Time and Tide

Show notes:

Beneath the thin blue line of the ocean’s surface lies an underwater meadow of grass. In Great Bay and coastal New Hampshire, these flowing fields of green are nurseries for young fish, an anchor for sediments, and a sign that our ecosystems are healthy. However, these life-supporting aquatic pastures face new threats. Here, in the constantly moving waters where rivers meet the sea, scientists, students, and communities are working together to bring back one of New Hampshire’s most vital—but also fragile—coastal habitats: eelgrass.

These underwater meadows once stretched far and wide across the bay, but recently, storms, changing water temperatures, and pollution are having an impact on our local eelgrass species, Zostera marina.

A new restoration project—backed by local towns, oyster farmers, and researchers at the University of New Hampshire—is testing innovative ways to help these plants return and thrive. From transplanting shoots to exploring seed-based restoration, the work happening here could shape the future of eelgrass recovery across the country.

Act 1: What’s slender like an eel, and requires clear, cold water to thrive? Explore eelgrass 101 with Trevor Mattera, Habitat Program Manager with the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership (PREP), as he takes us through the past, present, and future of Zostera marina in New Hampshire waters.

Act 2: Strap on your snorkel and float through an eelgrass meadow with Matthew Allen, New Hampshire Sea Grant’s Undergraduate Doyle Fellow, who spent this past summer spending as much time as humanly possible in a wetsuit, assisting Trevor and the team at PREP with their Great Bay Estuary Oyster & Eelgrass Restoration project. Experience a day in the life working to restore eelgrass and hear a harrowing story about mating horseshoe crabs.

Act 3: You can’t have thriving eelgrass without clean water. Gretchen Young, the Deputy Director of Technical Services at the City of Rochester, New Hampshire, explains how this restoration project came to be funded, and why municipalities are joining forces to address nitrogen pollution in Great Bay.

Guest Speakers:

Trevor Mattera, Ph.D., Coastal Ecosystems Extension Specialist, New Hampshire Sea Grant

Matthew Allen, Undergraduate Doyle Fellow, New Hampshire Sea Grant

Gretchen Young, Deputy Director of Technical Services, City of Rochester, New Hampshire

Hosted by: Brian Yurasits, Science Communication Specialist, New Hampshire Sea Grant

Co-Hosted by: Erik Chapman, Director, New Hampshire Sea Grant

Produced by: Brian Yurasits

Creators and Guests

Host

Brian Yurasits

Science Communication Specialist, New Hampshire Sea Grant.

Host

Erik Chapman

Director - N.H. Sea Grant

Guest

Gretchen Young

Deputy Director of Technical Services, City of Rochester, New Hampshire

Guest

Matthew Allen

Undergraduate Doyle Fellow, New Hampshire Sea Grant

Guest

Trevor Mattera

Ph.D., Coastal Ecosystems Extension Specialist, New Hampshire Sea Grant

What is Time and Tide?

Time and Tide is a New Hampshire Sea Grant podcast for anyone who is connected to the Granite State’s waterways and wants to learn more about the latest science impacting both yourself, and the animals that live here. Hosts Erik Chapman and Brian Yurasits break down complex topics from seafood to coastal resilience by bringing on guests from both the research world, and local industries to share their expertise and perspectives.

Matthew Allen: [00:00:00] So Eelgrass, I like to think of as like a giant field, like when you're swimming through it with a snorkel and a mask, it almost feels like you're running through like a giant farm field on land, um, with a whole bunch of small little critters and everything. Like if you're just sitting down there in the eelgrass and you're looking around, you can see a whole bunch of like these small little guppy fish and shrimp and all that stuff swimming through there, and it kind of just flows along.

Brian Yurasits: Beneath the thin blue line of the ocean surface lies an underwater meadow of grasses. In Great Bay and coastal New Hampshire, these flowing fields of green are nurseries for young fish, a sink for carbon, an anchor for sediments, and a sign that our ecosystems are healthy. However, a quiet transformation is currently [00:01:00] underway. Here in the constantly moving waters where rivers meet the sea scientists, students, and communities are working together to bring back one of New Hampshire's most vital, but also fragile coastal habitats: eelgrass. These underwater meadows once stretched far and wide across the bay, but recently storms changing water temperatures and pollution are having an impact on our local eelgrass species, Zostera marina. A new restoration project backed by local towns, oyster farmers, and researchers at the University of New Hampshire is testing innovative ways to help these plants return and thrive. From transplanting shoots to exploring seed based restoration, the work happening here could shape the future of eelgrass recovery across the country. I'm your host, Brian Yurasits, and welcome to Time and Tide. A New Hampshire Sea Grant podcast where we explore the science, stories and people behind our changing coastlines. In this episode of Time and Tide, my co-host [00:02:00] Erik Chapman, and I will prepare our snorkels and take a look beneath the surface with the team behind the Great Bay Estuary, Oyster and Eelgrass Restoration Project to learn how collaboration, science, and a bit of optimism are helping restore life to these underwater meadows.

