The MassBays' Management Committee and staff are thrilled to share some fantastic news: Prassede Vella, longtime scientist and champion of our program, has been promoted to Executive Director of the MassBays National Estuary Partnership. We are so very excited to see her step into this new leadership role!

Prassede brings 20 years of experience in coastal science and management to this role. She joined MassBays in September 2010 as a staff scientist, where she quickly became a driving force behind our science-based approach to tracking, protecting, and restoring estuaries. Over her many years with us, she managed our Healthy Estuaries Grant program, developed a novel Biological Condition Gradient framework, coordinated and chaired various MassBays and external committees, and initiated countless scientific endeavors that persist today. Her work at MassBays has always been grounded in a deep understanding of marine systems and a knack for bringing collaborators together.

As Executive Director, Prassede steps into a new chapter with the same curiosity, dedication, and collaborative spirit we’ve come to know and appreciate. We’re excited to see where her leadership takes MassBays next and grateful to have someone with deep institutional knowledge, scientific credibility, and a vision for organizational growth at the helm. Please join us in congratulating Prassede —we’re looking forward to what’s ahead!

MassBays received funding from EPA and Restore America’s Estuaries to lead a multi-region eelgrass restoration initiative that will plant at least four acres of eelgrass across 6-8 sites using seeding techniques. Our regional coordinators will lead efforts in Gloucester, Beverly, Marblehead, Nahant, Duxbury, and Plymouth. Since the team planted pilot-scale plots last summer, the seeds have been gradually germinating, poking through the sediment surface, and starting to grow. We’ll kick off monitoring of these sites this spring to inform our final selection of sites that will receive full-scale plantings. We’ll also begin tracking light and temperature conditions with continuous data loggers, conduct reconnaissance surveys at the full-scale sites, and track seed maturity at our wild seed-donor meadows. Seed collections will take place in mid-summer using sustainable techniques, and seeds will be processed at DMF’s Cat Cove Marine Lab. Out-plantings will follow in late summer and early fall. 



Want to know more about our techniques? Read our Quality Assurance Project Plan here, and our Infographic here. Reach out to Jill Carr for more information.

Map above: restoration and donor sites

MassBays team planting 2025 pilot sites in Salem Sound.

In Fall 2025, MassBays’ Metro Boston Regional Service Provider, the Northeastern University Marine Science Center, teamed up with Emerald Tutu in East Boston to build a pilot-scale salt marsh nursery pilot. The Emerald Tutu is a grant-funded research group working to design and implement biomass-based coastal protection and restoration infrastructure in East Boston and surrounding areas. Salt marsh cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) was seeded into waste biomass (dead invasive Phragmites reeds and industrial cotton offcuts) to form the bases for prototype living shorelines mats that could be deployed at permitted test sites in East Boston and Lynn.

Emerald Tutu is preparing for spring monitoring to evaluate how different seed sources and biomass types may have affected Spartina survival and growth in the nursery over a harsh winter. Lessons learned from this pilot will inform next steps, which may include a second set of experiments at additional test sites around Metro Boston. For project updates, keep an eye on the Emerald Tutu website this summer, where you can also learn about Emerald Tutu’s past and current coastal resilience work around floating wetlands and living shorelines.  

Above: Laying cotton and phragmites substrate for a salt marsh cordgrass nursery pilot. (photo credit: Gabriel Cira, Emerald Tutu)

Long-term coastal habitat mapping provides important data for tracking changing conditions and health of coastal ecosystems. However, most methods are time intensive and costly. The rise of blue technology offers new means of collecting data more swiftly and with less costly resources. In 2024, scientists from the MassBays' Upper North Shore Regional Coordinator, the Merrimack Valley Planning Commission (MVPC) embarked on a project to test the impact on data quality of integrating new technology into long-term coastal monitoring programs. Using drones, aerial imagery, and LiDAR, the team mapped and tracked marsh edge erosion, persistent marsh wrack deposition, and habitat conditions for potential eelgrass restoration sites in parts of the Great Marsh on the North Shore in Massachusetts. 

