Nantucket Pond Coalition

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About the Nantucket Pond Coalition:

We have created a charitable fund with the Community Foundation for Nantucket to receive donations for this initiative dedicated to restoring and protecting the ponds on Nantucket so they can be enjoyed by generations to come. We support finding scientific solutions to mitigate the accelerated eutrophication of the ponds due to excess nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer, septic systems and household products.

Increased population on Nantucket has created poor water quality conditions such as harmful algae, excessive nuisance aquatic vegetation and low dissolved oxygen. Invasive plant species, like phragmites, create long term challenges for a natural pond habitat. We propose to balance the impact of human activity with the protection of Nantucket’s pond and estuary resources through planning, public involvement, education, research and sound resource management.

We work with all the not-for-profit organizations and the Town to continually move forward with action plans to improve the pond experience on Nantucket.

To visit the Pond Coalition’s website, click here.

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About the Coalition
Pond Coalition & Egan Maritime Partnership

Pond Coalition & Egan Maritime Partnership

Made with the Egan Maritime Institute for an oceanography unit in the island’s middle school, and built around the question the students were set to debate: should Nantucket work to restore its ponds and wetlands to their original state. It opens on the geology — the eighty-odd named ponds were cut by the Laurentide glacier twelve thousand years ago and took their present shape about six thousand years ago, when the rising sea made Cape Cod and the islands — and on why restoration cannot wait: explosive population growth has pushed eutrophication forward by decades, and there is enough phosphorus and nitrogen on the pond bottoms now that sewering and fertilizer management alone will not undo it. The team then introduce themselves and their part in the work. The teacher and Egan Maritime’s education manager explain why water quality is the students’ problem to inherit. The Land Bank’s environmental and agricultural coordinator describes the Consue Springs marsh restoration, where phragmites more than fourteen feet tall will be sprayed from an amphibious Marsh Master and the dead stems cut each November for three to five years. The Land Council’s executive director covers ten years of sampling the smaller ponds for harmful algal blooms and the phosphorus that feeds them. The town’s water resource specialist covers the monitoring of streams, harbors and great ponds. Bob Williams closes on the heavy equipment the Coalition brings in: the aquatic harvester that took more than thirty thousand pounds of vegetation out of Hummock Pond, and the Marsh Master that treats and mulches the shorelines so a pond edge has a chance to heal.

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Pond Coalition & Land Bank Partnership

Pond Coalition & Land Bank Partnership

The Land Bank’s chairman opens on six years of joint work on the great ponds, and Bob Williams takes it from there, at a celebration of the town’s and the Land Bank’s sponsorship of the aquatic harvester: a 4,500-pound paddle wheeler, twenty-six feet long, with a reciprocating blade that cuts below the surface and lifts about 130 cubic feet of vegetation a load — weed that would otherwise die and decompose on the bottom, drawing down oxygen, returning nutrients to the water and turning a pond slowly into a swamp. The Land Bank’s director runs through the current projects: a third year of foliar spraying on Long Pond, with the hope of extending it to all the Land Bank’s frontage there, and purple loosestrife and pioneer phragmites stands at Miacomet Pond. The season closes at eight acres harvested and seventy-seven cubic yards — over 22,000 pounds — of excess vegetation. Then the shorelines: the Long Pond pilot that tested the safety of foliar spray, the Marsh Master working north of the Massasoit Bridge, and the cut-and-mulch pass in late November once the plants have died back on their own. Before-and-after footage of the same stretch of Hummock Pond’s southeastern shore, a year apart, shows a stand fourteen feet high and thirty feet deep give way to open shallows where fish, turtles, herons and cormorants feed. It ends on the 2021 job at Consue Springs, where clearing the phragmites and knotweed brings the harbor back into view from Orange Street and the bike path.

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Overview of the Nantucket Pond Coalition

Overview of the Nantucket Pond Coalition

Narrated by Robert Williams and cut around his presentation to the Board of Selectmen on 19 July 2017. Between passages of the ponds themselves — shorebirds working a shallow edge, the cut at the beach where a pond is let out to the sea, aerials over the moors to the south shore — it steps through the Coalition’s programs: the federal clean water grant, a working meeting around a kitchen table, sample jugs lined up on a porch, the aquatic harvester at work, and the September 2015 phragmites pilot, with Keith Gazaille spraying from a skiff and the Marsh Master out in the reeds. It closes on a Canada goose leading a line of goslings across the water, then the Coalition’s mark and web address.

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The Aquatic Harvester
Aquatic Harvester Thank You Celebration

Aquatic Harvester Thank You Celebration

On 19 August 2017 at Hummock Pond, Bob Williams of the Nantucket Pond Coalition thanks the town and the Nantucket Land Bank for sponsoring the aquatic harvester, a 4,500-pound paddle wheeler that takes off about 130 cubic feet of weed a load. Left to die and decompose on the bottom, he says, that vegetation draws down a pond’s oxygen, loads it with nutrients and turns it by degrees into a swamp. Rita Higgins, newly elected to the Board of Selectmen, calls the ponds an indicator of what development is doing to the island’s natural systems; the two can go hand in hand, she says, but the island has to act now. The executive director of the Nantucket Islands Land Bank sets out a third year of phragmites spraying on Long Pond, the hope of extending it to all the Land Bank’s frontage there, and loosestrife and phragmites work at Miacomet. The Nantucket Land Council describes the federal phosphorus grant it manages with the town on Long, Hummock and Miacomet, and the water quality sampling it is doing before and after this harvest. John Johnson, thirty years on Miacomet Pond, says the reeds have closed in where the water was once open, and that the children who used to swim there no longer do. A Long Pond landowner describes the fund the twenty-two abutters have opened to clear the phragmites themselves. Williams closes on the day’s haul: some 30,000 cubic feet of weed, bound for the composter at the landfill as fertilizer.

