Massive project aims to fix Pocomoke River, bring back swampland

Mike Dryden and Matt Kane crunch through frozen puddles off Whiton Crossing Road on a crisp December day.

The swamplands outside Berlin might not look like much to passersby, but they are the site of one the largest restoration projects in Maryland’s history.

“Any nutrients and sediment that are being caught by this system here aren’t hitting the bay,” said Kane, senior media relations manager at the Nature Conservancy.

“By installing the breaches, we’re trying to put it back to its original self,” said Dryden, conservancy project manager and outreach coordinator, of the Pocomoke River.

Since 2015, the Nature Conservancy with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and other partners has installed more than 100 breaks along a 9-mile stretch of the Pocomoke River, restoring thousands of acres of floodplains lost to development.

According to the conservancy, the project will help more than 125,000 pounds of nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment carried downstream by the river annually settle in the surrounding wetlands, rather than flowing into the Chesapeake Bay.

Making way for farming

The 73-mile-long Pocomoke River is the easternmost river emptying into the Chesapeake Bay.

With headwaters in Delaware’s Great Cypress Swamp, the river historically meandered through the flatlands of Maryland’s Worcester and Wicomico counties before entering the Pocomoke Sound near the Virginia state line and, eventually, the Chesapeake Bay.

That changed rapidly after World War II when, in a gambit to feed a budding population, a massive ditching project altered an 18-mile stretch of the river.

Draining the swamp made space for farmland, but it also made the Pocomoke a fast-track for runoff carrying sediment and nutrients to the Chesapeake Bay.

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That’s a major problem in the bay, where “dead zones” — caused by an excess of nitrogen and phosphorus — cause algae blooms and suffocate marine life each summer.

“They thought they were doing a good thing, but come to find out, they weren’t,” Dryden said.

With the restoration project, the Nature Conservancy and its partners aim to slow the flow of the Pocomoke’s waters, allowing some of those nutrients to filter into the swamplands before they enter the bay.

“The floodplain gets inundated during these storm events and that’s where we get our water quality benefit,” Dryden said.

Fixing the river

To repair the Pocomoke’s riparian functions, the Nature Conservancy and its partners broke ground for a massive restoration project in 2015.

Together with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, Maryland Department of Natural Resources, U.S. Geological Survey, France-Merrick Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and local landowners, the Nature Conservancy began installing 100-to-200-foot floodplains along the river.

Working breach by breach, local construction crews carved out more than 100 of the wide, flat swaths that become flooded after storms. No farmland was taken out of production for the project, TNC noted.

The effort has restored more than 3,000 acres of floodplains to date, according to Dryden.

“It’s not something that could’ve been achieved by one of the partners by themselves,” Kane said. “It’s the fact that everyone’s working together that has allowed them to get so much done.”

But the work hasn’t always gone easily.

“We had to do a lot of outreach, meeting with the landowners, getting them on board with the project,” Dryden said.

While the Nature Conservancy and its partners fund the projects, each easement requires its own permitting application, which can be up to two years in the making, he said.

“You’re with them the whole time, working with them, answering questions they have, scheduling site visits,” Dryden said.

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As sections of the Pocomoke have returned to swamplands, however, word has spread and property owners have sought to get involved with the project.

“That’s when my job starts to become easier, because they start to call me,” Dryden said.

Is it working?

Because it flows into the bay, the Pocomoke River “ends up being especially important to meeting the Chesapeake Bay plan goals,” said Kathy Boomer, a Nature Conservancy watershed scientist on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The Chesapeake Bay plan is a multi-state effort to improve the bay’s water quality.

To monitor the success of the project, scientists installed testing sites along the river — two on still-channelized stretches of the Pocomoke, three along restored sites and one on a naturally connected section of the river, Boomer said.

“It is providing the benefits that we expect,” she said of the project, but “maybe not as much as we would hope.”

That’s because the floodplains act as mixing zones, she said.

Mixing zones are areas where effluent is discharged and diluted in the surrounding water.

By looking at the water chemistry, Boomer can determine whether water comes from rainwater, river water or local sources, and she’s finding that local discharge plays a big role in water quality of the Pocomoke.

“In these small channels feeding into the floodplain, the water quality varies widely,” Boomer said. “It’s very clear that some are affected more by human activities than others.

“It leads to a need to understand what these sources are,” she said.

Boomer is seeing evidence of more settling-out of sediment in areas with breaches — a key function of the swamplands.

She’s also seen a rise in the water table, which boosts wetlands’ function, she said.

Boomer hopes to collect data on the Pocomoke for another five to 10 years, helping establish baseline data for future restoration work.

“What we’re really trying to dig out is a better understanding of whether these restored wetlands can provide the greatest benefit in terms of water quality and in terms of habitat,” Boomer said. “It’s not like we can say these floodplain connections are a silver bullet to our water quality problem.”

But, she added, “When you consider the water quality benefits of the floodplain reconnections as well as the potential to enhance habitat — yes, it’ll lead us to doing more floodplain restorations.”

Restoring the river’s “release valves” could also help reduce flooding downstream in towns such as Snow Hill, which will be the subject of additional scientific study.

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‘A whole new world’

Since the Pocomoke River project began, Dryden has already seen shifts in the surrounding landscape.

“When you go back a year later and see the vegetation out there, you really can tell you’ve done something and you feel good about it,” he said. “It’s this whole new world.”

More than 60 species of migratory songbirds use the Pocomoke watershed as a stopover during their migrations and Dryden has seen a return of waterfowl in the wetlands.

Workers have planted native cypress trees into the new breaches, too, he said.

The habitat could provide a boost to tourism in Worcester and Wicomico counties, where the Pocomoke River forms the backdrop for hiking, boating, fishing, camping, birding and paddling.

The Nature Conservancy and its partners plan to install 16 more breaches this year and, eventually, restore the 18-mile stretch of channelized river, Dryden said.

There is no time frame for finishing the project, he added.

Meanwhile, more local landowners are joining the efforts to restore the swamp.

“It’s rewarding for them to see that they’re part of this creation,” Dryden said.

To learn more about the Pocomoke River floodplain project, visit https://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/maryland_dc/blog/pocomoke-flooding-the-swamp.xml. 

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