First, we'll hear from Trevor Mattera, Habitat Program Manager with the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership, who gives us a lesson on Eelgrass 101 and plants seeds of hope for the future of restoration work in Great Bay. Then, we'll head out on the water with Matthew Allen, a New Hampshire Sea Grant Doyle Fellow who would much prefer to spend his time wading through the shallows than wading through emails.

Matt shows us what restoration looks like from the field and shares stories of his wild encounters. And finally, we'll speak with Gretchen Young, Deputy Director of Technical Services at the City of Rochester, New Hampshire, representing the Municipal Alliance for Adaptive Management, about how local communities are investing in [00:03:00] clean water and a healthier bay.

Float along with us above the eelgrass meadow.

Trevor Mattera: So, I'm Trevor Mattera. I'm the Habitat and Water Quality Manager with the Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership, better known as PREP. I usually look at a lot of academics that are really focused on like their one little species of snail or their one little species of bird, and I'm like, nah, that can't be me.

But have you heard about this one really cool species of grass that lives underwater?

Erik Chapman: It happened to you.

Trevor Mattera: It happened to me. Eelgrass is a really cool species of vegetation. It creates the basis of our underwater ecosystem in Great Bay, in these real estuarine environments. Estuaries, where your fresh water is meeting with your salt water, it's a hard place to live, but it's a great place to live. It's some of the most interesting species either [00:04:00] pass through it at some point in their life or they use it continually. You get out there and you're like, this is a really neat place and eelgrass really builds your foundation there.

It's like your one species of vegetation that says, I am going to hold this thing up on my shoulders. And it's not always doing so hot, right? So we as an organization have to come in and, and see how it's doing and see ways that we can possibly come in and intervene and help it out.

Brian Yurasits: This is a great transition into my first hard-hitting question for you. What is Eelgrass? Can you describe what it looks like, the scientific name of the species that we have here? Yeah, give us a little a little foundation of knowledge to start things up with.

Trevor Mattera: Eelgrass, also known as Zostera marina, is one of our two species of seagrass here in New Hampshire.

The other being widgeon grass or Ruppia maritima. Ruppia, widgeon grass likes it a little more fresh. It's more like an underwater fresh plant that will sort of get close to the estuary. Whereas if [00:05:00] you're out in a salt water and you know it's salt like Great Bay or out along the coast and you're underwater and you see these long, you know, foot, two foot, sometimes even three foot slender blades of bright green grass that just wave in the waves, much like little green eels, you know you're looking at eelgrass. It's not a seaweed, it's a flowering, rooted plant. So it does need to be rooted down to the sediment. It creates seeds, it's spreads, uh, along a rhizome, which is like a thick underground stem.

Erik Chapman: Hooked is the word I think that describes exactly what you've brought us through there with your relationship to eelgrass and then what it means to you in sort of connecting to the bigger picture.

Brian Yurasits: And Trevor, what's the correct word for, is it a meadow of eelgrass?

Trevor Mattera: Yeah absolutely, meadow, bed, we use bed. You almost think of it as like if you're out on dry land and you just think of a meadow of like this one type of grass that just goes off [00:06:00] into the horizon, like that's what it builds. It builds like this one monoculture of thick, dense, tall, lush grass that just sort of cruises across the sand.

Brian Yurasits: I want to get into the story of how eelgrass came here in New Hampshire, maybe the natural history of eelgrass. I know this is an interesting story. The species that we have here in New Hampshire, is it different or is it the same as species found elsewhere across the United States?

Trevor Mattera: Globally, there are over 70 species of seagrass.

Zostera, so eelgrass specifically originated probably over in the Pacific. It was thought to have originated near Japan, worked its way across the Pacific Ocean and then started moving north. We're talking a story that's hundreds of thousands of years ago, but basically made its way over the pole, you know, through the Bering Strait and back down on the other side into the Atlantic. From our side of the Atlantic, spread across the Atlantic over to Europe's side. Genetic diversity of the species, you can see a lot more genetic [00:07:00] diversity generally over in the Pacific and Southern populations. So you start seeing those bottlenecks of genetic spread probably caused by different ice ages through the years.

That can start causing issues because when you have less genetic diversity, you start losing resilience in a population.

Brian Yurasits: What are the ideal conditions for Zostera to thrive in New Hampshire or across its entire range?

Trevor Mattera: So Zostera is a temperate species. It's a rooted photosynthesizing plant, so it needs sunlight.

In a nutshell, eelgrass, Zostera likes cool, clear water. The cooler the better and the clearer the better. It generally gets stressed out and can start dying back around 25 degrees Celsius. That's sort of the number in the literature that people generally quote. And because of that, it definitely has a southern maximum extent.

Here in New Hampshire, we're pretty far from that extent, but some of our water bodies can certainly start warming up when they're shallower.

Brian Yurasits: What's the extent that you'll see Zostera [00:08:00] in New Hampshire waters?

Trevor Mattera: It needs clear water, and because of that, there's also an extent as to how deep it can get because sunlight just won't penetrate too deep. So it really sticks around the coastlines.

