Tag: Delaware River Basin

by Todd Pover, Senior Wildlife Biologist

Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey is pleased to announce that it was recently awarded two grants by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation through its Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund (DWCF). The multi-year grants are Assessing American Oystercatchers to Inform Management and Restoration Strategies and Rare Turtle Research and Monitoring in the Southern Delaware River Basin.

The new American oystercatcher grant is a continuation of a similar current DWCF grant, the added years will allow for more comprehensive research and monitoring of oystercatchers on New Jersey’s Delaware Bayshore to help us determine long-term breeding trends. We will also continue to assess oystercatcher habitat use, including the development of Best Management Practices to facilitate habitat restoration on the Bayshore. New research under the expanded funding includes foraging and chick provisioning studies, as well as more banding and use of GPS transmitters to enhance tracking of oystercatcher movements within the Bayshore and beyond.

The turtle grant will allow for trapping, and telemetry surveys for bog and spotted turtles to be conducted at understudied and historically occupied New Jersey focal sites in the southern Delaware River basin. This project aims to provide the state with updated population demographics and landscape data for the region, in particular to direct and expedite future restoration and management activities. Restoration can then proceed at the highest priority sites to ensure inhabited wetlands retain all the landscape features necessary to sustain rare turtle populations.

The DWCF, created in 2018, is funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to achieve the goals of the Delaware River Basin Conservation Act. The Act guides and supports federal, state, regional, and local partners to collaboratively identify, prioritize, and implement habitat restoration and conservation activities within the watershed.

The Potential Impact to our Natural Resources

by Stephanie Egger, Wildlife Biologist

Many residents of New Jersey may have heard about hydraulic fracturing of the Marcellus Shale and the potential ecological  impacts to the Delaware River Basin. The following provides an overview of the process of hydraulic fracturing and impacts to our natural resources in New Jersey.

The Mar­cel­lus Shale is sed­i­men­tary rock buried thou­sands of feet under the ground.  It extends from upstate New York south through Penn­syl­va­nia and to West Vir­ginia and west to parts of Ohio.  The nat­ural gas in the shale is trapped in tiny spaces and fis­sures within the rock.

Hydraulic fracturing or fracking uses high-pressure pumps to inject a mix of water, sand, and chemicals into drilled wells that will fracture the shale rock to open cracks and release natural gas (Figure 1).  A well can be repeatedly fracked and each gas field incorporates many wells.  The process takes an enormous amount of water using an average of 4.5 million gallons of water to frack a well and a well can potentially be fracked up to 18 times.  Many chemicals are used in this process, some of which are known to be toxic and known carcinogens (e.g. benzene, glycol ethers).  Some chemicals are unknown because they are still considered proprietary by the industry.  Many of the chemicals cannot biodegrade so if released into the air or water they are there to stay. Continue reading “Fracking in the Delaware River Basin”