Prime Hook marshes can be salt and fresh

The long-awaited draft comprehensive plan for Prime Hook National Wildlife Refuge offers an extensive analysis of the complex problems there.

Yet the three alternatives offered in the plan have all been roundly rejected by those whom the plan will most affect: the people whose homes and hunting grounds are threatened under all three alternatives.

Scientists who visited the refuge agree climate change, sea-level rise and human efforts to maintain freshwater marshes threaten the refuge. They recommend using dredge sediment to re-establish saltwater marshes in an area now largely underwater. As presented, this option offers attractive elements, but it’s an all- or-nothing approach calling for the end of freshwater marshes.  This plan is a long-term solution to a near-term crisis.

The plan fails to account for the varied character of sections of Prime Hook, which are defined by the roads that cut across the refuge to the coastline. Unit 3, the largest of four sections, lies between Broadkill and Prime Hook roads.  A distinct habitat fed by Prime Hook Creek, Unit 3 has successfully been maintained as a freshwater marsh for more than a century, supporting a rich diversity of wildlife and providing a key and unique freshwater feeding haven for migrating birds.

It’s possible climate change will eventually inundate this area with saltwater; new studies put the Atlantic seaboard among areas of highest risk. Still, if Unit 2, between Prime Hook and Fowlers Beach roads were built up with sediment and re-established as a healthy salt marsh, it could, as a more stable salt marsh, provide protection for the community of Primehook Beach and help maintain the larger Unit 3 as a freshwater marsh.

Storms will periodically open breaches, and sand will constantly erode, but if the shoreline is quickly repaired when that happens, and Unit 2 is restored to salt marsh, Unit 3 may well continue to exist as freshwater marsh for the next 15 years, if not longer.

This plan might not be sustainable for the next 50 years, but it could work over the next 10 and provide much more data about the effects of sea-level rise in time for the next 15-year plan.