The attached news story popped up in my daily Adirondack Almanack email, and I thought I would pass it on.
To summarize: About 150 feet of shoreline was eroding into Lake George, largely due to the clay soils. This resulted in turbidity, which is a term for hazy water caused by suspended particles. The Lake George Association and the Friend's Point Homeowners' Association joined forces to prevent further shoreline erosion. People often repair shorelines using structural approaches such as concrete walls, but such approaches are expensive and environmentally harmful. Therefore, the LGA and the Friend's Point Homeowner's Association decided instead to use vegetation to stabilize the shoreline. The article refers to this technique as bioengineering. Since waves crash along the shoreline, they lined the new shoreline with a stormwater fabric called "Grow Sox" before planting native vegetation.
I am not sure how widely this method is used, but I am impressed by how involved and yet noninvasive it is.
http://blog.hulettsonlakegeorge.com/index.php/archives/3142?utm_source=Adirondack+Explorer+%26+Adirondack+Almanack&utm_campaign=bbbc688ba1-Adirondack_Almanack_RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b49eb0d11b-bbbc688ba1-47316029
This is really interesting to see on a small scale; this has been shown to work with coastal areas as buffers from storms. I am from New Jersey and when people started building houses on the shore, they took up all the poison ivy because their kids were getting horrible rashes from it. However, they didn't realize that the ivy roots were the only thing holding together the sand dunes which acted very effectively as a natural buffer from storms.
ReplyDeleteThere have been efforts in recent decades to regrow vegetation on parts of beaches, but that is very difficult when the roots were the only thing holding it all together
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