When driving around Great Bay on Route 4 or Route 108, or crossing the General Sullivan Bridge from Dover into Newington, look out and try to see with an a-chronological eye. Impose the past onto the present moment and you’ll see, speckling the swirling blue waters spread out in front of you, gundalows sliding toward Portsmouth on the ebb tide, packed with white pine for shipment to England or textiles from one of the mills in Dover or Newmarket; in the exposed mudflats, Abenaki, English settlers, or 19th-century farm children digging for oysters; along the shore, you’ll see thick stands of timber, smoke from a seasonal Native camp, recently cleared farmland, or racks of drying fish. Coming back to the present, there are boats moored at marinas, weekend paddlers launching from shore, and fishing boats checking on lobster buoys. You’ll see million-dollar homes, picnic tables, preserved land, and smokestacks puffing out thick clouds in the distance. Many different people have seen many different things in this one treasured and abused body of water.

Great Bay and its accompanying Little Bay were formed approximately 14,000 years ago, when ocean waters, swelled by the runoff from receding glaciers, flooded low-lying inland areas. Fed by the Winnicut, Squamscott and Lamprey rivers and connected to the Atlantic Ocean by the Piscataqua River, these mingling fresh and salt waters form one of the largest estuaries on the Atlantic Coast. Estuaries are extremely important to marine ecology, containing more than one half of the living matter of the world’s oceans. It’s this abundance of life, combined with easy access to the interior and unusually fast tidal currents, that made this region so attractive to European settlers.

“There was a definite pattern to settlement,” says Stephen Michaud, site manager for the Portsmouth and Exeter branches of Historic New England. “Starting in the area around Portsmouth, settlements were established along the tidal portion of Great Bay, especially at waterfalls. Towns like Exeter, Newmarket and Durham were all founded around these areas where there was a shift from fresh water to the tidal zone.”

Michaud says that by 1650, there were 50 sawmills operating in the area of Great Bay. This early trend toward industrial activity continued through the centuries, taking a toll on the water: waste products from the mills, leather tanneries and brickyards settled on the bottom of the Bay, contaminating the mudflats and eelgrass beds and causing great damage to the region’s ecosystem.

Now the mills are shut down, and the Bay is healthier than it’s been in over 200 years. This is thanks in large part to concerned citizens who take an active role in keeping the Bay clean and bustling with life, whether it’s by voting against the building of the Onassis oil refinery in Durham in the 1970s, upgrading wastewater treatment plants or volunteering with the Great Bay Coast Watch.

Despite the improvements made and the land set aside, Great Bay is still at risk. As the area’s population increases and more land is developed, the Bay is subject  to pollutants from non-point sources, like runoff from roads and lawn fertilizers. Land that has recovered from the clear-cutting practices of colonial farming and lumbering has now become prime real estate and is in danger of being reduced to tract housing.

“There’s a fine line between preserving open space and providing the housing that is needed in the region,” says Michaud. “But how far do we go before we’ve filled in our soul?”

In reading the pieces that follow, we hope that you will be inspired to acquaint yourself with Great Bay. Learn its history and its present, and ask yourself what its future should be.
—Mike Campbell

workhorse on the water
by Scott P. Yates

To look at a gundalow, one might reasonably ask, where’s the rest of it?

“Gundalows are funky boats,” agrees Captain Chuck Holloway of the Gundalow Company. “They built it very much as if it were an upside down barn.”