Marsh Edge Erosion

Marsh edge erosion is a major contributor to marsh degradation and loss. Since 2015, MVPC and Boston University have been monitoring 19 locations across the Great Marsh to track marsh edge erosion using traditional methods which had limitations. For this project, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) were developed to conduct marsh edge mapping using drones. A total area of 13.32 acres of saltmarsh was mapped across five long-term marsh edge monitoring sites using UAV-LiDAR and UAV-normal-color imagery. Findings from the survey of vertical and horizontal marsh edge (fall 2024 - fall 2025), revealed that winter storms may not be the only cause of erosion. In Essex Bay, 111.24 m³ of marsh were lost over the winter while an additional 43.52 m³ were lost over the summer. Being able to quantify loss as a volume was a substantial advancement in this project, and provided a new and more easily comprehended metric to use when communicating scientific results to a range of audiences.

Chronic Marsh Wrack

The deposition of marsh wrack is a natural, and often cyclical occurrence that brings nutrients to the marsh. However, in recent years, more expansive and persistent wrack mats have been observed locally. While wrack deposition can be beneficial, large and thick “mega” mats can suppress natural vegetative growth causing die-off and marsh subsidence. Large wrack deposition was first observed in Great Marsh in 2022 and mapped on foot using a hand-held GPS at two locations in Salisbury and Ipswich. This method was time intensive and delineating the edge proved challenging. Using UAV imagery, a total of 15.2 acres were mapped each fall and spring to measure aerial extent and track seasonal changes in wrack cover across the two locations and compared to standard field mapping techniques. Results showed more dramatic spatial and temporal changes in chronic wrack in Salisbury than in Ipswich. See the full report here.

Eelgrass Restoration

Eelgrass is a type of seagrass found in subtidal coastal waters in beds or meadows that can span from small patches to hundreds of acres in size. Eelgrass is a critical marine habitat, providing a range of ecosystem services including nursery beds and feeding grounds for fish and other organisms. While eelgrass has long been a defining feature of Massachusetts coastal waters, it has experienced significant declines over the past decades. To combat local loss, large-scale restoration (through transplanting live shoots or seeding) and enhancement projects have been underway in the Great Marsh since 2013, several of which were supported by MassBays funding. Identifying locations for optimal conditions for restoration efforts is a complex and labor-intensive process. To facilitate this effort, seasonal UAV imagery was acquired across a 40-acre area in Essex Bay. Across the area surveyed, two locations (0.4-1.19 acres) were identified as potential sites for future eelgrass restoration.

Outcomes

The results of this project are encouraging, indicating that integrating new technology in marsh edge, marsh wrack, and eelgrass habitat suitability monitoring can improve data collection efficiency, comprehensiveness, granularity, accuracy, and accessibility, making it a game changer in the field of long-term monitoring. However, traditional field data collection methods will remain a valuable addition to long-term monitoring in coastal habitats as they expand information collection. A combination of UAV and similar technology with traditional (though less frequent) field methods for continued monitoring is likely to be the most effective and efficient way forward. Having good data, more frequently, will enable managers to take preemptive actions or to react faster to changes in coastal habitat conditions before it is too late. Aerial imagery from these studies and associated trends are available in the Healthy Estuaries: UAV Coastal Monitoring Viewer. 

This work was supported by funding from the MassBays Healthy Estuaries Grant Program. Read the full article here:  Using UAV Technology in Enhance Long-Term Coastal Monitoring | MVPC.

To learn more about ongoing projects in the Environmental Program, check out the MVPC website! 

Each spring across Cape Cod, thousands of river herring migrate from the ocean to freshwater streams and ponds to spawn. Tracking these migrations helps scientists and managers understand how fish populations are responding to restoration efforts and changing environmental conditions. But counting fish runs presents a challenge: no monitoring program can observe every fish moving through a river.

To help illustrate how scientists estimate run sizes from limited observations, MassBays’ Cape Cod Regional Service Provider, the Association to Preserve Cape Cod (APCC), developed a new interactive educational application called The Great River Herring Count. This application simulates a river herring migration across a series of days and times of day and mirrors the real challenges faced by fisheries scientists and volunteer monitors: only a fraction of a fish migration can be directly observed, yet managers still need reliable estimates of the number of individuals in the run.

The game highlights several key scientific concepts used in fisheries monitoring. For example, players quickly discover that sampling only during the busiest time of day - or focusing on a single “hot spot” - can produce misleading estimates. Spreading observations across early, peak, and late portions of the run, and across different times of the day, produces stronger results. This random stratified sampling approach reflects the randomness of fish movements during the day and across different parts of a migration to better capture natural variability. 



