A Gathering Storm
Proprietors of summer rentals converge on city offices, seeking redress as scourges of jellyfish drift towards the beach, frightening vacationers from seaside resorts. Watermen stand by helplessly, witnessing a shocking decline in their catches in areas that, until recently, were teeming with shellfish. Homeowners recoil at the prospect of venturing into their own backyards, terrified of the thick clouds of mosquitoes that infest their suburban neighborhoods.
No, these are not scenes from a new reality-TV disaster series, but are instead just a few of the real-life effects of increasingly intensive development on the Jersey Shore, says Stanton Hales, Jr., Ph.D., director of the Barnegat Bay Partnership, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving and restoring the region’s ecology. Hales says that as the building trend advances southward along the coast, unpredictable environmental impacts and their detrimental consequences could become the norm for the entire region.
Barnegat Bay, in Ocean County, NJ, is home to some of the state’s, and the nation’s, most valuable coastal ecosystems. But the New Jersey coast is under increasing pressure from human activities that impinge upon this habitat, its nutrient cycles, and its hydrology, driving an accelerating trend toward eutrophication of the estuary.
Tim Dillingham, director of the American Littoral Society, says eutrophication linked to stormwater runoff is the major environmental problem facing estuaries in all coastal regions of the United States. He adds that the peculiar geography of Barnegat Bay, a shallow lagoon with only two outlets to the ocean, leaves it “a bit more challenged than others.”
Barnegat Bay absorbs a nitrogen load of 1.4 million pounds per year, according to estimates presented at the 2010 Summit Meeting on the Role of Nutrient Management in Urban and Suburban Landscapes in Nutrient Loading of Surface and Ground Waters at Rutgers University. This nitrogen, the summit observed, reaches the bay through a number of pathways, including “direct atmospheric deposition (22%), groundwater discharge directly into the bay (12%), and surface water discharge, which includes nitrogen in stormwater and in groundwater discharge as base flow in streams (66%).”
A Painful Reality
Senator Robert Smith, who represents the region in the New Jersey State Legislature, says Barnegat Bay is considered one of the two worst basins in the nation for eutrophication. “We had species radically reduced, fishing impacts, turbidity, and the bad news is, if you stopped adding nutrients right now, it might take 10 years to see an impact.”
As has been true in cases of environmental degradation everywhere, the problem in Barnegat Bay has, for a long time, gone mostly unnoted beyond a core group of experts, and the small cadre of individuals, such as fishermen, whose livelihoods are directly affected. But that hasn’t stopped advocates like Dillingham, Hales, and Smith from trying to address the issue.
And lately, the problem has begun to gather a constituency. “The stinging sea nettles really started to bring the issue to public attention,” says Dillingham. “It wasn’t just hurting the watermen, but it was beginning to hurt tourism.” And tourism, he says, is the largest source of revenue for Ocean County, capable in good times of bringing $4 billion into the regional economy.
With two of the state’s major industries, fisheries and tourism, under threat from ecological chaos, the New Jersey legislature, with the encouragement of Senator Smith, decided to take action to preserve, restore, and enhance the aquatic resources of Barnegat Bay and other coastal ecosystems in the state. Their efforts culminated in three pieces of legislation that New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, signed in January. Contained in these new laws are three major policy initiatives that experts say may soon become a model for water and estuary ecosystem management practices throughout the United States.
Each of the three novel legislative initiatives address, in one way or another, soil health, a component of ecological function that Hales says has for too long been denied the attention it deserves.
David Friedman agrees. In testimony in support of the eventual legislation, Friedman, the district director of the Ocean County Soil and Conservation District, says, “Healthy soil is the key component of a thriving watershed. It is the structure of our soils which sustains clean water, abundant wildlife, lush forests, and wetlands.”
Life in a Microcosm
Over the past 10 years, Ocean County has been one of the fastest-growing jurisdictions in the state, and Dillingham says the political boundaries of Ocean County “correspond almost exactly to the boundaries of the Barnegat Bay watershed,” presenting an ideal test ground for policies and practices that could, potentially, be implemented to protect soil health in regions with similar concerns anywhere in the US.
New Jersey’s new law will require the state’s soil conservation services to set standards to rehabilitate post-development soils. Friedman says his agency is working on drafting these new standards to promote soil health and percolation.
Friedman has been looking into the relationship between soil health and stormwater management in Ocean County over the past three decades, and he says the problems have a history. “Back in the 1980s, our office observed stormwater basins holding water long before the first house was constructed, prior to construction of any impervious structures such as roads and houses.”
