Essex Salt Marsh Panorama

Posted on by Kimsmithdesigns

Essex Salt Marsh ©Kim Smith 2015Still frozen, the Essex Salt Marsh panorama was taken yesterday.

Click to see full size.

As we were talking about salt marshes on a recent podcast, the following is information provided by the Massachusetts Bays Program:

The Essex Salt Marsh is part of the 17,000 acre Great Marsh that extends from Cape Ann into New Hampshire. Salt marshes are found in coastal areas. These unique ecosystems are formed within protective estuaries and support numerous plants and animals. Salt marshes are among the most productive lands on earth, outcompeting even the best-managed farms. Two-thirds of all marine fish and shellfish depend on salt marshes during some portion of their lives.

Salt marshes are divided into two general vegetation zones. The Low Marsh is flooded twice daily by the incoming tide and is dominated by Spartina alternifolia (low salt marsh grass). The High Marsh is flooded sporadically and is dominated by Spartina patens (high salt marsh grass). Salt marshes contain tidal creeks, pools, and islands of high ground, and serve as highly efficient pollution filters.

Nationwide, vast areas of salt marsh have been destroyed by filling, dredging, and developing upland areas. The Great Marsh has escaped much of this destruction, but it is impacted by pollution runoff and mosquito control ditches built in the 1930s, and by road and rail crossings, which restrict tidal flows to upstream marshes.

 

 

 

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Published by Kimsmithdesigns

Documentary filmmaker, photographer, landscape designer, author, and illustrator. "Beauty on the Wing: Life Story of the Monarch Butterfly" currently airing on PBS. Current film projects include Piping Plovers, Gloucester's Feast of St. Joseph, and Saint Peter's Fiesta. Visit my websites for more information about film and design projects at kimsmithdesigns.com, monarchbutterflyfilm.com, and pipingploverproject.org. Author/illustrator "Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities! Notes from a Gloucester Garden."

5 thoughts on “Essex Salt Marsh Panorama”

  1. Hi Kim, what are mosquito control ditches and how did they work? If you mean those straight cuts that run from the tidal creek toward shore, I thought that those were related to salt marsh hay harvesting (although I don’t know where I got that idea).

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  2. Hi Allen. There are people who have much greater knowledge about the Essex Salt Marsh, but this is my understanding of the different types of cuts that we see there.

    Although salt marsh hay harvesting began in the 1700s, where the farmers hand cut with scythes and waited for an extremely low tide, it was a race against time. By the 19th century methods began to change. The marsh farmers dug ditches to drain off rainwater and ground water, and to create more of the upland marsh, with its better grasses. This made the land drier, which meant better hay, more acreage, and better harvesting conditions. Even later in the 19th century, large serpentine dikes were also created.

    In the 1930s, one of the jobs created by the WPA was ditch-digging in salt marshes. More than 90 percent of east coast salt marshes were ditched. The thought was that by draining the water off the marsh quickly after high tides, the ditches would eliminate mosquito-breeding habitat. The ditches were not maintained and in some cases, became prime mosquito breeding habitat as the water in the ditches stagnated. Another detrimental side-effect was that once the marshes were drained, they were no longer used by wildlife.

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