AGENDA: 

• Monitoring Plan status - Living document. 
• Update on soils monitoring
• Christine Hatch  - update on hydrology and soil moisture monitoring
• Chris Niell - update on vegetation monitoring
• Brian Mayton - Update on LO Platform
• Adrian Wiegman - paper in BioSciences “Modeling attenuation of nitrogen loads delivered to coastal bays from ecological restoration of cultivated wetlands,

LO and Monitoring Plan as Living document:

• LO’s goal - to help create a repository of monitoring information for all cranberry farms and wetland restorations in the state - goal monitoring for 10 years post restoration.
• Monitoring effort begun by individuals to capture, learn from and share arc of change.  
• DER contracts FY22-FY26
• The Plan for 10 years of monitoring evolved over several years with support from DER and guidance from Alex Hackman, Jess Cohn, and Bill.  A requirement was that protocols for hydrology, soils, and vegetation need to be replicable and the entire monitoring effort needs to be affordable.
• Some protocols, especially those for hydrology and soil moisture need more definition; Christine will address some particulars today.
• We look forward to working with project managers on particulars for individual sites. 

At-a-glance chart of project status for 10 year monitoring effort

The monitoring plan specifies that we monitor all priority projects pre restoration, and years 1, 3, 5, 7,10 post restoration. We are using this chart, found in the FY25 final report, to determine monitoring schedule for different properties. It will be updated for FY26. Hopefully, we will transition this info into a database for all projects so it will be easy to look up when monitoring occurred on specific projects.  As we lean into the web site being developed by Brian Mayton, you should be able to see updates about recent monitoring on project pages. 

Christine Hatch - Hydrology and soil moisture update see files "DER-LO-Hydrology-Hatch-2025 10.20"

• Hydrology -Piezometers and stilling wells - 
• Placement of piezometers on a site - broad distribution, both sides of stream, higher and lower elevations
• Goal is to have an average water level record across site
• New technique - ground core with small corer; place piezometer in hole; should go down about a meter
• Connect to plant plots
• Soil moisture: connect to plant plots, move toward continuous loggers.

Chris Neill  see files "DER-LO-Plants-Neill-2025 10.20"

• Plot based protocol
• Are non native species coming in 
• Are the species that dominate wetland dominant
• How is plant diversity changing overtime. 
• Methods Comparison with transect method of Nantucket Foundation - does one method measure species richness better than the other.
• Geogiann Keer Question about percent cover - restored cranberry bogs will have a more architecturally complex canopy cover than marshes
  • Relative or percent cover
  • Chris measures total percent cover
    • Also DBH at 8m2 
    • Canopy densiometer measurement
    • Above ground carbon 
• Georgiann Keer, long term monitoring is too short. 
  • What is the plan for 10+ years
  • Coastal world - everyone wants to warehouse  the data but few achieve it. Chris - NSF does a good job of requiring people to post. 
  • At least at the project level what is the long term plan 
• Bill discussed is work to turn protocols into an S.O.P. 
• Adrian: Should we contact Georgeann for strategic planning? georgeann.keer@mass.gov 

Brian Mayton

• Web platform
  • Projects are connected to properties
  • Properties show locations for data
  • If you do not have an account, email us to request one. 

Adrian 

Modeling Nitrogen Load Reductions from Restoring Wetlands on Retired Cranberry Bogs

https://projects.livingobservatory.org/projects/nitrogen-removal/updates

Chris Neill 
Suggested we have an in person meeting with the DER project managers.