Workers in excavators dig up fill as they regrade the land in the Great Meadows Marsh restoration project in Stratford. Decades ago, when the are was being developed, fill was dujmped into the marsh. Now the area is undergoing a large scale restoration to combat sea level rise. Ryan Caron King / Connecticut Public
Plunked on a southern New England shoreline is an understated and misunderstood ecosystem: Great Meadows Marsh in Stratford. For decades, that site was treated as an ugly nuisance, but it’s the focus of a $4 million restoration project aiming to make the coast more resilient to climate change.
Rick Potvin, manager of the Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge in Stratford, said he understands that salt marshes often don’t look like much.
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“When you take a look at the marsh, I think people see: Well, you know, that’s someone’s lawn that hasn’t been kept up,” Potvin said. “But what [they] don’t understand is all of the intricacies within the marsh.”
Despite their looks, Potvin said, salt marshes are biological powerhouses. They provide unique habitat for wildlife and are a key barrier against climate change.
“Let’s think about if I own a house over here. And the hurricane comes. And the hurricane brings all the storm surge, and it comes rushing in,” Potvin said. “Well, where’s that water going to go here? It’s gonna hit this marsh, the marsh is going to absorb the power, dissipate the water, and I don’t have water in my basement. That makes me happy.”
But for decades, Jim Turek, a restoration ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Great Meadows Marsh was considered to be pretty useless.
“A lot of the marsh and the swamp in this area was considered a nuisance. Mosquito-producing. You couldn’t use it for agriculture. You couldn’t build a home on it,” Turek said.
So developers basically treated salt marshes as coastal dumps. Here at Great Meadows, Turek said, “They took dredged sediments from Bridgeport Harbor. It was right after World War II, and this is where they deposited it.”
Turek bent down and picked up some of that sediment.
“This used to be at the bottom of Bridgeport Harbor. And it’s clean. It’s not contaminated. It’s actually very good soil,” he said.
An Amazon fulfillment center sits on the edge of the Great Meadows Marsh, where many rare and vulnerable bird species take refuge. The marsh, which is part of the Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge, is undergoing a restoration project to increase its resiliency and health. Marshes act as natural buffers during storms and often naturally move as sea level rises. But many marshes in Connecticut have been trapped in by development along the coastline. Ryan Caron King / Connecticut PublicRestoring tidal flow
The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection estimates over one-third of the state’s tidal wetlands have been lost due to dredging, drainage or fill operations.
Workers in excavators dig up fill as they regrade the land in the Great Meadows Marsh restoration project in Stratford. Decades ago, when the are was being developed, fill was dujmped into the marsh. Now the area is undergoing a large scale restoration to combat sea level rise. Ryan Caron King / Connecticut Public 
An Amazon fulfillment center sits on the edge of the Great Meadows Marsh, where many rare and vulnerable bird species take refuge. The marsh, which is part of the Stewart B. McKinney National Wildlife Refuge, is undergoing a restoration project to increase its resiliency and health. Marshes act as natural buffers during storms and often naturally move as sea level rises. But many marshes in Connecticut have been trapped in by development along the coastline. Ryan Caron King / Connecticut PublicRestoring tidal flow