Keeping the Great Lakes Great

By Anne Secord and Gian Dodici

	Excavator constructing potholes and channels at Buck Pond 2016. “Islands” constructed at Salmon Creek Preserve 2016' Photo credit:USFWS

The quantity and quality of wetlands have been in a long decline in the coastal areas of the Great Lakes due to a combination of factors, including water level regulation and development. Since 2010, the New York Field Office and partners have been hard at work improving habitat at the Rochester Embayment Area of Concern.  With funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, we conducted wetland habitat assessments in streams, ponds, rivers, and bays on the south shore of Lake Ontario near Rochester, NY.  We found degraded wetlands with few species and limited diversity of physical habitat. Cattails and a select few other plant species ran rampant, crowding out other plants, invading open areas, and nearly covering the entire wetland.  By contrast, a complex, healthy wetland would generally have a mix of open water and vegetation with a variety of different plant types and heights.  The New York Field Office prioritized several areas within the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Braddock Bay Wildlife Management Area (which is in the Rochester Embayment Area of Concern) to focus on and developed plans to restore some of the most degraded areas to healthy, diverse wetlands. We recreated a mosaic of edge habitat by excavating over 22 acres of potholes and open water channels in the solid cattail stands at three sites within the Wildlife Management Area; Long Pond, Buck Pond and the Salmon Creek Preserve. We also constructed 16 acres of interspersed habitat mounds, as well as islands that are isolated from the tenacious roots of the adjacent cattails.  These mounds and islands have been treated to remove cattails, then seeded with herbaceous natives and planted with native woody species such as dogwood, buttonbush and maple.  The wetland potholes and habitat mounds are specifically designed to be of varying size and depth/height so as to improve habitat diversity.

Leopard frog eggs. Photo credit:USFWS		Leopard frog adult. Photo credit:USFWS

The channels also allow fish, such as northern pike, the access to spawn in newly created wetland habitat and will improve nesting and foraging habitat for ducks, wading birds, and, hopefully, the New York State-endangered black tern. The black tern nests in expansive marshes with mixtures of emergent wetlands and open water. Take a look at the aerial video of the Salmon Creek Preserve this past winter after potholes, channels and islands had been constructed.

Project Biologist Gian Dodici and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Biologist Heidi Kennedy at Braddock Bay Wildlife Management Area. Photo credit:USFWS

We also constructed vernal pools, which are temporary pools of water, within the upland area of the Salmon Creek Preserve to create breeding habitat for amphibians like the leopard frog.

Anne Secord is the Branch Chief of Environmental Quality and Gian Dodici is a Biologist at the USFWS New York Field Office in Cortland, New York. Anne can be reached at Anne_Secord@fws.gov and Gian can be reached at Gian_Dodici@fws.gov