The boats hark back to an era when the river was the great highway. To marry their needs to the peculiarities of the waterway, farmers along Great Bay and its tributaries used the boats to transport their harvests of produce, meats, marsh hay, flour, linseed oil, snuff, lumber and bricks baked from clay dug along the banks. For three centuries, tons of raw materials traveled daily in the bellies of gundalows, propelled by the tides, the lateen sail, sweeps (oars), or poles in the shallows. Coal went up the river to build and operate the many factories. The factories produced oil, cotton and textiles, which gundalows ferried out to awaiting ships. Iron, plaster of Paris, and lime were among other cargoes.
Although the age of the gundalow is over, the spirit lives on in the full-scale, operating replica Capt. Edward H. Adams, a good example of one of the largest and most sophisticated vessels. At 70 feet long and 50 tons, and drawing just one foot, 11 inches of water, it’s fully decked, planked with pine, has a lateen sail (usually triangular in shape) and a cuddy cabin—the small quarters aft. The vessel honors Edward H. Adams, who piloted the last commercially operated gundalow, Fanny M., which was abandoned at Hilton Point, at the entrance to Little Bay, in the 1920s. According to the Gundalow Company’s Web site, Capt. Adams dedicated much of his life to fighting for “the spirit of an age he felt people were ignoring.”

Holloway agrees with Adams’ perception of slackening Seacoast spirit.

“This was a maritime community with great history, and that may not be appreciated,” he said.
Wendy Pirsig agrees. She’s standing on the granite seawall at Quamphegan Landing on the Salmon Falls River, near the Counting House Museum in South Berwick, Maine. Pirsig is on the museum’s board of directors and is the chairwoman of collections. She says the landing was home to prolific tall shipbuilding and coal gas factories. Gundalows were vital to the transportation of coal, lumber and cotton to and from the factories that once stood here.

About 10 feet from the ale-colored waters of the Salmon Falls River, she pointed out a half-yard deep pit rimmed by a faded and worn brick wall. She said it was the remnants of the original coal gas container—yet another precious cargo for the gundalow. She’s happy that it’s still there, and that the landing is partially preserved as a reminder of the factory days of long ago made possible by the gundalows.

“We’re all lucky that (the landing) didn’t get built up by something else. It looks pretty much like it used to. You can just picture it like in the early days,” said Pirsig.

In May, the Adams visited in South Berwick for the first time in its history. It was the first time any gundalow had ventured that far north in at least a century.

“The Route 101 bridge essentially prevented the gundalow from getting any further (north),” said Nathan Hazen, a University of New Hampshire Marine Docent and Gundalow Company board member. “101 has been a roadblock for more than a hundred years.”

In order to reach Quamphegan Landing, Hazen explains, “we had to do some charting that had never been done before. We charted it last year and took soundings. There are three rapids between Hamilton House and the Counting House at low tide,” said Hazen. “It was kinda fun because it was our first time over those rapids on a 50-ton boat,” said Hazen.

With only inches of clearance over submerged rocks and under low bridges, sometimes the only way to pass through is by dismantling the sailing rig, which takes about three hours.

With the Adams reduced to a three-foot-high vessel, the sailors still have to wait for the incoming tide to push the vessel onward.

Journeys were even more perilous in days of yore, when boats sometimes sank in the Piscataqua River, where they may yet sit with loads of nails, bricks or wrought iron undelivered.

Still, the fleet’s efforts added up. In the 1850s, Moses Paul, and agent of the Cocheco Manufacturing Company in Dover, said, “The amount of goods and merchandise belonging to the Cocheco Mfg. Co. that is transported on the river to and from Dover and passing under the Portsmouth bridge in packets and gundalows is in value about $750,000 per year.” Keep in mind that 155 years of inflation makes $750,000 in 1850 worth over $16.6 million today. That’s pretty good for a bunch of farmers floating up and down the Piscataqua in upside down barns.

gundalow summer schedule

The spirit of the gundalow has been reincarnated with a new mission. Though the Capt. Edward Adams no longer ferries tons of raw materials from port to port, several port destinations will get a visit this summer.

The Gundalow Company,  a non-profit organization preserving the Adams for maritime, historical, social and environmental education, will host educational programs for children ages 6-12, as well as for the New Heights Teen Center in Portsmouth and Teen Outlook Center in Exeter. A grant from the N.H. Coastal Program supports lectures on contemporary coastal issues for adults.

Molly Bolster, executive director of the Gundalow Company, says bringing the gundalow to the people by increasing the number of visits to ports is the main message. It’s reaching people, it’s moving up and down the river, she notes. “It’s doing what the gundalow is supposed to do.”

