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To: Bluedot Living
From: Isaac Hersch, Environmental Educator, Nantucket Conservation Foundation
Subject: Resilience, Health, and Biodiversity: The Gifts of Conservation Land
Together, the many land trusts on Nantucket Island own more than half of the island’s land, most of it protected from development in perpetuity. The Nantucket Conservation Foundation, owning just over 9,000 acres, permanently protects around a third of Nantucket Island. This extensive array of conservation land makes Nantucket a world class destination for year-round residents and island visitors. In many places on Nantucket, you can enjoy pristine beaches with barely a house in sight, walk on trails through globally rare sandplain grasslands or hardwood forests, kayak through ponds and harbors, or take in expansive views from highpoints in the Middle Moors. Not only does conservation land make Nantucket a beautiful place to live and visit, but it also provides benefits, including increased sustainability, resilience to climate change, and positives to human health.
Climate Change Resilience
Conservation land — permanently conserved open space — is one of Nantucket’s most valuable resources for adapting to climate change. Efforts to conserve land provide a wealth of natural solutions to erosion, shoreline protection, and adaptation to sea level rise, as explored in the next points. Conservation land itself protects the biodiversity of an area — the variety of plants, animals, and landscapes unique to a place. The more diversity, the more variety in a natural area, the more potential a place has to adapt to future change. On Nantucket, with more than 50 percent of the island in conservation, we have a wealth of resources to adapt to climate change. Our wetlands and salt marshes protect the shorelines from storms and can also sequester carbon, removing it from the atmosphere and reducing climate warming. Our intact coastal dune shorelines help prevent erosion and naturally adapt to erosion when it happens. Even green spaces like parks help local cooling rather than the warming that occurs from sun absorption in areas with lots of concrete and buildings.
Shoreline Protection
One of the most iconic features of Nantucket is Coatue, the jutting barrier beach forming the north shore of Nantucket Harbor. The Coatue Wildlife Refuge, a 5-mile spit of land, creates the calm waters of Nantucket Harbor, offers protection from storms coming across the Sound, and provides habitat for many rare and endangered shorebirds and plants.Vegetation communities, including 100-year-old cedar forests and rolling dune fields, hold together the sand and protect the area from erosion. Without Coatue, downtown Nantucket and many areas along the harbor shoreline would face much worse erosion and flooding from winter storms.
Sea-Level Rise Mitigation
Within the three main harbors of Nantucket Island, Madaket, Polpis and Nantucket Harbor, lie several salt marshes. These salt marshes aid in slowing the impacts of sea level rise to the island and mitigate wave action against the shore. As the vegetation of the salt marshes grows, dead plants become the soil for new growth, slowly raising the level of the ground over time. Thriving salt marshes can rise up along with rising sea levels and provide flood protection to the uplands behind. Salt marshes also act as sponges, absorbing flood waters and the force of storm waves and slowly releasing them back to the harbor.
Water Quality and Harbor Health
In unhealthy watersheds without an abundance of wetlands, nutrients from fertilizer and pollutants run directly into the ocean and harbors. This can cause problems like harmful algal blooms or make the area unsafe for swimming and fishing. In a well-functioning watershed, wetland plants uptake nutrients and filter water runoff before it reaches the ocean. This natural process contributes to bettering water quality in the harbor, making the water clean and safe to swim and fish in. Cleaner harbors also mean more Nantucket bay scallops and oysters!
Positives for Human Health
Networks of inland conservation land provide massive benefits for human health and happiness. These open spaces provide trails for people to keep active by walking, running, or biking. With so much land on Nantucket dedicated to conservation, we have been able to create the Coast-to-Coast trail. This trail, made as a collaboration between all the land-owning conservation organizations on-island, is a 24-mile-long trek across the island. The trail winds through almost every type of habitat we have on the island, from globally rare sandplain grasslands and coastal heathlands to hardwood forests and wetlands.
With so much dependence on natural systems, it is vitally important that we strike a balance between development and protected conservation land. Losing too many natural areas harms people’s ability to live, work, and be healthy. Luckily, Nantucket has been able to strike this balance and provide extensive open space for people to enjoy, many rare habitats which allow for important species to thrive, and ecosystems critical to the fight against climate change. As we continue to support these conserved areas, they will continue to support us.
Visit us at nantucketconservation.org
