PLYMOUTH – It may just be the ultimate Earth Day project.
Volunteers this week pitched in to help plant some 500 trees and shrubs along a meandering stream bed that just two months ago was a man-made pond feeding old cranberry bogs.
Alissa Young, the property manager for Tidmarsh Wildlife Sanctuary in Manomet, acknowledges it looks a bit like a war zone today, with stumps and brush scattered in piles across the muddy landscape.
But in just a few weeks, the property at 60 Beaver Dam Road should already start looking better. And before long, visitors to the nature trail system will have trouble distinguishing it from the hundreds of adjacent acres where cranberry was also once king.
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UMass Amherst researchers celebrate years of restoration and a green exit strategy for farmers
December 15, 2020
Christine Hatch and Glorianna Davenport of the Living Observatory dig for a broken fiber optic cable in the newly constructed microtopography. Foothills Preserve, Plymouth, Mass. Photo courtesy: Ricard Torres-Mateluna/Hatch lab
Students Alyssa Chase, Jeron LeBlanc and Lyn Watts measure soil moisture along a transect above fiber optic cables at Foothills Preserve, Plymouth, Mass. Photo courtesy: UMass Amherst/Hatch lab
AMHERST, Mass. – As the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration’s Cranberry Bog Program released its report this month recounting a decade of restoring former cranberry bogs to wetlands, project research hydrogeologist Christine Hatch and her University of Massachusetts Amherst students are poised to continue collecting data and monitoring the “re-wilded” ecosystems’ progress for years to come.