Anyone can take a tour of the gundalow Capt. Edward Adams as it travels throughout the Piscataqua region this summer. Regular visiting hours for the gundalow generally are Wednesday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Contact the Gundalow Company for more information at 603-433-9505 or www.gundalow.org.

operation restoration
by Paula Sullivan

On a sunny day in late July, senior lab technician Jennifer Greene and her assistant, lab technician Holly Abeels, walk down to the dock at Jackson Estuarine Laboratory, hop in a small motor boat and putter over to the “oyster raft” to take a peek at the young oysters growing there. Dangling from the raft in a cove on Adams Point are plastic crates, each filled with what would appear to be nothing more than a pile of dead oyster shells covered with a film of murky brown algae. Greene reaches down, plucks a shell from the crate and swishes it in the water for a minute. The algae floats away to reveal a relatively clean shell. Upon closer inspection, one can see that the pale, glistening inner shell is mottled with a covering of tiny brown specks that look like grains of sand. Each is a two-week-old oyster. For now Greene and Abeels have only to monitor them. In about two months, when the hardier individuals have grown to thumbnail size, they’ll be released into the bay along with the shells they’re attached to, creating the beginning of an oyster bed. Greene is happy with the way things look with these cultivated oysters, but they represent only half of the restoration equation. 

In a body of water that once housed oyster reefs so large as to be a hazard to shipping, the history of the American oyster is a long and dramatic one, a tale of wild proliferation, tragic annihilation and an occasional surprise comeback.

In pre-colonial times, Native Americans feasted on the plentiful mollusks, perhaps even using the shells as a form of currency. By the early 1700s, commercial harvesting had already begun to take its toll before industrial pollution and sediment from sawmills, shipyards and even breweries caused the population to dwindle.

Oysters rebounded in the late 1800s, but that didn’t last long. In his book “Cross-Grained and Wily Waters,” historian W. Jeffrey Bolster tells of a survey published in 1874 that broadcast the discovery of untapped oyster beds in the bay. The announcement prompted an instant chain-reaction of “catastrophic overfishing,” and within five years, the population was almost wiped out. Commercial harvesting never recovered and in 1953 was outlawed altogether.

Over the next 50 years, the oyster population continued to struggle, but by the early 1990s, scientists had reason to be cautiously optimistic: the cloud held a silver lining. As a result of the very pollution that was threatening the oysters, many beds were closed off to harvesting altogether. If conservationists and environmentalists could keep the beds closed off and begin to reverse the effects of pollution and overfishing, then perhaps the oysters stood a chance. Then came MSX.

This microbial parasite (not harmful to humans) had been working its way up the Atlantic Coast since the 1950s, when it was first discovered in the Delaware Bay. It decimated oyster beds from North Carolina to New York but seemed not to want to migrate any further north than that, and northern scientists believed their oysters were safe. Then, in 1980, MSX began moving north again. In 1995, scientists’ worst fears were realized. MSX hit the bay, and the oyster population was once again driven to near extinction. Since then, it has been an uphill battle.

In 1989 former commercial aquaculturist Richard Langan, Ph.D., began monitoring what is referred to as spatfall—that is, the number of baby oysters (known as spat) that survive the larval stage and “set” into an oyster bed. Over the course of an eight-year study, Langan recorded only one good spatfall in the bay, but this, he says, is typical of northern oysters, as oysters spawn only when water temperatures climb above 68 degrees Fahrenheit. In general, says Langan, spatfall is always a high-odds game. A single female oyster will release 50 million eggs during spawning. Only a small percentage will become fertilized (a single male releases billions of sperm, and fertilization takes place in the open water), and of those, anywhere from one to four will survive through spatfall, with four being a banner year. With the arrival of MSX, restoration became a priority.

