By Lauren Wanko
Correspondent
It’s home to countless organisms, spanning 660 square miles. NJTV News joined Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Bob Martin aboard a boat on the Barnegat Bay.
“What we’ve been focusing on is collecting the science necessary to understand the baseline. There’s been a lot of discussion over time on what the health of the Barnegat Bay is and all we had was pieces of information. Over the last three years we’ve been filling in those gaps,” Martin said.
Gov. Chris Christie announced an action plan to address the ecological health of the watershed in 2010.
What are some of the contributing factors that have led to the diminishing health of the bay? “There are a lot of things. Things we can clearly identify is a lot of additional nutrients that go into the water, from fertilizers that come in, a lot of things that wash off, storm water runoff that go into Barnegat Bay and some buildup around Barnegat Bay has contributed to that,” Martin said.
Over the past few years, the DEP has undertaken 10 major studies, including researching environmentally sensitive areas like the Sedge Island Conservation Zone right off Island Beach State Park.
“These projects are all designed to coordinate and compliment each other and then we’re gonna work with other people in the department so we develop tools and management strategies on how to manage these natural resources in the bay,” said NJ DEP Office of Science Research Scientist Thomas Belton.
Rider University’s Paul Jivoff deployed a cylinder into different habitats around Sedge Island like sea grass and algae and pulled samples of the organisms found in it with a net.
“Then we compare sizes and abundances and species diversity between habitats,” Jivoff said.
The goal — to determine how important the habitat is to organisms and to see how well they thrive around the Conservation Zone compared to other areas in the bay.
“What’s going on in the Conservation Zone is at least equal to what’s going on outside because the habitats are very similar,” Jivoff said.
Nearby, ReClam the Bay — a local non-profit — rakes for clams. Rutgers University’s Monica Bricelj says since the 1980s, there’s been a huge decline in the clam population.
“Not very clear on what the reasons are at all, whether it’s habitat loss or changes in water quality, it’s not clear at all,” she said.
Bricelj and her team placed cages with juvenile clams in four sites throughout the bay to study their growth rates and survival. The highest growth rates occurred within relatively undeveloped protected areas. Aside from the research projects, a bay clean-up has become an annual event.
Since 2011, the DEP, school kids and other volunteers have removed nearly 2,390 cubic yards of trash and recyclables from the Barnegat Bay watershed, which sprawls over much of Ocean County and small parts of Monmouth County.
Commissioner Martin says water quality studies are also part of the plan.
“We clearly have data that the water quality is good and continues to get better,” he said.
The DEP’s research on the watershed is ongoing.