Our coastal grass is doing great because our coast really provides that cool, clear water that it really thrives in. Great Bay also houses the most eelgrass we have in New Hampshire because of just how much area it has to spread out. But as I'm sure we'll get into, there's challenges in Great Bay because it's not as coastally fed, and because of that we see less clear, less cool waters.

Erik Chapman: So, can you describe what is the status of eelgrass in New Hampshire and a little bit more?

Trevor Mattera: Back in the eighties, we had somewhere around 3000 acres total. As we start getting into the nineties, there was a pretty significant drop-off. We sort of leveled out around the 2000, 2,500 acres. That's still a significant drop, 40% or so. And it [00:09:00] essentially stayed there with a little up and down for quite a few years. As of recently because of large precipitation events that have been happening, 2023 was the most recent but even this year 2025 seems to have been brought a lot of rain during the growing season, I think we've seen another large decrease in acreage specifically to Great Bay too.

Again, it doesn't happen to affect the coastal beds as much.

Brian Yurasits: Eelgrass is dropping for various reasons. How long have restoration efforts been happening in Great Bay?

Trevor Mattera: Yeah, it certainly predates my time with PREP. Back in the nineties, professor at UNH Fred Short really was the father of Eelgrass here in this region.

His team did a lot of restoration, multiple hectares throughout the estuary using different techniques that all focused around adult transplants. There's multiple ways of restoring eelgrass. The most common and the most historically used here in this region is essentially just a technique of transplanting.

So you [00:10:00] go out to healthy donor beds, you say, this bed here looks gorgeous, really healthy plants they're doing well, we can borrow a little here. So you go in and you essentially take those plants with, you know, enough root and rhizome mass and you transplant it just like you would transplant a plant in your garden.

The trick and generally the different techniques are essentially just building off that. It's figuring out ways you can hold the plant down while it establishes itself and hopefully spread to produce a new bed in the area you brought it to.

Erik Chapman: Can you talk about what are the other efforts that communities and others are taking to try to ensure that those plants have the best opportunity to thrive?

Trevor Mattera: Of course you can just try to bring in plants and spread those plants. The other way is you can take a step back and you say what's causing problems for the plants in the first place? And really try to reduce stressors that you might see causing your decline of eelgrass. One of the bigger ones, especially in our area, is the reduction of pollutants, [00:11:00] specifically nitrogen. Nitrogen, it's plant food. It feeds plants. So you'd think that the more nitrogen the better because hey, the plants are doing great. That doesn't really work out in practice because as a rooted plant, eelgrass can get a lot of its nitrogen from the sediments, from the soil. It doesn't need a tremendous amount of nitrogen.

On the other hand, there's a lot of free-flowing photosynthetic critters out there like your algaes, your macroalgaes, your planktons, which will take all that extra nitrogen that you've been pumping into your system and start blocking out and outcompeting your eelgrass, which really shades it out.

One thing that our communities have been doing and a stellar job over the last few years has really put investments into infrastructure such as their wastewater treatment plants, to start bringing their nitrogen loads and our nitrogen loads really, down, in hopes of increasing the health in the bay.

Brian Yurasits: And in terms of those, the very simple two things that eelgrass needs, clear water and cold water, that would impact that clear water part.

Trevor Mattera: Absolutely. Sunlight, [00:12:00] sunlight, sunlight.

Brian Yurasits: You mentioned that this extreme rainfall really impacted the natural eelgrass beds as a whole in Great Bay. Is there something that's flowing with that water that is impacting the eelgrass? Is it just all of that excess fresh water that impacts the eelgrass? What exactly is at play there?

Trevor Mattera: It's a factor of what the water is bringing with it. In this case, when you get a lot of storms and a lot of precipitation, you see a lot of this storm water runoff and that runoff really brings with it everything that's been on the land within our watershed.

So, anywhere within the 52 communities that we work in, the Piscataqua region, if it's raining, it's bringing all of that nitrogen, that pollution, that sediment, that garbage in some cases down into the waters. It'll find its way to the closest water body, the closest river, and run right out into our estuary.

Brian Yurasits: And I want to get back to the structure of how you physically transplant these healthy stocks of eelgrass.

How do you ensure that these, you know, shoots of eelgrass are going to stay [00:13:00] put and have the time and space to set their roots before drifting away in the current that happens in Great Bay, which can be very intense. So how do you go about engineering that?

Trevor Mattera: There are tons of really cool engineering solutions to that problem. Around our area I've really focused in on two. One being something called horizontal rhizome method. You just take a couple of shoots, like two or three, you cross the rhizome, which again looks like an underground stem, and you take a garden staple like you would in your garden, and you just staple that down to the sediment, and you do that thousands of times.

The other that we use here is called a TERF, stands for transplanting eelgrass remotely with frames. It's generally about a two-foot by two-foot mesh box. It's a frame that has some bricks on it, and what you do is you essentially lightly tie eelgrass shoots to the bottom of this frame and you stick the [00:14:00] frame down on the sediment floor, so it provides a little bit of weight to keep the grass down so that it will grow in the sediment where you put it. And then a couple weeks later, once the grass is established, you come back and you very carefully remove the frame and take it away.

Brian Yurasits: How much space do these restoration sites take up?