One of Langan’s colleagues at the lab is Ray Grizzle, Ph.D., who now leads restoration efforts for the University of New Hampshire’s Marine Program and Zoology Department. (Langan is still active at the lab, but has taken on a more administrative role; he currently serves as director of the Cooperative Institute for New England Mariculture and Fisheries at the University of New Hampshire, and as co-director of the National and Atmospheric Administration– UNH Cooperative Institute for Coastal and Estuarine Environmental Technology.) In addition to monitoring spatfall, Grizzle has been introducing cultivated oyster to the bay since 2000. This summer, about 50 native oysters were culled from a Nanny Island oyster bed and sent to the Moscungus Bay aquaculture farm in Bremman, Maine. About 24 million fertilized eggs were then sent back to the lab, where Greene, who works alongside Grizzle, set about raising them.

French novelist Anatole France once wrote, “What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!” France’s quote comes close to summing up one of the greatest obstacles standing in the way of oyster habitat restoration—finding a substitute for oyster shells.

Because baby oysters prefer old shells to settle onto, it is imperative that a supply of shells be present when oysters are spawning. This supply of shells, known as cultch or brood stock, forms the backbone of any healthy oyster bed. In a perfect world, baby oysters settle onto the cultch, grow into adults, live out their lives, then become cultch themselves, eventually forming a vertical bed, or reef, that continues to build upon itself year after year. Each time an oyster bed becomes depleted or broken up, sand and silt move in, covering up the brood stock and leaving newly hatched oyster larvae to perish. The challenge for researchers, then, is to replace the cultch with a new supply of shells, or, in the face of a shortage of such shells, to create a viable substitute.

Marine Ecologist Jay Odell, of the Nature Conservancy, is another researcher working to restore oyster habitat in Great Bay. To compensate for the shortage of shells, Odell is working to find a suitable material to serve as artificial cultch. The most promising material Odell has come up with is an ordinary cement tile, of the sort you would find at Home Depot. Crafted of calcium carbonate and sand, the small, square tile provides a surface not unlike an oyster shell. Odell fashions tiles into what he refers to as “oyster condos” by stringing them together and encasing them in a mesh bag. Then he lowers the condos into the water at the crucial moment of spawning, hopefully in time for native spat to settle onto them. Although the project is still in the experimental phase, it’s shown promise, and it appears that the spat, though still partial to shells, will adhere to the tiles and grow into adults. Odell also forms condos out of actual shells when they’re available and lowers those into the water as well.
On a warm evening in July, a small audience has gathered at the Newfields Town Hall to listen to Odell speak about oyster restoration. Odell speaks enthusiastically and entertainingly, covering all the basics of the oyster life cycle and touching on his research with artificial cultch.

“I like people, and I love marine life,” he tells the audience. “But most of all,” he adds, “I love telling stories of marine life to people.” As with Grizzle and Greene, the driving force behind Odell’s enthusiasm is his commitment to restoring ecological balance to Great Bay.

Any ecosystem, marine or otherwise, is made up of an intricate web of diverse organisms. Each organism performs specific ecological services that contribute to the overall balance. If you remove one species, whether it be a microscopic phytoplankton or a 30-pound striped bass, the effect reverberates.
One of the most significant ecological services provided by oysters is water filtration. An adult oyster can process as much as 50 gallons of water a day, and a healthy oyster population would greatly improve the water quality of the estuary. Eelgrass—an essential habitat of the bay—is left particularly vulnerable in the absence of a healthy shellfish population. An oyster reef also provides habitat to countless forms of estuarine life, including small crustaceans, seaworms and baby finfish. The excess sperm and egg that is emitted during spawning provides food for these other species as well, and the list goes on.

From here on out, it’s a waiting game. With the cooperation of New Hampshire’s Fish and Game Department, researchers hope that at least some of the beds will remain closed permanently. The Catch-22 is that as soon as the public gets wind of a healthy oyster bed, there’s an instant risk of the same kind of chain reaction that decimated the beds a hundred years ago. As a result, even if a bed begins to show signs of significant growth, researchers feel compelled to keep the good news at least partially to themselves. Grizzle and Greene were happy to report the existence of a burgeoning reef in the bay but exclaimed simultaneously, “Don’t print the location!” In addition to petitioning for the continued closure of specific beds, researchers are working to begin an oyster shell recycling program. Through the program, recreational harvesters will be urged to return empty oyster shells to the lab to return to the bay. It only makes sense, says Grizzle, that those responsible for using a resource contribute to its restoration.