Friedman says he contacted Chris Smith with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to evaluate the issue. He says it was determined back then that changes in hydrology caused by the clearing of vegetation and land were contributing factors to the buildup of water in the basins, but that the most important factor was “the loss of soil porosity due to heavy construction equipment crushing pore space in the soils.”
He explains, “Typical soil on the Jersey shore is 50% void space. All the good stuff is stored in the pores.”
According to an EPA article on soil health in the region, these cavities include “large, medium, and small pores. The greatest concentration of large pores, called macropores, is closest to the surface. Macropores act like a funnel, allowing water to enter the soil as saturated flow to a maximum depth. Rainwater typically follows the channels created by roots of native plants.”
Friedman says the sandy or loamy soil types prevalent in this part of New Jersey provide a very high degree of permeability, with plenty of room for the microbes, air pockets, and macroorganisms that constitute a living, although hidden, ecosystem.
“Once you crush that, you have an anaerobic condition; the pore space is vital to reducing runoff,” says Friedman. Compaction “has a permanent effect on the soil. If roots can’t penetrate, you end up with very shallow roots.”
According to Friedman, most of the biological activity and ecological functions that work to slow down, cleanse, and infiltrate water take place within these pores. When the pores are absent, the activity stops; the soil ceases to be alive and ceases to perform its natural ecological and hydrological functions.
The Not So Green Grass of Home
Friedman authored a study in 2001 titled Impact of Soil Disturbance During Construction on Bulk Density and Infiltration in Ocean County, New Jersey, conducted in conjunction with US Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (USDA-NRCS), that confirmed the significant increase in excessive runoff from loss of pore space.
Friedman briefly describes the study’s findings: “A natural soil has a soil bulk density of about 1.3 (50% pore space). We measured turf in residential developments that were constructed in the 1970s having a soil bulk density of 1.75 to 1.9 and an athletic field built in 1980 that had a bulk density of 1.97. And note, concrete has a bulk density of 2.2.”
In other words, soils that have been compacted during the construction of a home site, can be nearly as hard and impervious as concrete.
Friedman recalls instances where fresh plantings of trees and shrubs have died off because their roots could not establish themselves in the dense dirt, and instances where athletic events in the area had to be called off because the ground under the playing fields had stiffened to the point that the surface was no longer safe for athletes.
Steve Sousa, president of Princeton Hydro, a firm providing consulting services to the Barnegat Bay Partnership, believes developers need to be provided with a better understanding of “how to deal with maintaining soil health” both during and after construction.
He says that contrary to appearances, well-groomed and manicured green lawns do not necessarily represent pervious landscape from a functional point of view.
“At face value, you’d think if you have large areas of green lawns, you wouldn’t get that much runoff.” But, Sousa argues, by employing the landscaping practices that generally accompany development, by “altering what goes on in the pores, what happens in the soil structure, you’re no longer getting good water penetration. You can create major impacts to the hydrology.
“This would not be an issue if it was on an isolated lot here or there. However, it is ubiquitous in every watershed across all landscapes throughout the country, and the world,” he says.
A Penetrating Look
In their undisturbed condition, Friedman says, New Jersey’s Pine Barrens forests can infiltrate water at the incredible rate of 15 inches per hour. “These coastal plain soils have no runoff at all,” he says.
“Since you have such good soil porosity, you’ve got roots and microorganisms that each take up and utilize the water” before allowing it to filter down to groundwater. According to Friedman, the 100-year storm for the area, which might drop a maximum of 9 inches of rain in a 24-hour period, would easily be absorbed by these soils, disappearing into the forest ecosystem within hours, leaving little trace in the form of surface water.
He adds that the streams flowing through these forests are almost exclusively supplied by this infiltrated rainwater. “The base flows of our streams, and the sustainability of our wetlands, are far less dependent on the quantity of rainfall than upon the functioning soils beneath our feet–they are the vital arteries that work throughout the year.”
Friedman has often repeated a simple experiment that illustrates his point. “If you take an instrument that soil scientists use–it’s called a penetrometer–into the woods, you can bury it down three feet right to its handles, but if you walk five feet from there, and get out onto the lawn where they ran the heavy equipment years ago and created a turf area, you can’t bury it more than an inch.
“The amount of storage in the woods is phenomenal versus what it is out there on the turf.”
