Welcome to the latest edition of the WSU Shore Stewards News. We offer periodic newsletters about timely topics for the thousands of Shore Stewards around Puget Sound. Be sure to visit our new website, which is full of information about living on and near our shores and for the archives of this newsletter.
The following newsletter focuses on shoreline armoring in Puget Sound and was written by Scott Chase, WSU Shore Stewards Coordinator in Island County.
Enjoy!
Cheryl Lowe
Water Programs Coordinator
Jefferson WSU Extension
Recognizing How Bulkheads Change the Shoreline
Photo: Scott Chase
Bulkheads, seawalls, and riprap are some of the words that describe man-made structures meant to hold back erosion caused by waves, wind, and tides. These structures (“armoring”) may also be associated with boat ramps, piers, docks, and any other structure on the beach. All these structures contribute to the armoring or hardening of the shorelines of Puget Sound. It is estimated that more than a quarter of Puget Sound shorelines are currently armored.
While armoring may serve to protect a shoreline against wave erosion, the energy of the waves may be diverted elsewhere, often toward the bottom of the bulkhead. This water movement scoops away sand and may eventually cause the bulkhead to be undermined and lean towards the water. In all cases, however, the wave energy is also directed back towards the beach, scouring away the sand and small gravel, leaving larger gravel and sometimes bedrock in place of the once sandy beach. When several homes or a community have hundreds of feet of bulkhead along the beach, this effect may be more dramatic. The finer sand and gravel may end up being moved from in front of the bulkheads to sites at one or the other end of the bulkheads, due to littoral drift. If the beach was a location where fish like surf smelt or sand lance deposited their eggs, the change of sand and gravel compositions could cause the beach to no longer be a reliable spawning location for these important forage fish. Salmon, seabirds, and many other marine species depend on such forage fish in their diet. Likewise, the change in a beach’s characteristics could mean the end of its ability to support the important habitat provided by eelgrass beds, which are nature’s nurseries for a wide range of marine species. Over the past century there have been significant reductions in the size and number of eelgrass beds in Puget Sound.
Without armoring, long term erosion is generally quite slow, often less than one foot per decade. Some locations of Puget Sound that experience more dynamic wave action have higher erosion rates. Erosion usually does not occur at a constant rate so it is hard to predict erosion patterns. You could experience little erosion of your property for 40 years, and then a landslide removes a large piece of your bluff at one time. Sometimes these landslides are not caused by erosion from wave action, but due to heavy rains, which cause heavy super-saturated soils.
Shoreline Armoring in Puget Sound
Shoreline armoring photo courtesy NOAA
A large portion of Puget Sound’s 2500+ miles of shoreline is vulnerable to erosion, depending on hydrologic forces such as tides, runoff and wave action, as well as composition (sandy bluff, bedrock, etc.) In the past, this erosion was viewed not as a natural process that is an important factor in the health of the Sound, but as a problem that needed to be controlled. This was particularly true for private property owners, both residential and commercial, who installed bulkheads and other armoring to halt any erosion, even in locations that experienced little or very slow erosion. In a 2010 report, the Washington Department of Ecology estimated that over 700 miles of the shoreline in Puget Sound are armored, which varies significantly county by county. Over 90% of the urban waterfront between Everett and Tacoma, for example, is armored by riprap protecting the railroad tracks that parallel the shoreline, residential armoring, and bulkheads and seawalls in front of piers, ports and government-owned land. In rural San Juan County, however, the percentage of armored shoreline is closer to 4 – 5%.
The Puget Sound Partnership, a state agency, has proposed that by 2020, the amount of armoring removed should exceed that amount of new armoring. This will primarily happen in public areas, like beaches and parks. When armoring must be replaced, for which it is increasingly difficult to obtain a permit, they will emphasize the use of “soft shore” or more natural techniques. These techniques will be discussed in upcoming newsletters.
New Shoreline Armoring Study Shows Effects on Ecosystem
Megan Dethier, a research professor of biology at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories, has just released the results of a study that analyzes multiple sites within the Puget Sound region, offering the first comprehensive look at how shoreline armoring impacts the Puget Sound ecosystem. Though there are hundreds of different factors that impact the shoreline ecosystem, the researchers searched for patterns that were driven by armoring alone. The paper describing their results was published in April 2016 in the journal Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science.
