By Neil Foley, Education Coordinator and Ecologist Sunrises on Nantucket are worth the effort every time, even for a night owl like myself. Before most of the island wakes for the day and the rotaries jam with the traffic, it’s a spectacular feeling to face the fog banks and listen to a chorus of songbirds…
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In many conservation and restoration projects, ecologists work hard to protect native things or bring native things back to a place. But this last year, Nantucket Conservation Foundation Staff acted as predators and aggressively removed a native crab from a few salt marshes in Polpis Harbor. Our prey? The purple marsh crab (Sesarma reticulatum). The…
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As an island in the Atlantic Ocean, Nantucket intimately understands the impacts of increased flooding frequency and storm events. For our community, adopting ways to increase our Coastal Resiliency is essential to maintaining quality of life, community function and ecological integrity on our little island. So what is Coastal Resiliency? Essentially, it is the ability of a coastal…
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The photos and videos on social media October 30th, 2017 were dramatic. Ocean waves in Madaket washing over the dune separating Hither Creek from the Atlantic Ocean, swirling under and around the stilt house and pushing sand into the southern end of Hither Creek. For a while during this story, it looked like Hither Creek…
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*Please note, this blog post was originally published in The Inquirer and Mirror on January 19, 2017 in the article series called Island Ecology. The Foundation’s Science staff will be regularly contributing to our local newspaper and reprinting articles here the following week.* As the shortest day of the year has passed and we officially…
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Unexplained die off of salt marsh plants, particularly along creek edges and the low tide line, has become an increasing issue along the New England coast since the 1990s. Along marsh creek banks and harbor edges, salt marsh plants (particularly salt marsh cordgrass or Spartina alterniflora) began disappearing, leaving behind large swaths of exposed soil, filled…
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The Medouie Creek Wetland is a large wetland along the north side of Polpis Harbor on Nantucket Island. This wetland was historically one large salt water marsh, directly connected to the harbor, getting daily tides washing over it. Sometime in the 1930s, a dike was created to build a road, allowing people access to the…
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