Friedman says that, in the past, “The mindset has always been to collect runoff and bring it to a basin to try and match pre- and post-construction conditions, but that is almost impossible to do. Healthy soils have millions of years head start on product development. We can’t build a basin that works as well as the soil beneath the woods.”
No Single Recipe
An additional provision of the initiatives requires the state’s Department of Transportation to “fix” the basins under its jurisdiction.
“We have over 2,300 storm basins in the county. Many of them are not functioning as designed,” says Hales. Some of the county’s basins have been holding water for decades, serving as mosquito habitat and health hazards to nearby communities.
With up to 2,000 of the county’s basins either malfunctioning or overburdened, the new initiative will be accompanied by a $10 million section 319 grant to begin the work of restoring these basins to infiltrate stormwater and retain nutrients. The first step in the process, Hales says, will be to establish a public-private partnership to map out each of the county’s basins, gathering information such as street address and acreage to prepare for a more detailed evaluation of each basin’s condition and performance.
Sousa says he has been working with the Pinelands Commission over the last several years to determine the causes of infiltration basin failures–“whether it was poor design, or whether performance factors were not set up right.” He believes that most infiltration basin failures are “the result of post-construction soil compaction, whether that occurred during initial construction or repeated maintenance, and not design flaws.”
But he also notes, “There is no cookie-cutter solution; each site has its own challenges and features.” He says his firm has had some success renovating failed basins and “bringing them back up to their true function.” He has consulted on some of Ocean County’s earliest basin retrofits to successfully reverse the compaction process and restore infiltration.
A basin in downtown Toms River had been holding water and contributing to flooding problems in the area for years. Friedman says the project team began by roughing up the floor of the basin to the depth of the compacted layer, which can vary from a depth of a few inches to 3 feet or more. Blending in organic material to “fluff up the soil,” and backing out of the basin carefully to leave an undisturbed growing medium behind, workers seeded the depression with native plantings.
Today, Friedman says, this basin that had contributed to incessant flooding problems now functions like a large rain garden, quickly infiltrating all the water it receives within 48 hours of a storm. “The water never reaches the outlet structure. Since we’ve done that, the county hasn’t had one flooding problem in downtown Toms River.”
Friedman says it has been an evolutionary process. “We basically found out that if you don’t address the chemical, the physical, and the biological functions of the soil and you’re just adding organic matter, it doesn’t work. We had to break up the compacted layers.” Adding such soil amendments as gypsum and lime to address soil physical characteristics and chemistry and OeanGro fertilizer to “make the soil alive again–that’s how we restored the functions.” Friedman applied these same principles subsequent basin retrofits, including a project in conjunction with PMK Group in 2008 that converted the Ocean County Utilities Authority’s malfunctioning basin at its Central Water Pollution Control Facility located in Bayville, Ocean County, to something that functions more like a bioretention basin. The Barnegat Bay National Estuary Program lauds that project in its spring 2010 newsletter as “a complete success.”
Dillingham endorses the approach and suggests that basin retrofits can also serve as a timely flood prevention initiative. “The designs that enhance the nutrient removal will also serve the flood management needs,” he says. “A lot of these basins are older, they were designed around a certain amount of development within a watershed; now some of these watersheds are almost completely built out, and they may have exceeded their design flows.” He believes the new approaches can accommodate multiple goals, “but generally we’re not going to exacerbate the flooding issue; we’ll deal with flooding as one of the aspects of design, as well as nutrient removal.”
Friedman points out that there are an additional opportunities to improve the performance of infiltration basins, He says a lot of the trouble can be prevented by not letting the basins fill up in the first place. And that solution has its roots at the home. “If we can lessen the amount of runoff getting to the basins by having healthy soil in our lawns and our gardens, that’s a big plus,” he says.
More Green, Less Nutrients
The third initiative undertaken by New Jersey to restore soil health addresses nutrient load through source control, by focusing on reducing the use of fertilizers for lawn maintenance.
According to the Science and Technical Advisory Committee for the Barnegat Bay National Estuary Program (BBNEP), overall, residential fertilizer application accounts for approximately 8% to 15% of the estimated total nitrogen load to the estuary. The Rutgers University summit report on the role of nutrient management concluded that, at the watershed scale, “reducing total nitrogen input results in greater retention of nitrogen within a landscape.”
The Rutgers report also reached the conclusion that the greatest risk of nitrogen leaching from turf into surface waters occurred during winter, because “plants uptake nitrate-nitrogen in transpiration water” and “because the transpiration rate is very low during the winter, nitrate uptake into plants is low.” The report cites a Connecticut study confirming that fertilizer applied in December presented the greatest risk of leaching.