Trevor Mattera: It really depends on the project. When I started back in 2021, we were doing just small pilots around the estuary. You know, a couple of hundred square feet. Testing locations, testing different donor beds. This larger project we did a half an acre of restoration spread over three different sites.

Erik Chapman: Yeah, can you talk a little bit more about that project? The title of that project actually had the word oyster in it, so maybe you can help me understand when I hear about eelgrass restoration I guess increasingly I'm just hearing oysters and eelgrass together, so maybe you can help us understand that relationship and why it's important.

Trevor Mattera: I will say that relationship is really cool and probably something that's a little bit more recent as well. I think [00:15:00] restoration used to be very siloed.

That's just not how our ecosystem works. These two habitats are both extremely critical and they share the same kind of land area under the water that people may not see all the time. For this project the funders, the Municipal Alliance for Adaptive Management, wisely realized that they wanted to be able to restore both of these very critical habitats.

So they came to PREP and UNH partners and said, how much oysters and eelgrass can we restore given one pot of money? So, not only did this project include two acres of oyster restoration, but we also took adult oysters that were purchased from aquaculture farmers here in the estuary and used those oysters among our eelgrass plantings to try to gain some of those co-benefits that those species can provide to each other.

Brian Yurasits: And what are some of those co-benefits?

Trevor Mattera: The research going into the relationship is [00:16:00] pretty new. But essentially an adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day, pulling a lot of sediment out of the water. Eelgrass also does its own work, filtering the water by knocking those sediments outta the water, so they work in tandem, again clearing the water. And clearer water not only helps eelgrass, but it can also help oysters too, because those reefs don't get covered in over-sedimentation or anything like that. A way that eelgrass can help oysters, and again this is something that is being studied, is because it's a photosynthesizing plant it can actually buffer against ocean acidification, which can be an issue for oysters going forward in shell creation.

Erik Chapman: Yeah, so I guess the more you sort of understand the ecosystem relationships, you understand how they all work together to support each other. Can you talk a little bit about the funding for that project and how communities are involved in this work?

Trevor Mattera: The funder for this project was the Municipal Alliance for Adaptive Management, which is a collaboration of municipalities around the Great Bay Estuary [00:17:00] that are all come together and are helping each other figure out ways that they can both manage for the Great Bay Total Nitrogen Permit, but also working on ways they can adaptively manage for nitrogen going into the bay.

Erik Chapman: I guess I'm just really heartened by what you're describing, which is the communities working with both oyster and eelgrass restoration, and a better established relationship between our understanding of the ecosystem, and our connection from a community standpoint in restoring the health of that ecosystem.

Trevor Mattera: I think the collaboration has been absolutely outstanding and we find ourself in this wonderful place now where some of our greatest champions have these positions within municipal leadership, municipal staff, that they can really come to the table and say this is important. We can work with all of our restoration partners within this watershed, as well as bringing in, again that aquaculture arm of our system. That really started under the [00:18:00] leadership of the Nature Conservancy back during COVID, where they would start purchasing larger oysters that weren't finding their ways to markets for restoration purposes. And we have built and fostered those relationships where now they are just a functional arm of the restoration. Not only are we supporting them through purchasing the oysters, but they're supporting our work by providing these large adult oysters that can really supercharge these projects.

Erik Chapman: What you're also restoring, I think, is the place of university research as a player that's connecting the municipalities with improving water quality.

Do you ever get the sense that you're restoring more than just eelgrass?

Trevor Mattera: Yes. It feels really good.

Brian Yurasits: So Trevor, what were the results of this project? How did the restoration go in regards to physically transplanting healthy eelgrass to this struggling Great Bay?

Trevor Mattera: It didn't go great. 2023, when we started the project, we had record breaking rains throughout the growing season.

Not only did that absolutely do a number on our plantings, [00:19:00] it did an absolute number on the natural population within Great Bay as well. When we went out there in 2023, I mean, the water was just brown the entire season and, and there was this tremendous dieback because of it.

When it came down to it, we did plant a half an acre of grass, which was great. On the other hand, because of the difficulties we were seeing and just because of how our system is changing in real time, we realized the amount of work that is needed to do that kind of scale project is just tremendous. And because of that, to be able to even think about scaling up further than that, we really needed a new way to come at this problem. Which pushed us in the direction of seed-based restoration.

Brian Yurasits: How did you find this idea of seeds as your hope for the future of restoration and scaling up restoration in this area?

Trevor Mattera: The seeding idea has really come about all over the country, I would say. We're seeing this idea thought about as a very viable [00:20:00] option from partners in states not only up and down the Atlantic coast, but over on the Pacific as well. It's really modeled after successes they're seeing down in the Mid-Atlantic and the Virginia area. Eelgrass will not only spread via rhizome, you know, through just vegetative growth, but it will also produce flowers and seeds as it goes. And it wants to get rid of its flowers and seeds. Those shoots will generally mature and then break off, and those seeds will get dispersed. So dispersing seeds is something that the plant naturally wants to do, and because of that, we feel that there's a lot less impact on any given bed, especially if that bed doesn't look like it's using that reproductive capacity. If it feels like that bed is really supported by perennial vegetative growth that's just naturally spreading, it's probably not using the seedlings, and in fact those seedlings are probably getting smothered anyway.