None of the researchers are intent on prohibiting oyster harvesting altogether. Odell and Grizzle both believe that a moderate amount of recreational harvesting, limited to a few designated beds, can be maintained in conjunction with the restoration process. This is good news for men like George Frick, an 85-year-old Durham resident who’s been harvesting oysters on the bay for 55 years. Back in 1950, when Frick first started oystering, he says the practice was completely unregulated. Even then, Frick says he took only what he and his family would consume—about three bushels a year—but he knew plenty of men who took more.

“There were guys who dredged and raked,” says Frick with obvious disdain, referring to the highly destructive and now illegal practice of dragging a giant bucket or rake through a reef. Frick has always used handheld tongs, and he doesn’t need any scientific data to tell him that the oyster population has dwindled. “Thirty or forty years ago,” he says, “I could get a bushel by myself in less than an hour.” Now, even with the help of son Paul and longtime buddy Malcolm MacGregor, he is lucky to take a half bushel in an hour. He plans to continue harvesting, but he claims he is a conscientious harvester. He says he has always brought his shells back to the bay, and he says, “If you bring up a cultch with a bunch of little ones, you throw it back,” and adds, “I could never understand the guys who would just take whatever came up.”

the wild life
by Josh Pierce

The single best word to describe Great Bay is flux.

From the six-to-eight-foot tides flushing through 17 billion gallons of water twice daily, to the impact of humans over the millennia, to the seasonal wildlife that migrates in and out, things are always changing.

Once, on a blustery April day, a few friends of mine decided to kayak from Exeter to Portsmouth via Great Bay. As they later recounted it, their journey through Great Bay and Little Bay was harrowing. The tide rushed against them, the wind was blowing and there was three- to four-foot chop. It took forever to fight through it. They made it through as far as Newick’s Restaurant on Dover Point by dusk before calling me for a ride the last few miles.

Now, as I stand on the south shore of Great Bay at the Sandy Point Discovery Center, a summer breeze has generated waves half a foot high on the open water in front of me. I paddle my touring kayak away from shore in the early morning isolation, each wave thwacking on the backside of the hull.

I’ve also been here when it’s completely calm, the glassy surface reflecting the sun’s rays like a crystal ball. In these moments of tranquility, the surface belies what’s going on below, as an abundance of creatures struggle to survive in the water and the goopy sediments. Ninety-one species of plants and animals have been identified as living in the mud here. Horseshoe crabs, a living relic that predate T-Rex’s reign on earth 250 million years ago, muck about, eating sea worms, soft-shelled clams, mussels and any invertebrates that their mud-plowing activities expose. More closely related to spiders, scorpions or ticks than crabs or lobsters, most of the 80,000 eggs a female lays each year become energy food for hundreds of thousands of migrating shorebirds that pass Great Bay on the Atlantic flyway. Horseshoe crabs’ anomalous existence makes them of interest to science: a dried extract of the horseshoe crab’s blue blood is used in products that screen for human diseases, and bits from their shells are used as coating for surgical sutures and dressings. The American lobster spends summer vacation in Great Bay foraging for green crabs, blue mussels, sea worms and sea urchins before returning to deep offshore waters as the winter approaches. American oysters and starfish settle in the mud; winter flounder shadow the bay’s bottom, feeding on invertebrates, their crooked eyes on the lookout for predators above. Rainbow smelt winter in Great Bay, and Atlantic salmon pass through on their adolescent journeys to the sea and then return on a last dash back to their birthplaces.

