Joni Mitchell lamented in her 1970 environmental song “Big Yellow Taxi” that “they paved over paradise and put a parking lot in it.” The Marine Discovery Center in New Smyrna Beach tries to do just the opposite.
The center’s project, called “Promoting Paradise and Removing a Parking Lot,” aims to remove 12,000 square feet of paved surfaces on the center’s campus and replace them with living shorelines and coastal habitats.
According to the center, the project will restore coastal wetland habitat where concrete and asphalt lay for decades and serve as an extension of the living shoreline demonstration area.
The bulk of the work involves creating over 300 feet of living shoreline along the southwestern portion of the center’s campus, which also includes the largest parking lot.
“We have this steep slope of concrete material that was used to hold the sediment in place,” Tess Sailor-Tynes, the center’s scientific conservation coordinator, said in an interview. “We’ve excavated all that, we’ve maintained the mangroves that have grown through the (impermeable) material, and we want to plant about 1,000 different plants, maybe a few more, in that area.”
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Some of the plant species – all of which are native to the area and serve specific purposes related to their proximity to the water and elevation along the shoreline – include grasses, berries, palmettos, live oaks, gumbo limbo trees, and more.
“All the species of plants that we work with that are native to those areas will flourish and create great habitat and a rewilding of that area,” Sailor-Tynes said.
To be an example to the community
The work began Friday morning, with center volunteers helping to place about 600 plants, Sailor-Tynes said.
The center is counting on the help of more volunteers in the coming weeks to continue work on the project.
Some of the funding for the project, which has a price tag of nearly $500,000, came from the Disney Conservation Fund, “which has awarded money to nonprofits for water conservation efforts since 2014,” the center said.
According to Sailor-Tynes, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission and the St. Johns River Water Management District have also provided funding and are preparing for the project.
Local landscaping companies Lindley’s Nursery and Justin Kennedy Landscapes are also helping by providing some of the plant material for the project.
“A lot of moving parts, a lot of big goals, but it’s going to be a really cool project,” Sailor-Tynes said.
Another aim of the project is to incorporate the new coastline into the central ‘living coastline demonstration area’.
“This is an area that we first started establishing in the 5-acre salt marsh that we restored a decade ago,” she added. “And this living shoreline demonstration area is an example of what we restoration practitioners do, but also what homeowners and residents can do to better rewild their properties, while also adding ecological and economic benefits.”
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Living shorelines and their grasses, mangroves, oysters and other plant species help protect riverbank areas “from rising waters or natural disasters like hurricanes,” Sailor-Tynes explains.
“There’s a lot going on,” she added. “We want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to bring nature back.”
The Marine Discovery Center is located at 520 Barracuda Blvd. in New Smyrna Beach and is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
This article originally appeared in The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Marine Discovery Center New Project to Create 300 Feet of Living Shoreline