Sites were examined in south, central and north Puget Sound, and the findings indicate that beaches with armoring became steeper and slightly narrower over time, with finer grained sediment and sand being replaced by larger pebbles. With the large number of samples, and variety of beach types that were sampled, it was found that the shape and texture of the beaches happened slowly, over a period of time, something that was not as evident before.
The study was conducted by identifying 65 pairs of sites around Puget Sound, with each pair including one site with some degree of armoring and a nearby one with no armoring. Each pair of sites was within a distinct shoreline unit, called a drift cell. The amount of armored shoreline in each drift cell varied. Data collected at each site included the number of logs on the shore; the amount of natural debris, such as algae and seagrass; size of beach sediment; amount of overhanging vegetation (which drops insects and other food into the water); invertebrates like sand fleas and insects; and the slope of the beach.
Armored beaches were found to have fewer drift logs, seagrass, algae, and other organic debris than the unarmored beaches. Since insects and crustaceans depend on this vegetation for food, there were fewer invertebrates at the armored locations (and thus less food for birds and small fish). Surf smelt and sand lance depend on sandy beaches for spawning habitat, which was replaced by coarser sediment in areas with armoring. All of these nearshore habitat changes were found to likely alter the migration and feeding patterns of juvenile salmon in Puget Sound. And in drift cells that had a higher percentage of armoring, even unarmored sites had less sand and larger sediment. Additional information on Megan Dethier’s studies can be found in the links in the Resources section.
Is Shoreline Armoring in Puget Sound Declining?
After many decades of degradation, the amount of shoreline armoring that was removed from Puget Sound in 2014 exceeded the amount of newly constructed armoring. With growing realization that bulkheads are harmful to our shoreline ecology, and increased difficulty in getting permits to build or replace bulkheads, installation of new shoreline armoring has slowed. Bulkhead removal, particularly in public access locations, has contributed to shoreline restoration. Federal, state and local grant programs are helping shoreline property owners replace their bulkheads with more natural solutions. When Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife officials reviewed all permits they issued in Puget Sound, they discovered they had surpassed that milestone that Puget Sound Partnership had hoped to achieve by 2020. This figure was just for one year, however, and more work needs to be done between now and 2020.
New, replaced, and removed Puget Sound armoring (2005-2014). Source: WDFW
In 2014, 1,530 feet of new armoring was constructed in Puget Sound, with 3,710 feet of armoring removed and not replaced with anything else. The amount of new armoring has decreased drastically: 8,493 feet was installed in 2007, dropping to 3,924 feet in 2013 and 1,530 feet in 2014. No armoring was added in Whatcom, Thurston or Jefferson counties in 2014.
The amount of bulkheads removed in 2007 was 314 feet, jumping to 1,647 feet in 2013 and 3,710 feet in 2014. One of the North Olympic Salmon Coalition’s habitat restoration projects in Jefferson County included the removal of a 1,150 foot long seawall in Discovery Bay, resulting in forage fish spawning where none was previously observed. These calculations are based on WDFW permit information. Recent studies, funded by the EPA, included surveys of shorelines by boat to check new construction along the shoreline and found that some bulkheads have been built without appropriate permits. The total number or length of these bulkheads is unknown. Though these should be counted as new construction, they are not included in the WDFW figures. Also, soft-shore or natural armoring is counted as new construction, the same as concrete bulkheads. Soft-shore armoring is an improvement over concrete, but that was not taken into account in the WDFW study. How these factors affect the reporting of the amount of armoring is unknown. The following chart shows the amount of new armoring in Puget Sound, by county, for the time period 2005 – 2014.
New Puget Sound armoring by county by year (2005-2014). Source: WDFW
Resources
Rethinking Shoreline Armoring – A series of Salish Sea Currents magazine. Encyclopedia of Puget Sound. (The Encyclopedia of Puget Sound is published by the University of Washington’s Puget Sound Institute) https://www.eopugetsound.org/magazine/shoreline-armoring
Detheir, Megan N. et al. Multiscale impacts of armoring on Salish Sea shorelines: Evidence for cumulative and threshold effects, Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science (2016 Provided by: University of Washington)
Kinney, Aimee et al. Analysis of Effective Regulation and Stewardship Findings, Dec 2015. Puget Sound Institute. Link
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