Long Island's vulnerable South Shore Estuary Reserve gets a $2.4 million funding boost

The Long Island South Shore Estuary Reserve, a sprawling 70-mile-long network of waterways vulnerable to environmental pressures, will receive a $2.4 million infusion of state funding.

The New York State Department of State, at a press conference at Tobay Beach Wednesday afternoon, said eight municipalities, nonprofits and agencies earned the awards through the South Shore Estuary Reserve Local Assistance Grant Program.

That program allocates money to initiatives centered on restoring, hardening and studying the complex system of beaches, tidal marshes and shallow bays that support microscopic plants and animals essential to local ecology.

The funding will be spent on a range of projects, from marine debris removal and habitat restoration to septic system installation and wildlife monitoring. Experts said ocean warming accelerated by human-induced climate change, overdevelopment and other environmental pressures is creating challenges for the waters along the southern portions of Nassau and Suffolk counties.

“There’s been a lot of development on the coastline, erosion of coastlines, degradation of wetlands,” Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, which received funding from the state grant, said in a phone interview. “It really has a lot of challenges for restoring it.”

Long Island’s South Shore Estuary is home to about 1.1 million people and spans from western Nassau County through Southampton. Most of the water in the estuary is shallow, making it especially affected by warming water temperatures and severe weather.

Enrico Nardone, executive director of the Seatuck Environmental Association, said “intense development” has impacted habitat and water quality and habitat within the estuary. Seatuck plans to use grant funding to deploy drones and citizen scientists to study the population of the diamondback terrapin, which is the only turtle that lives entirely in estuaries.

“They’re a species that was once very, very abundant but has been significantly impacted over the past 100 years,” Nardone said.

With waves crashing just 100 feet away, Oyster Bay Supervisor Joseph Saladino on Wednesday said the funding will be used in part to plant tens of thousands of plugs of dune grass in the coming years, hardening the shoreline against erosion. 

Tobay Beach has suffered repeated erosion in past years, and a series of projects have been implemented to stave off the constant ocean battering, Newsday reported. The town also plans to use the funding to plant shellfish seedlings to improve water quality in the Great South Bay. 

Other projects funded by the grant include the Citizens Campaign for the Environment's plan to launch a campaign centered on reducing marine debris; a Stony Brook University experiment to identify the heat tolerance of eelgrass; and Suffolk County's restoration of salt marshes at Cupsogue County Park. 

Keisha Santiago, the deputy secretary of state for the New York Department of State, said Long Island is “feeling the impacts” of climate change, which include more severe storms.

The estuary serves a significant role in slowing down waves during major storms while also providing critical habitat and serving as an economic driver through tourism and harvesting. 

“The estuaries themselves provide so much protection,” Santiago said. “They are actually working waterfronts.”

Dr. Bradley Peterson, a professor at the Stony Brook School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, said the funding is critical since water temperatures along the East Coast are insidiously rising faster than other areas, endangering plant and animal life within the estuary. 

“What that means is many things that can’t move are having a hard time adapting with this change,” Peterson said.

By Joseph Ostapiuk

joseph.ostapiuk@newsday.com@OstapiukJ