So taking those seeds and moving them to an area that really doesn't have either the vegetation or the reproductive capacity through enough [00:21:00] flowering shoots to sustain itself, is something that can really sort of help one bed or one area without as much impact on your healthy beds that you really wanna maintain and conserve.

Erik Chapman: I mean, what you're describing is a continual struggle, but a continual learning environment. You've described some incredible successes and some really important change and evolution, but also just like we're still up against something pretty significant and we're gonna have to keep being persistent and continually learning and advancing our approaches.

Brian Yurasits: So how do you physically go about collecting these seeds for dispersal? Have you begun this transition of your methodology?

Trevor Mattera: We have, yeah. So we started last year in 2024. The very first thing you have to do for seed-based restoration is know where and when your seeds are going to be. So unlike adult transplant, where you just can sort of swim out and you say, oh, there are healthy plants, I'll move those. Your seeding window is very tightly tied to when your beds want to flower and produce [00:22:00] mature seeds because those seeds will mature and then drop, and then you're out of luck. We had a survey last year surveying multiple sites around the estuary, again out on the coast and in Great Bay, to sort of hone-in on that window, which is generally only a couple of weeks as to when is the best time to start harvesting. As far as the harvesting actually goes, we're not pulling up whole shoots in this case. A reproductive shoot of an eelgrass actually looks very, very different from the vegetative growth of eelgrass. Vegetative growth is like this long, lush, slender blade that looks like an eel. A reproductive shoot is thin, it has a hard stem, it's kind of branchy and it comes out and it has little pods that have little flowers on it. So it's very quick to pick out, which is a reproductive shoot and which is a vegetative shoot. And you can go in and you just sort of break the reproductive shoot somewhere along the stem. And then we can bring them back to the Jackson Estuarine Lab out on Adam's Point where we have flow through water systems.

We can put them in tanks [00:23:00] and honestly, you can just sort of spin those shoots as they mature and the seeds drop out.

Brian Yurasits: I'm curious, how do you go about choosing where you're gonna drop all of these seeds in Great Bay?

Trevor Mattera: With help from Dr. Alyssa Novak from Boston University, who's created an updated site suitability model, we have an idea of where eelgrass would like to be. And then of course we have our old maps of where Eelgrass was and no longer is. So we can sort of take choice of sites from where we think there should be eelgrass. And then, yeah, we go out there and, and plant.

Brian Yurasits: What will Great Bay look like in the future if this works? What are your hopes for this restoration effort? In the context that the Gulf of Maine is changing?

Trevor Mattera: The word that really sticks in my mind is resilience. I would love to see resilient eelgrass beds. Enough beds that can create a healthy system, especially in Great Bay, that have the resilience that they can self sustain throughout the years, even as these stressors are thrown at them. [00:24:00] We are not seeing that right now. We are definitely lacking the resilience in our system, and because of that, our grass and other habitats are really struggling. But because of the work that we have all been putting in as a community, I am really hopeful that we can get to a place where we can bring back those populations, stop the loss, and find a way that they can get their footing so they can stay into the future.

Erik Chapman: Really cool to, uh, get a chance to talk to you and, uh, learn more about what you're doing and just, you know, thanks so much.

Trevor Mattera: Hey, thank you. This was a pleasure. Thanks guys.

Brian Yurasits: In part two of today's episode, we hear from New Hampshire Sea Grant's Undergraduate Doyle Fellow, Matthew Allen, who spent this past summer spending as much time as humanly possible floating above New Hampshire's eelgrass meadows, assisting Trevor and the team at PREP with their Great Bay Estuary oyster and eelgrass restoration.

Stay tuned to experience a day in the life with Matthew, hear a harrowing story about mating horseshoe crabs, and become [00:25:00] inspired to continue learning.

Matthew Allen: Yeah, so my name is Matthew Allen. I'm from East Kingston, New Hampshire. I'm at UNH right now for Environmental Conservation and Sustainability. I was the 2025 Sea Grant Doyle Fellow.

Brian Yurasits: I had the privilege to go out there with you a few times this summer and document and photograph the work that you were doing. You seemed right at home, working in the field, hopping into the boat, snorkeling. How would you describe a day in your life working in this project?

Matthew Allen: I actually enjoyed the swimming and snorkeling a lot more than I thought I would.

Yeah, that was probably the highlight of my day. Day in the life, I commuted from home this summer, I was like 30 minutes away from the lab. So I'd wake up and do a nice 30 minute drive through Newmarket, watch the sunrise, and yeah, then I would arrive at the lab. We'd get there at 6:00 AM. Those 6:00 AM days were rough, but they were beautiful. Crystal clear, super calm.

Depending on if it was a harvest or a plant day, we would go to the tank and we had some live eelgrass shoots in the tank, and we'd weave that into these [00:26:00] burlap mats and then take those mats, put 'em on a metal cage and put 'em in Great Bay.

