Ecologists race to save Delmarva beach plant

http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20100920/NEWS/100920020/Ecologists+race+to+save+Delmarva+beach+plant

INDIAN RIVER INLET — Christine Riblett makes the trip from Newark to the Delaware Seashore State Park every summer to look for the pint-sized seabeach amaranth.

The average beachgoer is unlikely to notice it underfoot, but the red-stemmed, wrinkly-leafed plant captivates the ecologists and volunteers who search for it.

Participating in the annual amaranth count is similar to an Easter egg hunt, Riblett said.
A glimmer of hope

Although this year’s survey results have been troubling, Savage said the amaranth has recovered from worse.

For years, the plant was thought to have disappeared from Delmarva until its reemergence in the late 1990s. It was listed as a federally threatened species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service in 1993.

“Looking back, in 2004, we found two plants, but the next year we found 69,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ll get them back, but they’ve recovered before.”

Although Hurricane Earl took a toll, Bailey said the surviving Delaware plants were able to seed for next year’s crop.

“Being an annual plant, they got done what they needed to do to get through the season,” he said.

Violi said this fall’s mapping project may bring changes to how the plants are managed and possible replanting efforts that focus on locations where the amaranth is most likely to survive.

“If it seems likely to go extinct in five or 10 years, that may be one way to sustain the seabeach amaranth,” she said.

Restoration ecologist Wayne Tyndall, of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, said the Assateague surveys should give researchers a better idea of how to manage the species.

Because the amaranth is native to the area, he said he’s confident it can recover from the habitat loss and dune stabilization projects that first sent it on a path toward extinction in the 1960s.

“It’s habitat – the overwash flats and upper portions of beaches – have been slowly recovering,” he said. “As the island recovers from stabilization activities, it should recover as well.”

This year, Violi said surveyors found just over 200 plants in the Maryland portion of Assateague Island.

In the neighboring Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, biological technician Eva Savage said surveyors didn’t find any amaranth plants for the first time since the surveys were conducted in 2001.

Savage said last August’s Hurricane Bill may have contributed to the disappearance of the plant, although in recent years its population has hovered around five throughout the refuge’s 14,000-acre expanse.

In Delaware, wildlife biologist Matthew Bailey, of the state Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, said this year had yielded 25 plants along the coast, an average year.

“If the (decline) became a trend for a number of years, it would be concerning,” he said. “On a site-by-site basis, they can really fluctuate, so I’m not sure if it’s an alarming trend.”

An umbrella species

With hurricane season now in full swing, Bailey said one of his concerns is that storm surges could wash the plants and their seeds out to sea.

“They are definitely vulnerable to being washed away, because we’ve seen it with some of the big storms in past years,” he said, noting that last year’s Hurricane Bill left one lone survivor on Delaware’s beaches.

Hurricane Earl, the first major storm to hug the coast this year, wiped out 10 of the plants, not nearly as many as Bill, Bailey said.

The forces of nature only compound the forces of man in imperiling the plant, Bailey said.

“Shoreline development has knocked back its habitat up and down the Atlantic coast,” he said. “The stabilization of dunes, by putting in Riprap or other hardening structures, makes the area unsuitable for (the amaranth).”

Violi said a healthy amaranth population would bring many benefits to the coastline, including a food source for deer, horses and insects; a habitat for other endangered species like the piping plover; and some protection from erosion.

“It serves as an umbrella species,” she said. “If you protect the amaranth, you also end up protecting many other species that are also endangered or threatened because of the sensitivity of that habitat.”
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A glimmer of hope

Although this year’s survey results have been troubling, Savage said the amaranth has recovered from worse.

For years, the plant was thought to have disappeared from Delmarva until its reemergence in the late 1990s. It was listed as a federally threatened species by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service in 1993.

“Looking back, in 2004, we found two plants, but the next year we found 69,” she said. “I don’t know if we’ll get them back, but they’ve recovered before.”

Although Hurricane Earl took a toll, Bailey said the surviving Delaware plants were able to seed for next year’s crop.

“Being an annual plant, they got done what they needed to do to get through the season,” he said.

Violi said this fall’s mapping project may bring changes to how the plants are managed and possible replanting efforts that focus on locations where the amaranth is most likely to survive.

“If it seems likely to go extinct in five or 10 years, that may be one way to sustain the seabeach amaranth,” she said.

Restoration ecologist Wayne Tyndall, of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, said the Assateague surveys should give researchers a better idea of how to manage the species.

Because the amaranth is native to the area, he said he’s confident it can recover from the habitat loss and dune stabilization projects that first sent it on a path toward extinction in the 1960s.

“It’s habitat – the overwash flats and upper portions of beaches – have been slowly recovering,” he said. “As the island recovers from stabilization activities, it should recover as well.”

“It’s fascinating because the seeds can lie dormant for a very long time,” she said. "It can seem for a while like there’s nothing out there and there’s no hope.

“Then a year comes along when the conditions are just right and you see quite a few plants,” she said.

Since its rediscovery on Delmarva’s beaches in 1998, the endangered seabeach amaranth – which stands at a scant few inches tall – has struggled at the brink of extinction.

Now, ecologists are working to determine how close to the edge it actually is.

An uncertain future

While the amaranth, which was designated as a threatened species in 1993 under the Endangered Species Act, is the subject of ongoing studies across Delmarva, one park is going further.

“We’re trying to get a model that could help us determine if the population is viable and what the probability of extinction is in the future,” said Helen Violi, an ecologist at the Assateague Island National Seashore.

Using GIS mapping software, Violi said park officials plan to overlay various data sets – including elevation, rainfall totals and storm surges – on top of the locations where amaranth has been found.

Once the work is completed in October, she said the data should give researchers a better idea of whether the amaranth can survive in the region and what factors are contributing to its possible demise.

Between 2000 and 2002, she said almost 1,000 of the shrub-like amaranth were planted at the foot of the dunes, in less-traveled areas of the park.

“Since then, we’ve been doing annual surveys,” she said. “The population was growing until 2007, and then we started seeing a decline.”