A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst is continuing a multi-year study of the South River salt marsh in Marshfield, part of a statewide effort to better understand the effects of flooding, erosion, and vegetation changes along the Massachusetts coast.
Speaking before the Marshfield Conservation Commission on October 1, research fellow Ryan Wicks described how the project combines aerial drone imagery, lidar mapping, and on-the-ground data collection to assess the condition of salt marshes across the state.
“This is an EPA-funded project for the last six years,” Ricks said. “The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has started funding our work as of this year as well, moving forward for the next two years as part of the long-term salt marsh monitoring program.”
The team’s work in Marshfield focuses on the South River site north of Rexhame Beach. Researchers are collecting vegetation samples, monitoring drainage patterns, and tracking changes in elevation using high-resolution imagery accurate to within 10 centimeters vertically.
Ricks said the study uses both traditional fieldwork and advanced technology to produce detailed models of salt marsh ecosystems. “We do ground truth sampling, we do transect sampling to do vegetation surveys,” he said. “We generally install water loggers, which we had installed at the South River site last year.”
Ricks said the instruments record pressure and temperature every ten minutes to measure how long water remains after flooding. “Those are the main things that we're looking and relating that to vegetation health, those inundation patterns,” he said. The research began in 2018, with South River added a year or two later. “We have data at the South River site for, I believe, as far back as 2022,” Ricks said. Asked about salinity monitoring and coordination with local watershed groups, he explained, “We are not measuring salinity at South River or at any of our sites,” but added that collaboration is a goal. “That would be wonderful. Collaboration and coordination with data collection and analysis and environmental monitoring is front and center to the goals that we have in mind.”