Restoring a coastal wetland doesn't always require heavy machinery, extensive excavation, or complicated engineering. Sometimes, it simply calls for a few bales of hay, a shovel, and a group of volunteers willing to get muddy.
That's the approach Ducks Unlimited and its conservation partners are taking at The Lighthouse Center for Natural Resource Education in Waretown, New Jersey, where an ambitious restoration effort is underway to improve approximately 50 acres of coastal wetlands along Barnegat Bay.
The project combines innovative, low-cost restoration methods with the natural processes that have sustained coastal marshes for centuries. It's also helping demonstrate how these techniques can be implemented on a larger scale across the Mid-Atlantic Region.
A Marsh in Need
Located within the Upper Barnegat Bay Wildlife Management Area, The Lighthouse Center property encompasses approximately 194 acres of salt marsh, maritime forest, brackish impoundments, and other coastal habitats.
These wetlands provide important habitat for waterfowl, shorebirds, wading birds, fish, and other wildlife. They also help absorb wave energy, store carbon, and buffer surrounding areas from coastal flooding.
But like many salt marshes along the Atlantic Coast, this landscape has been changing.
Decades of human activity, particularly salt hay farming and mosquito-control ditching, altered the marsh's natural drainage patterns. Networks of artificial ditches changed how tidal water enters and leaves the wetland, contributing to erosion, prolonged flooding in some areas, and the gradual loss of healthy marsh vegetation.
As grasses disappear, the marsh loses more than its green appearance. Their extensive root systems help hold sediment together and build the marsh's elevation over time. Without those roots, the marsh becomes increasingly vulnerable to erosion, rising water levels, and conversion to open water.
The result is a cycle of degradation that can be difficult to reverse without intervention.
Working With Nature, Not Against It
Rather than attempting to rebuild the entire marsh through large-scale construction, Ducks Unlimited and its partners are using an approach known as channel hydrology restoration.
The concept is straightforward: identify where historic alterations have disrupted natural processes, make targeted improvements, and allow the marsh to do much of the remaining work.
At The Lighthouse Center, those improvements include two primary techniques.
First, ditch remediation encourages select ditches to gradually fill with sediment and colonize with adjoining salt marsh grasses by reducing ditch depth and tidal flow velocity. At Lighthouse Center, remediating ditches involves placing upland hay into certain historic drainage ditches. The hay helps slow water movement and trap sediment. By remediating some ditches and leaving others open, the tidal flow path through the wetland is rerouted to reflect a more natural, sinuous path through the marsh. Over time, this creates a more natural network of tidal channels that allows the marsh to retain sediment and maintain its elevation.
The second technique, runnelling, addresses a different problem. In areas where water becomes trapped on the marsh surface, workers dig small, shallow channels connecting those pools to existing tidal waterways. These channels allow excess water to drain, creating conditions where native marsh grasses can recover.
Neither technique requires dramatically reshaping the landscape. Instead, both are designed to restore the natural balance of tidal movement on which healthy salt marshes depend.
“We specifically look for areas in the marsh that are already trying to heal themselves and use runnelling to encourage them along,” said Laura Lenderman, DU Regional Engineer.
This approach represents an important opportunity to expand the restoration toolbox available to conservation professionals.
The work at The Lighthouse Center involves novel restoration techniques – especially the use of upland hay in ditch remediation – being implemented at a meaningful scale in the Mid-Atlantic, with the potential to inform similar efforts elsewhere in the region.
Conservation Gets Its Hands Dirty
While the techniques may be relatively simple, implementing them across a coastal marsh takes considerable effort.
Last month, volunteers joined Ducks Unlimited biologists, engineers, and conservation partners for hands-on restoration work at The Lighthouse Center. Working directly in the marsh, participants carried and placed hay in ditches, dug shallow runnels, and helped improve tidal connections throughout the project area.
For many volunteers, it was an opportunity to experience wetland conservation in a way few people ever do: standing in the marsh itself, seeing firsthand how water moves through the landscape, and helping restore the habitat around them.
The volunteer effort also demonstrates one of the advantages of low-cost, low-tech restoration. Because many of the techniques rely on manual labor and relatively simple materials, community members can participate directly in work that would otherwise be carried out primarily by specialized contractors.
"This is a great opportunity for people to get directly involved in conservation and see how relatively simple techniques can make a meaningful difference for coastal wetlands," Ducks Unlimited Regional Biologist Ben Langey said. "Volunteers are working right alongside our biologists, engineers, and partners to help improve this marsh for wildlife and make it more resilient for the future."
The work is part of a collaborative effort involving Ducks Unlimited, The Nature Conservancy, New Jersey Fish & Wildlife, the Natural Resource Education Foundation of New Jersey, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Delaware Bay Coastal Program, the New Jersey Department of Transportation's Office of Maritime Resources, and other partners.
Together, these organizations are combining expertise in wildlife biology, coastal engineering, environmental education, and habitat restoration to address the marsh's interconnected challenges.
Building a Stronger Marsh for the Future
The low-cost, low-tech work is only one component of the larger restoration effort at The Lighthouse Center.
Additional planned work includes the beneficial use of dredged material, a technique that repurposes sediment removed from navigation channels to help rebuild degraded wetlands.
By placing suitable sediment in areas where the marsh has lost elevation, restoration partners hope to create better growing conditions for native salt marsh vegetation, which in turn protects the surrounding community. Future efforts also include addressing shoreline erosion and exploring opportunities to restore natural features that can help protect the marsh and community from wave energy.
These approaches complement the ongoing work to improve tidal flows. While ditch remediation and runnelling help restore more natural hydrology, sediment placement can address areas where the marsh surface has already lost too much elevation to recover through ditch remediation and runnelling alone.
Together, the techniques offer a more comprehensive approach to restoring coastal habitat.
Healthy salt marshes support an impressive range of wildlife, including migratory waterfowl, shorebirds, wading birds, and fish that depend on coastal wetlands for feeding, shelter, and reproduction. They also provide valuable benefits to nearby communities by absorbing wave energy, improving water quality, and storing carbon in their vegetation and soils.
Those benefits become increasingly important as coastal landscapes face rising sea levels, stronger storms, and continued development pressures.
A Model for the Mid-Atlantic
The significance of The Lighthouse Center extends beyond the approximately 50 acres targeted for restoration.
Across the Mid-Atlantic, coastal wetlands face many of the same challenges: historic drainage alterations, shoreline erosion, loss of marsh elevation, and changing tidal conditions.
Traditional restoration methods can be expensive and difficult to implement across large areas. Low-cost, low-tech techniques offer another option, particularly where targeted interventions can help natural processes resume.
The Lighthouse Center provides an opportunity for conservation professionals to evaluate these methods in the field, monitor how the marsh responds, and apply what they learn to future projects.
Restoration partners will continue assessing water movement, marsh elevation, vegetation, and wildlife use to determine how effectively the work is helping the wetland recover.
For Ducks Unlimited, the project reflects a broader commitment to conserving coastal wetlands through science, collaboration, and practical solutions.
At The Lighthouse Center, those solutions are already taking shape, one hay-filled ditch and shallow channel at a time.
Media Contact
Jay Hathaway
Communications Coordinator, Great Lakes Atlantic Region
Ducks Unlimited Inc. is the world's largest nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving North America's continually disappearing wetlands, grasslands and other waterfowl habitats. Established in 1937, Ducks Unlimited has restored or protected more than 20 million acres thanks to contributions from more than a million supporters across the continent. Guided by science, DU’s projects benefit waterfowl, wildlife and people in all 50 states. Learn more at www.ducks.org.