Brian Yurasits: Picturing that with you, you know, you're out there at sunrise, the wind is usually pretty light. You have all the colors going from the sunrise off of Great Bay's water. It's pretty picturesque.

Matthew Allen: We had two sites at Fort Stark Beach and then one at Newcastle Beach. And then we would take those shoots and bring them back into Great Bay. So you'd harvest mature eelgrass shoots, perfectly healthy, very, very lush beds out there, and then bring 'em in and transplant them. Yeah.

Brian Yurasits: While you were sticking your head under the surface of the water, what kind of species did you see utilizing these habitats?

Matthew Allen: We saw oysters, scallops, yeah horseshoe crabs were in there too. Not necessarily on the coast, but in the bay, absolutely. Saw a lot of hermit crabs, like just little small fish and the lobster. Yeah, really it's a variety of different fish.

Brian Yurasits: And I feel like oftentimes too, you'll see seabirds like cormorants diving below, looking for some of those bait fish. How would you describe differences between the two sites, between Fort Stark and your work in Great Bay? What was the water like? What were some of the differences that you could see [00:27:00] from your time working on both those sites?

Matthew Allen: Yeah, so I'd say it's mostly differences you can't see. Great Bay waters are pretty turbid, which basically means that they're super cloudy, mostly due to sediment. So you can't really see a whole lot in the bay. Maybe a few inches visibility if you're snorkeling around, whereas the coast is crystal clear for feet.

We had some pretty deep harvest days where it was like six, seven feet of water and you could, you could see straight to the bottom.

Brian Yurasits: So while you're collecting your samples, were you floating on top of these beds? Were you kind of trying to wade around them?

Matthew Allen: Yeah, so it really depended on the tide. There's variations in how high the tide comes up on low tide and high tide.

If you had a pretty low tide, you could just wade out there and start picking stuff. But if you had one of those higher low tides, yeah, you were just gliding along the top of the water, maybe doing some, I guess it's not really free diving you're going down a few feet. Diving down and grabbing the root structure of the plants and pulling 'em out, making sure that they can be transplanted.

Most of the time we were just gliding around. 'cause you don't really want to disturb the bottom. And risk ripping out more plants.

Brian Yurasits: How were they then transplanted to the Jackson Estuarine [00:28:00] Lab?

Matthew Allen: We would collect the plants in those bags. They're just small little mesh bags with metal handles. It's very stressful to transplant those plants.

And then once we took them outta the water, we would fill a cooler up straight from the ocean and then just put the plants in the bags in that cooler. I think it's a 40 minute drive from Fort Stark to Jackson Lab. Yeah, so there's multiple tanks at the lab. We only used one. I mean, you can only keep the plants for like 48 hours.

Pretty much you take this burlap mat, it's probably three feet by three feet, and you'll do 27 plants per mat. So it's a three by three grid, and you'll take the plants and you'll just weave them through the burlap. The burlap has holes so that the roots are on one side and the plant's on the other, and it kind of keeps the plant locked into the burlap mat.

And then once you have that mat, you'll put it in a cooler, and when we go out on the boat, we'll take like a lobster trap, like a metal cage, and you'll just lay the burlap over that cage. The roots are on one side and the plant leaves are on the other. You put the cage down so that the roots are facing into the mud.

From there, you'll take some garden staples and just staple the burlap mat down, which helps keep it all secure. Hopefully the plants will [00:29:00] take, and then we use burlap because it dissolves in water. Two weeks later, we'll take the cage up and when we take the cage up, we leave the burlap. And the burlap will slowly dissolve and the plants will stay.

Brian Yurasits: What are some of the skills that you were able to take away from that experience?

Matthew Allen: One of the things that I take the most out of from this internship is probably the networking. I got to meet a lot of cool people, including you, Brian, who are doing a lot of really interesting and cool things, in addition to being able to just swim around in a wetsuit and help bring a vital ecosystem back.

Brian Yurasits: How has working below the surface of Great Bay changed your own perspective of this place?

Matthew Allen: If you're above the surface, you have no idea it's even down there, but here this thing is, it's a plant, but it's sponsoring a fish nursery that's helping the Gulf of Maine fisheries. It's helping oyster habitat. It's all these interconnected things that all go back to this one plant that's bringing about all of this life. If you ever look at a map of Great Bay, it almost looks like a pair of lungs.

Brian Yurasits: Yep.

Matthew Allen: It's like the lungs of the sea of New Hampshire.

Brian Yurasits: How would you compare your learning [00:30:00] experience to like sitting in a classroom?

Matthew Allen: Absolutely different. I learned a lot more this summer in terms of how things work in the real world versus like you were just sitting in a classroom learning about it. I mean, your hands on and I think that tactile, you're working, you're doing things, I think it really helps.

Brian Yurasits: I'm sure you're gonna be able to tell your family and friends about all the experiences you had this summer in a way that you can't explain what you learned in a textbook, right?

Matthew Allen: When you're doing research in the real world, things are constantly changing. We had to adapt to different weather conditions, different volunteer availability, if we could get a boat driver, all that stuff.

Brian Yurasits: Do you have any really memorable days on the water? Any stories that are gonna stick with you?

