To celebrate National Tree Day we planted 80 trees on the Stanley Fairgrounds with community members. There were participants from the Stanley Agricultural Society, Stanley Mutual Insurance Company, Ms Humble’s grade 8 class, the Stanley High basketball team and NWAI members & volunteers.

Restoring our riverbanks provides habitat for wildlife and helps fight climate change by sequestering carbon, shading streams, and improving air and water quality. Since 2005, the NWAI has planted at least 30,000 trees, shrubs, and live stakes, restoring over 7 km of shoreline along the Nashwaak and its tributaries with the help of many funders and volunteers over the years.

We would also like to thank our funders; the NB Environmental Trust Fund, the NB Wildlife Trust Fund, Wildlife Habitat Canada, Eco-Action Community Funding Program (Environment and Climate Change Canada) and LUSH Cosmetics. We would like to thank all of our in-kind partners as well ~ the Stanley Agricultural Society provided the restoration site and opened their doors to the community, providing warm apple cider and home-baked cookies. The Canadian Forest Service donated 10 butternut trees for National Tree Day.

The NWAI repaired a 40m section of eroding riverbank bank on Nashwaak Valley Farms in Penniac. We installed a rock toe to prevent undercutting and re-sloped the bank to allow water to spill over into the floodplain. We will plant native grasses, shrubs, and trees. This restoration was part of a larger Atlantic Ecosystems Initiative project taking place in the lower Wolatoq watershed. A number of watershed groups are working on a Restoration Handbook and Toolkit that will be available in spring 2020.

It is recognized by climate change scientists that one of the most effective ways to limit the negative impacts of climate change on freshwater resources is through maintaining naturalized and well-vegetated shorelines with native plants that are resistant to the impacts of a changing climate.

Support for this work was provided by EcoAction – Environment and Climate Change Canada, Atlantic Salmon Conservation Foundation, Lush Cosmetics, NB Environmental Trust Fund and NB Wildlife Trust Fund.

For more details read the media coverage on this project: CBC News Story, CTV News Story

Click below for the video clip on CBC New Brunswick News
August 15, 2019

Click to read the article from the Daily Gleaner

The final report for this project  will be available on our website soon. You can contact our office for a copy.

Do you know what a rain garden is?

A rain garden is designed to collect rain runoff, slow its movement and allow the rain water to filter back into the ground. Rain gardens have various benefits to the environment, for instance, they help prevent erosion by collecting fast moving rain water; and by creating habitat for pollinating insects, birds and other small animals. We used 16 native wetland species such as swamp milkweed, sensitive fern, lungwort and Canada Lily.

We partnered with The Ville to build a rain garden and it was a success thank you to the volunteers that came out from Tidal Impact and the Marysville community. We encourage you to try building your own Rain Garden but please remember to not harvest native plant species to save money. For more information or if you have questions on how to build a rain garden feel free to contact us.

Photo credit: The Ville Cooperative

Are you interested in how we measure the health of the Nashwaak Watershed? We’re starting a new social media series to give you more information about our field work and the data we collect!  Check out our Facebook and Instagram to follow along every Wednesday. This week, we’re starting off with our temperature logger program. This is the third year that we’ve deployed HOBO temperature loggers throughout the watershed. This year we have 37 loggers installed in the Nashwaak and its tributaries that measure the water temperature every 4 hours. If you see one, please leave it be! Find out more information here.

From this information we hope to 1) determine the location of cold water refuges that are important to fish in the hot summer months so that we can restore or protect them and 2) monitor how warm the main stem and the larger tributaries get in the summer and compare those results year to year. The graph below shows the average summer temperature for 2018. The Nashwaak averaged almost 20C last summer while the tributaries were much cooler (16.5C).