Blog 6- Life and Death of the Salt Marsh

I found a link related to this selection about salt marshes. I found it interesting because, for one it was a canadian issue and secondly its about the protected land in New Brunswick where I will be moving in August. This link explains how the area 20 kilometers west of Saint-John is being protected by WWF-Canada, Conservation Planning and Atlantic Region. The Musquash Estruary is the last largest intact and pristine salt marsh in the Bay of Fundy. I am excited to travel the east coast in August, I will definitely be heading out to see this area to see for myself why this area is protected. The link is: http://thegreenpages.ca/portal/nb/2007/03/dfo_praised_for_nb_salt_marsh.html.

In this selection, there are discussions of wetland ecosystems and the urgent need for wetland protection as an ecological significance.
Along the eastern coast of North America lies a green ribbon of soft, salty, wet, low-lying land, called the salt marshes. The ribbon of green marshes has a definate but elusive border as the tides of the Atlantic fluctuate. There the grass sounds like wind on the prairie, there is music of moving water, and sounds of birds, or marsh hen, and clapper rail. There is a thunder of herds of crabs moving as they flee feet or migrate in search of food. If you listen you can hear the bubbling of air from the sandy soil below. These wetlands are also filled with smells of sea and salt water, a little iodine, dead life, and smells of grass. These are clean, fresh smells, that are pleasing to one.
In marshes that have been disturbed, dug up, suffocated with trash, poisoned and eroded with wastes from large cities, the smell is different. These marshes smell of hydrogen sulfide, like the smell of rotten eggs.
Some marshes can be walked on, although the footing is spongy. In the southern marshes only one grass covers the entire parts of the marsh area, and provides firm footing. In the northern marshes there is mud rather than grass, it feels like walking on a huge trampoline.
As you walk seaward, the mud has less root material and is less firm. On the edges of the creek, where the rising tide reaches resistance, it is slowed and drops the mud it has been carrying, the ground here is firm and even dry and hard.
Down toward the creek, there are no roots to make solid, nothing but mud and water fighting to hold the area.

The dangers to salt marshes stem from human activities, not natual processes. We destroy wetlands and shallow water bottoms directly by dredgin, filling, and building, and by pollution. The increase in human population along the coast has brought a pressure to destroy more and more marsh estruarine systems. Preserving these areas brings many benefits to everyone, it is not simply for the preservation.
Some destruction of preserved wildlife areas is inevitable. Roads must be built to the marshes, along the edges of marshes for easy access.
The planning of wetland preservation could be approached at a state level, but better would it be if it were approached as a national level, since it isnt independant marshes but the whole marsh system that needs to be analyzed. Planning demands need to start by classifying the value and importance of every marsh. Safeguards against development and the last of land being diverted to industrial use must be set in place. Corporate blackmails is hard to withstand and brings high pressure on organizations controlling the marshes.
Pressure also comes from state officials. The battle is between the forces of development and conservation.
In many of our National Parks this conservation is in place, now we need to preserve different sorts of natural resouces- as the ribbin of green marshes alond the eastern coast of North America.