Campaigns & Cases > Preserve River Ecology > Habitat Protection & Improvement

Habitat Protection & Improvement

An important component of our Hudson River program is monitoring and reviewing proposed and ongoing development projects – both in the Hudson and along it’s shores – that may have adverse impacts on critical habitats.

Riverkeeper participates in several regional policy and advocacy groups that foster long range planning for water quality and critical habitat protection as well as sustainable development. We also support the empowerment of citizens and groups to monitor and engage in development proposals that affect their tributaries, their river, and their communities.

Sprawl Development Hurts the Hudson

Suburban sprawl and large scale waterfront development damage tributaries and the main stem of the Hudson in several ways.

Sprawl

Sprawl is defined by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as “low-density, land consumptive, center-less, auto-oriented development typically located on the outer suburban fringes.”

The Hudson Valley is suffering an onslaught of real estate development at an unprecedented pace and scale. Developers are rapidly building roads, strip malls, office complexes, apartment buildings and residential subdivisions.

Sprawl creates a preponderance of impervious surfaces (roads, parking lots, building footprints). Impervious surfaces devour open space and curtail the landscape’s ability to purify stormwater naturally. Rain collects on impervious surfaces, scours pollutants off roads, gathers velocity, and runs off into the nearest surface waters, damaging the integrity of the Hudson’s headwater streams and impacting the estuary as a whole.

Recent watershed research shows that impervious cover has a profound and often irreversible impact on the quality of aquatic resources. Over thirty scientific studies show that the quality of streams, lakes and wetlands dramatically declines when impervious cover in watersheds exceeds just ten percent.

Sprawl increases traffic, air pollution, noise pollution and infrastructure costs, while degrading water quality, reducing biodiversity and reducing open space.

Waterfront Development

Waterfront development has direct impacts on waterbodies as a result of stormwater runoff as well as dredge and fill of the shoreline associated with the development.
Promoting Responsible Boat Basin Dredging

The Hudson River provides wonderful opportunities for boating. There are dozens of community boat clubs and public marinas along both shores from Manhattan to Troy. But maintaining these facilities in an environmentally-protective manner can be challenging.

The gradual accumulation of silt in boat basins reduces the depth of slips and, without periodic maintenance dredging, would render them unusable. However, due to years of industrial activities on the Hudson, the dredged sentiments may be contaminated and therefore should must be contained in a manner that prevents pollutants from re-entering the environment. The sediment contamination, however, is largely not caused by the boat basins themselves, but by other polluters such as General Electric’s PCB capacitor plants.

Standard practice of decades past was to dump dredged sediments into deeper open water. As this was phased out, the spoils were sent to upland to solid waste landfills for use as cover material.

But today, there are few if any local landfills available to accept these wastes. Thus, due to the scarcity of disposal locations and the extremely high cost of transport and disposal, very few marina operators have been able to obtain maintenance dredging permits over the last ten to fifteen years.

Without dredging permits, some marina operators have resorted to the illegal and polluting method of “prop washing” their slips (i.e. revving a boat’s engine in shallow water to disperse sediments). Meanwhile, more powerful interests, particularly public agencies operating in New York Harbor, are readily permitted to dredge and dispose of spoils in open water or at upland locations.

Riverkeeper is dedicated to working with boaters, marina operators, and New York State’s Hudson River Estuary Program to find a solution that will facilitate environmentally-safe maintenance dredging for recreational boat basins on the Hudson.
Waterfront Development Cases