Instead of fighting the waves, I bank right and travel east along the southern shore. The marshy shore holds stands of eelgrass and several large granite boulders sticking above the surface where I see my first birds: three double-crested cormorants fanning their wings in the breeze atop one of the granite boulders. The skittish birds fly away soon after I snap a few shots with a telephoto lens, and I continue exploring the coast, which is rarely straight for long. Twenty-five miles of undulating coastline envelop 4,500 acres of tidal waters. Protected coves are bookended by rocky points, with yellow birch, blue beech, white pine and white swamp oaks growing in heavy stands all the way to the rocky shores. I don’t see any, but eastern coyotes, fishers and porcupines all call these wooded shores home.

In the next cove, I paddle into a maze created by dense underwater stands of eelgrass. I hope to come upon an exotic bird or two, like a great blue heron, pied-billed grebe, northern harrier, osprey or even a bald eagle hidden among the grass, but only find another wary cormorant, which flies from his rocky perch at my approach. If I were here in late August, I might see migrating birds heading south: Canadian geese, peregrine falcons, mallard ducks. Black ducks and bald eagles spend the winters here.
Eelgrass creates an interesting habitat: it sucks the energy out of waves that roll through it, creating calm conditions, making an ideal hiding place and nursery for starfish, herring, eel, striped bass, winter flounder, ducks, lobster and blue mussels.

I return to the Discovery Center the way I came, noticing increased activity all around as the world begins to rise. A large development of houses sit on manicured quarter-acre lots. The trees and marshlands along the shore, once covered in prolific knotweed, dwarf glasswort and marsh elder, have been erased by the hand of man. Minivans and SUVs leave driveways, heading out into nearby rush-hour traffic so their owners can afford their bay views. “(The Great Bay area is) not suburbia,” notes Peter Wellenberger, manager of the Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. “We are still wild. (New residents) don’t understand why there’s skunk in the yard, why there’s shooting at 6 a.m. in fall hunting season, why they can’t cut trees to improve the view. Nature doesn’t mean a green lawn down to the bay. That’s contrary to what we’re trying to do.”

In May, the Nature Conservancy purchased the 38.7-acre Smith Farm on the southeastern shore, acting as lead acquisition agent for the multi-organizational Great Bay Resource Protection Partnership. The group’s land purchases in the past decade have protected 3,400 acres and serve as a national model.
According to Sen. Judd Gregg, whose work in Congress has secured more than $56 million for partnership projects since 1994, “Great Bay is one of the most diverse and significant ecosystems, not only in New Hampshire but in this entire region of the country. Given the development pressures and growth in this part of New Hampshire, it is important for all of us to protect and conserve Great Bay.”
Later in the day, I visit the Great Bay National Wildlife Refuge in Newington on the eastern shore. This is the largest contiguous plot of undeveloped land in the Great Bay Reserve, more than 1,000 acres containing diverse habitats, from bogs to upland fields to salt marshes and rocky shores. At the farthest point along the two-mile trail from the parking lot, a wooden platform perches at the edge of the trees high above the shore, with a view across the water of the wooded peninsula of Adams Point in Durham. Between here and there is the Furber Strait, the narrowest, deepest part of the bay at 58 feet, and as I look down at the water I can see the current rushing out toward the ocean.

Great Bay works as a gigantic sponge. It soaks up excess rainfall, preventing coastal flooding, and slowly releases it to the sea over time. The salt marshes act as water pollution control, absorbing waste, breaking it down and recycling it as nutrients for the myriad life in the bay. “The bay itself is certainly cleaner than it was in the 1950s when it was an open sewer. But now we’re seeing nitrogen-loading trends because of growth. That’s not a surprise. Hopefully we can have an impact on that,” says Wellenberger.

“We’re in a race against time here,” agrees Eric Aldrich, communications director for the New Hampshire Nature Conservancy. “The work we do over the next 3-5 years will have a great effect on what this area looks like for hundreds of years.”

some names you might recognize—or maybe not
by Karen Marzloff

Mapping the web of projects that form the network of conservation and preservation around the bay is a task for a Ph.D. candidate. Here are a good number of the organizations mentioned in this story and with whom you can learn more about the bay.