Matthew Allen: I remember one time I was putting our TERF down and I put it down and all of a sudden a thing wrapped around my leg. I was like, that's not a horseshoe crab. Uh, but it was two horseshoe crabs mating.

Yep, right around my leg. That was definitely an interesting experience though. And you also, you can't see anything 'cause the water's so cloudy. It was a little freaky 'cause not really anything in Great Bay that's supposed to wrap around your leg like that.

Then we went out to go harvest [00:31:00] on the coast. When we got out there, it was pouring rain, probably like 50 degrees in the summer. Uh, it was a rough day to be out there and we get out there and I'm pretty sure the water was up to my chin at our harvest site and we have to go pick 'em up from the roots.

So we were swimming out there, diving down, picking 'em up for like an hour. And by the time we got out, our hands and fingers and head were frozen. It was just one of those days where you have to just accept it and enjoy the experience.

Brian Yurasits: The best memories, looking back, they're not always like the most idyllic conditions. Sometimes it's those really rough, cold, rainy days that are gonna stick in your brain a little bit longer than the perfect day out on the water.

Matthew Allen: And yeah, I also got to work with Trevor Mattera on some of his phenology work. Just the two of us going out, taking some core samples of some of the sediment, and then working with, they're called HOBOs, so they measure light and salinity. I got to help him put some of those out. That was another cool memory.

Brian Yurasits: In a way, you're acting like a sponge just being around other grad students, researchers.

Matthew Allen: Just the opportunity to work around all of [00:32:00] these people that have been working on this for decades.

Yeah, it was very cool. Just being around the grad students and learning more about grad school, 'cause I'm, I'm planning on doing grad school.

Brian Yurasits: One observation that I had from getting to go out there with you, it's tougher than the way you described it. I will say, like, I was right there with you and one of the things that I noticed is that you took full advantage of this fellowship. You were super stoked to be out there every morning, you had this energy at like 6:00 AM, all smiles, you were ready to get into the water. Like this is exactly where I want to be.

Matthew Allen: So when I started this internship, I really wanted to take advantage and just put my best foot forward every day.

Be happy, be enjoying what I'm doing. And this job made it pretty easy to do that.

Brian Yurasits: But yeah, Matt, thanks for joining Time and Tide. It was a pleasure having you on and hearing your perspective of what it's like to work on eelgrass restoration in Great Bay.

Matthew Allen: Of course, thank you, Brian. Thank you PREP, Sea Grant, everyone who was able to gimme this amazing opportunity. I really appreciate it.

In our final act. We speak with [00:33:00] Gretchen Young, the Deputy Director of Technical Services at the City of Rochester, New Hampshire, to learn how this restoration project came to be funded and why municipalities are joining forces to address nitrogen pollution in Great Bay.

Gretchen explains the Municipal Alliance for Adaptive Management, otherwise known as MAAM, and we dive into the importance of using funds efficiently to advance clean water. Stay with us.

Gretchen Young: New Hampshire, I think is really interesting how each community, each municipality kind of runs itself on its own. And then there are some collaborations, there's the regional planning commissions and things like that, that are opportunities to work together, but a lot of each individual community does its own governing, makes policy decisions. But behind the scenes there's always been a level of collaboration going on. Municipal workers we're all facing a lot of the same [00:34:00] issues, and so when this Total Nitrogen General Permit came about, it's outlined something called Adaptive Management.

You learn, you adapt, and you manage. Through that, there was a lot of discussion about the need to understand the Great Bay more, the need for municipalities to sort of be rowing in the same direction and talking together, the need for some transparency. When the Total Nitrogen General Permit was being issued, the communities, especially the three largest regulated communities in the Great Bay Watershed, which include Rochester, Dover, and Portsmouth, recognize that there is a lot to be gained from this approach. There was an agreement between those three communities and the Conservation Law Foundation that said, at a minimum, the three communities would work together and would have several meetings, have a lot of transparency, have stakeholders at the table, part of the discussion. And so that happened the night before the permit went final. The next day we woke up, the settlement agreement [00:35:00] was in place, the permit was in place, and that's when we got started.

Since then, right now we've got 12 regulated communities in New Hampshire, and there's, as of very recently, three regulated communities in Maine. We created the Municipal Alliance for Adaptive Management, which is MAAM for short. So we've got eight of the regulated communities, and I'm just gonna run down the list.

So it's Rochester, Dover, Portsmouth, Exeter, Epping, Newington, and Milton. All are part of the Municipal Alliance for Adaptive Management in New Hampshire, and then recently South Berwick and Berwick have joined, and I believe Kittery is about to join. All of the stakeholders, so EPA comes to the table, DES comes to the table, now, DEP from Maine will be able to come. UNH Jackson Estuarine Laboratory, PREP has a huge presence at those meetings. The UNH Stormwater Center, all of these folks are really, really present, which is so cool.

Brian Yurasits: I want to just break [00:36:00] down some of these terms that you've been using. So what the total nitrogen permit is exactly. And what is the goal in setting that permit?

