Bays Program Interns Conduct Bulkhead Monitoring Program

BERLIN – Interns with the Maryland Coastal Bays Program (MCBP) are finishing a months-long monitoring program that will determine the successfulness of a three-year-old bulkhead project in Ocean City.

PVC pipes filled with sand and planted with native marsh grasses were installed along bulkheads at Bayshore Drive and Old Landing Road in 2013 as part of a partnership with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the Town of Ocean City.

Katherine Phillips, MCBP program manager, said the initial hope was to monitor the green bulkheads to nearby bare bulkheads to determine if the project achieved its goal of promoting biodiversity.

“Since 2013, we haven’t done any monitoring on how successful they were,” she said. “We have done maintenance and replenishment, but didn’t check to see how successful it was. We installed them with the hope it would reduce wave action and promote biodiversity. We had all these hopes, but we had no data.”

For seven weeks, interns Brenna Waite and Madison Warfield have waded through the water to collect data on water quality, biodiversity and habitat values, often using nets and samples to monitor fish activity and organism counts.

“They’ve been going out twice a week monitoring water quality and comparing it to bare bulkheads,” Phillips said.

While the interns are still crunching numbers, Phillips explained the monitoring program has already yielded some noticeable, yet inconclusive, results.

“Some days it’s a little better at the green bulkheads and other days it’s better at the bare bulkheads,” she said.

Regardless of the results, Phillips expressed interest in continuing the monitoring program.

“This is something we hope future interns will monitor in the coming years,” she said.

Phillips explained the current goal is to determine to successfulness of the program, but added that the results could lead to further green bulkhead projects in the future.

“At this point we just wanted to determine the success of the project,” she said. “There is potential that more of the green bulkheads could be installed in Ocean City or Ocean Pines. It’s something that we will be discussing further.”

About The Author: Bethany Hooper

Alternative Text

Bethany Hooper has been with The Dispatch since 2016. She currently covers various general stories. Hooper graduated from Stephen Decatur High School in 2012 and the University of Maryland in 2016, where she completed double majors in journalism and economics.