In many ways, the ecosystem is healthier than it’s ever been—it’s no longer referred to as an open sewer, nor are tanneries dumping chemicals into its tributaries or sawmills choking it with sawdust—but new threats include increased development and accompanying pollution from fertilizers, wastewater treatment plants and septic systems, which degrade the ecosystem. Education is an important tool in protecting the bay.

“It’s a small coastline, and most organizations work well together,” says Julia Peterson, who leads Discovery Cruises with Sea Grant. She follows up the cruises with surveys. “I know for a fact that (participants’) knowledge has increased, and their levels of concern are increased.”

N.H. Sea Grant encompasses the volunteer UNH Marine Docents, who present school- and boat-based programs and performances with the Sea Chantey Singers; Great Bay Coast Watch, whose 100+ volunteers monitor water quality at sites around the estuary and along the coast, conduct shoreline surveys and test for harmful algal blooms (which include so-called red tide), and have their eye on the proposed wastewater treatment solutions proposed for the bay; Great Bay Radio; and Discovery Cruises, which take the public around the bay for five-hour educational cruises each summer. Sea Grant is a federal-state partnership with NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), housed at UNH, in conjunction with the Cooperative Extension. To get involved, visit www.seagrant.unh.edu or 603-749-1565.

Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve oversees the research, education and stewardship missions of the 7,500-acre reserve, one of only 26 such reserves in the country. It was established in the late 1980s under a federal-state partnership between NOAA  and N.H. Fish and Game. The public face of the organization is Sandy Point Discovery Center, which offers exploratory tours and public programs. The Great Bay Stewards (www.greatbay-stewards.org) support the Research Reserve and help make Sandy Point Discovery Center free to the public. They include the former the Great Bay Trust, which worked to establish the National Estuarine Research Reserve and convert former Pease Air Force Base land to a National Wildlife Refuge in 1992. To get involved, contact volunteer coordinator Sheila Roberge at 603-778-0015 or visit www.greatbay.org. For the National Wildlife Refuge, which is part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, call 603-431-7511 or write This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

University of New Hampshire Jackson Estuarine Lab at Adams Point, Durham, represents an entire biosphere of organizations and interdisciplinary research projects, including nearly everyone mentioned in this list and more, plus six full-time faculty representing UNH departments of earth sciences, natural resources, plant biology and zoology. To learn more, call 603-862-2175 or visit marine.unh.edu/jel/home.htm.

N.H. Estuaries Project implements a management plan created by local stakeholders, including citizens, government officials and conservation organizations, to preserve, protect and enhance the estuary. The organization funds programs addressing wastewater, storm water, shellfish and coastal development issues, among others. A mapping project revealed that the amount of impervious surface (paved or built upon) in coastal watershed towns grew from 4.3 percent to 6.3 percent between 1990 and 2000, and those estimates will be updated in 2005. NHEP receives its funding from the EPA and is administered by the University of New Hampshire. Learn more or volunteer at www.nhep.unh.edu.
N.H. Coastal Program, under the state Department of Environmental Services, funds programs that address coastal cleanup, pollution control and groundwater availability, among other projects. Visit them at www.des.state.nh.us/Coastal.

Great Bay Resource Protection Partnership: With The Nature Conservancy as lead acquisition agent, the partners include Ducks Unlimited, Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, Natural Resources Conservation Service, New Hampshire Audubon, New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Other local land trusts include Rockingham County Land Trust and Seacoast Land Trust (www.seacoastlandtrust.org).

CICEET, the Cooperative Institute for Coastal and Estuarine Environmental Technology run jointly by UNH and NOAA, works on new technology for the people on the ground who have to comply with environmental regulations. Currently they’re assessing 15 of the most common storm water treatments used by public works departments around country. Learn more at www.ciceet.unh.edu, or visit their storm water assessment system at West Edge Parking Lot at the north end of Main Street in Durham.