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) that lines the marsh edges.

The tall and sturdy cordgrass is an essential buffer against the friction of tides and storms. Without it, soft banks erode out from under the other plants and the water line retreats farther and farther back into the marsh. The unchecked multitudes of purple marsh crabs have taken a visible toll on the developed areas of the Cape. By 2008, 50 percent of the creek banks in the marsh had worn back. Old drainage ditches have expa
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Contact: Liza Lester
llester@esa.org
202-833-8773 x211
Ecological Society of America
Source:Eurekalert  

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Depression-era drainage ditches emerge as sleeping threat to Cape Cod salt marshes
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