Gretchen Young: The way the EPA can regulate communities in New Hampshire is at point sources. So it's at a point where water discharges from a point to the receiving water bodies. A wastewater treatment plant discharges effluent into the receiving waters, and then we're talking about the Great Bay Watershed. So either directly into the Great Bay or into some of the rivers that feed the Great Bay.

There's research nationwide that really links nitrogen to causing health issues in estuaries like the Great Bay. So the EPA had not been regulating nitrogen. When you think of wastewater discharge and you think, oh, that's gross, I don't wanna swim in that water. You're thinking of it because of bacteria, because of things like that, that are in wastewater. But that's all been regulated for many decades, and these communities were hitting all of those targets. Now [00:37:00] we're talking about nitrogen. Now nitrogen is what you put on your grass to help it grow.

And so the EPA wanted to regulate nitrogen discharges from the wastewater treatment plant. However, the nitrogen sources are coming from fertilizers and are coming from organic debris that is breaking down. It's coming from septic systems, which there are many of in the region, and there's no easy way to regulate that.

There was just all of this debate about using resources in a way that is actually gonna be effective and impactful to the Great Bay. So then the total nitrogen general permit came out, it doesn't have any set targets, it doesn't have any set thresholds. It acknowledges that it's almost impossible to do that and monitor it. So it said, well, let's see, Adaptive Management.

Brian Yurasits: Just to distill some of that it, I've heard this analogy made in the past. That these permits are almost like a diet that is being implemented on the water body for a specific [00:38:00] pollutant, in this case, nitrogen. And it sounds like all of these municipalities are working together, since you're all connected to this watershed, to collaboratively limit that nitrogen input.

Gretchen Young: That's correct. It's this collaborative limit of nitrogen input. It's also looking to make sure that nitrogen is the thing causing the problems. It's also recognizing that nitrogen can often be a proxy of other pollutants.

Brian Yurasits: How does eelgrass play into this Adaptive Management Plan that you have?

Gretchen Young: Eelgrass has been this metric for the health of the Great Bay.

Brian Yurasits: As Trevor explained previously in our episode, that Eelgrass to thrive, they need clear cold water. It sounds like that's a metric of success that collectively these communities can see. How exactly did you become connected with the team over at PREP?

Gretchen Young: On this project in particular funding opportunities, especially five years ago, were coming in [00:39:00] waves. There were the congressionally directed spending initiatives, which folks from Congress, both the House and the Senate, we're able to sponsor projects and get them funded. And attractive projects were ones that had regional impact. And so our city manager, Katie Ambrose, saw an opportunity to take the work that the Municipal Alliance was doing and create a project that would be attractive for this type of spending initiative. Ultimately, Senator Shaheen did support this and was able to get a million dollars towards a research project for the health of the Great Bay. And the entity that really sponsored that was the Municipal Alliance for Adaptive Management. So it was a really great opportunity for everybody to work together and to really put those dollars to good use.

Brian Yurasits: You mentioned that your community that you're working in is inland. It's not directly connected to Great Bay, but it is in many ways. [00:40:00] How would you say that a healthy Great Bay ecosystem, how does that impact community members in your city?

Gretchen Young: It's a good question. That's hard because what messaging is resonating with the residents of Rochester?

Well, the message that resonates is when their tax rates are going up. We really have to be innovative, we have to be pragmatic, we have to be fiscally responsible, we also have to be stewards of the environment.

Brian Yurasits: Just personally, I moved up here from New York 10 years ago, and what I love about this area is that I know you mentioned you are 40 minutes from the coast, but you can in the same day, head to the coast or Great Bay and then get up to the mountains within an hour.

There's not many places in the United States that you can really do that. I do think people are coming here for those reasons.

Gretchen Young: You have a really good point. Also, one of the number one stated goals of the city council and has been [00:41:00] for a long time in Rochester is economic development is vibrancy of the community. And the people that are coming to this area are coming because of the proximity to the mountains and the water, not the reason necessarily people stay, you might stay because of family and all of those things, but you're coming like both of us, I moved here as well, because of these great resources. The Great Bay is absolutely linked to economic development and vitality in the community. And sometimes that is the most compelling message is that protecting the Great Bay is a form of economic development.

Brian Yurasits: Thank you so much, Gretchen, for taking the time and sharing your perspective of what it's like to work with this full collaboration of folks trying to achieve the same goal.

Beneath the tides of Great Bay this work continues. Each seed planted, each oyster reef restored, and each data point collected brings us one step closer to a clearer, healthier future for this estuary and for the communities connected to it.

[00:42:00] Eelgrass may be small, but it tells a big story about how science, collaboration and persistence can help heal a changing coast. And as this research grows, so does the network of people who care for these waters. From the students wading through mudflats, to the oyster farmers filtering the bay, to the local towns investing in clean water.

Time and Tide is produced by New Hampshire Sea Grant. Explore more of our episodes featuring the latest coastal science happening in the Granite State wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please consider leaving us a review. A huge thanks to our guests and a shout out to our partners at Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership, a National Estuary Program dedicated to restoring our region's waterways and estuaries.

We'll see you next month on Time and [00:43:00] Tide.

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