While the report concedes that many questions remain concerning the nutrient cycle, it closes with a simple direct recommendation: “Maintain plant density to reduce the volume of runoff and nutrient loads.”
In response to these and similar scientific findings, New Jersey adopted rules mandating the elimination of phosphorus from fertilizers sold in the state by 2012, and placing limits on the potency of the nitrogen constituent of fertilizers sold to homeowners. The law also adds rules governing the timing of nitrogen fertilizer application, curtailing its use during the winter. Further, the new law authorizes local governments to impose fertilizer-free lawn buffers to protect waterways from nutrient-laden direct runoff. An additional provision of the law mandates nutrient management training for commercial lawn fertilizer applicators.
“We think it is the strongest fertilizer legislation in the US; we think it’s good policy,” says Senator Smith, one of the cosponsors of the bill.
As the bill moved through the legislature, Rich Shank, the chief environmental officer for Scotts Miracle-Gro, a company that makes lawn and garden products including fertilizers, penned a column for the New Jersey newspaper The Press of Atlantic City. He endorsed the educational component of the legislation, and on behalf of the company wrote, “We are committed to remove phosphorus from our lawn maintenance products nationally by 2012, and we are ahead of that goal here in New Jersey.”
According to American Littoral Society’s Dillingham, fertilizer manufacturers also shared their view that package labeling and instructions can make a big difference in how homeowners apply their products. He says manufacturers have indicated that homeowners generally heed their recommendations and package inserts when using lawn care products.
But in the end, homeowners want green lawns along with a healthy environment, and the new laws don’t exactly explain how to achieve both.
Friedman, however, offers a clue. He says that the difficulties encountered in keeping lawns green and healthy looking can themselves be traced to soil compaction, particularly in newer suburban developments. According to Friedman, the soil has generally been damaged irreparably “on the first pass” of heavy equipment used in homebuilding, and that contemporary construction practices exacerbate that damage by disturbing earth over the entire footprint of the lot. “Back in the ’50s and ’60s, they only cut around the yard of the house to be built, but now it’s the entire footprint of the yard, and with the heavy gear they use nowadays everything is altered permanently,” he says.
Roughing It in the Outback
According to Friedman, homeowners often attempt to compensate for compacted impervious soil by applying extra pesticides and extra fertilizers to try to mimic a healthy growing medium, a futile exercise with the well-known environmental consequence of nutrient- and pesticide-laden runoff.
Friedman, a soil scientist himself, even admits to having difficulties growing turf grass on his own lawn “several years back.” Surmising that his problem was caused by excessive soil density, he tried loosening the soil by “poking holes in it with a with a pitchfork.” But he notes that didn’t last because “the kids playing in the yard simply closed the holes up again.”
“Next time I put peat moss in the holes; that makes the soil more resilient, and it helps it to hold together so it doesn’t completely collapse. Now I have good soil porosity in the backyard. I’m able to grow grass better, and I don’t have to water it as often; it has better moisture holding capacity.” Friedman says, therefore, that in addition to its nutrient control objectives, the legislation that New Jersey enacted can also be considered “a water conservation practice.”
Friedman maintains that if soil conditions could be improved, homeowners could enjoy turf as green as they might desire at a fraction of the nutrient load. “Poor soil conditions give turf a bad name. This is something that I have been trying to inform homeowners and planners about for nearly 30 years.”
Putting Sandy Soils on the Map
Many of the 28 National Estuary Programs in the US are facing detrimental effects of soil compaction similar to those affecting Barnegat Bay. Hales says he has entertained queries from environmental managers from neighboring states to discuss how they might establish similar soil health initiatives, but he says, “It’s a nationwide issue–sandy coastal soils can be mapped all over the East Coast, down to the Gulf Coast.” And the challenge stretches beyond even that broad geographic scale. “There is a lot of interest in what’s going on here,” he says. “There are similar problems with estuary ecology in King County, WA.”
Tom Dillingham also sees a wider potential for the New Jersey policy. “This initiative is important both to Barnegat Bay, a hugely valued natural resource in New Jersey, but I think to the extent that it helps answer some questions that are facing bays and estuaries around the country, the work takes on all that much more importance, so we’re really excited about its potential.”
Hales agrees, adding, “The overall objective is clear; we very much want to get water back into the ground.”