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Hummock Pond Harvester Demonstration

Hummock Pond Harvester Demonstration

An aquatic harvester demonstration at Hummock Pond on 20 August 2015. The machine works the pond under its own paddle wheels, cutting below the surface and carrying the weed up a conveyor to a waiting front loader. John Bartlett of Bartlett’s Farm, whose loader moved the cut vegetation up the beach, Selectman Rick Atherton, and Phil Albertson of the Nantucket Anglers Club each speak to the camera with the crowd of onlookers behind them, and kayakers and paddleboarders go by on the pond. The closing credits thank Bartlett’s Farm, the Nantucket Land Bank, Aquatic Control Technology and limnologist Ken Wagner.

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Harvester Demonstration Reception

Harvester Demonstration Reception

Bob Williams speaking to the crowd at Hummock Pond, beside the pile the harvester has built. He sets out the rest of the season — a phragmites mitigation pilot on Long Pond at the end of the month, and a federal grant for a blue-green algae project on Miacomet Pond over the winter — and makes the case for the work: a pond eleven thousand years old, turned murky and swampy by a century of septic systems on sandy soil, fertilizer, household products and acid rain; three ways to answer it, of which dredging is too expensive and hydro-raking too complicated, which leaves harvesting; and a goal that is not to clear the pond of weed but to slow the human acceleration of a natural process. The machine is an HP 5-130, its five-foot reciprocating bar cutting four feet under the surface onto a conveyor. He thanks the Coalition’s advisory board, the Land Bank, the Land Council, the Conservation Foundation, the town’s natural resources department and the town manager, and John Bartlett, whose front loader arrived the morning after a ten-o’clock-at-night text and who will compost the harvested weed back onto the farm’s fields. Selectman Rick Atherton speaks for the town, and the Land Council’s water quality specialist closes on the multi-tool approach: pond openings that flush the pond and draw clean salt water in, the harvester taking nutrients out load by load, the fertilizer regulations on the Board of Health’s books, and septic systems pumped on a regular schedule.

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Restoring the Shorelines
Hummock Pond North Phragmites Mitigation

Hummock Pond North Phragmites Mitigation

Half a minute of before-and-after stills, five years into an eight-year restoration: more than fifty acres of invasive phragmites eradicated along the northern shoreline of Hummock Pond, where the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, Mass Audubon, the Nantucket Land Bank and the Pond Coalition have worked as a team to treat the entire shore. The water column is to be treated for harmful algal blooms in the spring, and the restoration of the pond finished in a few more years.

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Hummock Pond Narrows Phragmites Mitigation

Hummock Pond Narrows Phragmites Mitigation

Twenty-five seconds, hand-held, at the narrows: the Gardner property shoreline first, cleared and open to the water, then a pan across to the far side of the pond, still walled in by phragmites.

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Pre & Post Hummock Pond Phragmites Eradication

Pre & Post Hummock Pond Phragmites Eradication

A split screen — July 2017 above, July 2019 below — moving along the same stretches of Hummock Pond shoreline. In the upper frame a continuous wall of phragmites; in the lower, the same bank cut back to open water, with houses, docks and the far shore in view again. It ends on the Coalition’s mark and a line: this is a five-year campaign, and we will keep you posted.

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White Goose Cove, Long Pond Phragmites Removal

White Goose Cove, Long Pond Phragmites Removal

Bob Williams on site with Keith Gazaille, the environmental contractor on the job, for a foliar herbicide application over about 3.9 acres of invasive phragmites along the western shoreline of White Goose Cove at Long Pond. The amphibious Marsh Master can cover ten to fifteen acres a day, so the spraying takes only a few hours; the herbicide travels from the leaves down into the roots and kills the plant. A crew returns about a month later, once the first frost has knocked the stand back, to cut the dead stalks with a hydraulic blade cutter and leave the mulch in place, which speeds the natural return of native plants. Gazaille, who is used to jobs running to several hundred contiguous acres, calls four acres a small one, and praises the detail the Conservation Commission put into the permit conditions — both the potential impact of the herbicide and the regrowth that follows it.

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Long Pond Pilot Project for Phragmites Eradication

Long Pond Pilot Project for Phragmites Eradication

Long Pond, 16 September 2015, on Land Bank property north of the Massasoit Bridge. Bob Williams talks with Rachel Freeman, the Nantucket Land Bank’s environmental coordinator and the project’s point person, about why an acre of phragmites was treated as a pilot: to establish for themselves that the method is safe and effective. Water quality is sampled in a control area and a treatment area, before and after the application; the plant species present are recorded the same way; and a line of drift posts tracks whether the herbicide moves off the site. Keith Gazaille, project manager at Aquatic Control Technology, explains the application itself — a glyphosate-based herbicide sprayed at about a 1.5 percent solution onto the leaves, absorbed into the root system for systemic control, with the full effect not expected until the following spring. The second half returns on 25 October, with drone footage along the shoreline, as the dead stalks are cut so native plants can recolonize.

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