While the game is designed to be fun and accessible, it reflects a deeper message: good science depends on thoughtful sampling. Just like in the game, understanding how fish populations are changing in the real world requires careful observation, collaboration, and community involvement. This game will serve as an outreach tool for community engagement in various settings, such as in classrooms, where it introduces students to sampling design, ecological monitoring, and the challenges of estimating wildlife populations in an engaging way, and for volunteers and community members, to whom it offers a window into the scientific thinking behind the Cape Cod River Herring Monitoring Program coordinated by APCC, conducted by a dedicated network of volunteers and supported by MassBays.

A large school of river herring passing up Herring Brook in Pembroke, MA

For centuries, river herring have been a vital part of Massachusetts culture, and each spring millions of river herring find their way into our coastal waters to begin their annual migration up streams and rivers. They are returning to their place of birth to spawn and create a new generation of river herring. However, river herring populations have declined sharply since the early 2000s. As a result, in 2006 the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) implemented a ban on the harvest of river herring from rivers and streams across Massachusetts. While the harvest ban was intended to reduce one stress on these fish (and did not apply to commercial at-sea harvest), they still faced a series of threats including drought, changing climate, shifts in predation, and an inability to access their spawning grounds due to dams or non-operational fish ladders. Herring are a crucial link in the coastal food chain as a source of food for striped bass, bluefish, osprey, herons and other coastal species, as well as humans. Following the harvest ban, many rivers saw increasing numbers from 2012 to 2019, followed by declining and unstable runs from 2020 to 2022. From 2023 to 2025, however, several runs bounced back strongly, including Herring Brook in Pembroke.

To help monitor trends, understand fluctuations, and address some of the problems faced by the river herring population, the North and South Rivers Watershed Association (NSRWA), MassBays' Regional Service Provider on the South Shore seek volunteers each year from late March through early June to help count herring. Counting is conducted in 10-minute blocks, seven days a week, six to nine times a day, at up to five different locations. These counts will help us continue to monitor trends in our local herring population.

2026 is anticipated to be an insightful year for herring counts in the South Shore region on several fronts. Foremost will be understanding the implications of the significant snowpack versus the persistent drought conditions on the runs and consequently on the herring’s ability to reach their favorite spawning grounds (see the NSRWA e-News for details). Secondly, the Veteran’s Park dam and fish ladder are gone! The new channel has been constructed and the project is almost complete. There may be a few challenges counting at this site, but we hope to document fish swimming up the new channel for the first time ever. Lastly, Island Creek in Duxbury is being added to the volunteer count this year. For the past several years, DMF manually moved migrating herring from Herring Brook in Pembroke to the headwaters of Island Creek in an effort to revive that run. The dedicated team at Island Creek hopes to track a successful return of fish this year. 

This critical information on populations of this precious species would not be possible without the dedication of citizen scientists who participate in annual herring counts. So NSRWA and MassBays call on volunteers again this spring to be part of this long-running monitoring program. Volunteer help is needed to count herring at one of six sites throughout the watershed – it only takes ten minutes! Volunteers may choose one of three four-hour time blocks (7am-11am, 11am-3pm, and 3pm-7pm) and count any ten minutes within the time block. Volunteers can sign up for multiple times and multiple sites according to your schedule. Counting will continue through May 30th at all locations except the South River (which ends on or before June 16th). See run locations and details here.



River Herring volunteers at still needed for the 2^nd half of the run.

Sign up to count at one or more sites here! 

Above: Volunteer Erin Levitsky counts herring as the pass up the fish ladder in Pembroke, MA

For decades, blue mussels were one of the most familiar sights on New England’s rocky shores, forming dense beds that supported a web of marine life. A growing body of scientific research paints a starkly different picture today: wild mussel populations in the Gulf of Maine have declined dramatically over the last 40 years. Historic survey data from the 1970s show that mussels once covered up to two-thirds of the intertidal shoreline from Cape Cod to Maine. Today, scientists have documented reductions of over 60% in mussel abundance, and in a few places almost total absence where thick beds once dominated. 

Part of what makes these declines so concerning is that blue mussels are a foundation species, meaning they provide habitat and shelter for small marine creatures, serve as an important food source for shorebirds and fish, and act as natural filters that clean coastal waters. When mussels disappear, the entire intertidal community changes. Seaweeds and barnacles take over while important species lose critical habitat. 

Researchers point to a variety of potential stressors driving this downturn. The Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest-warming areas of the global oceans. Rising air and water temperatures push mussels beyond their comfort zones, increasing stress and mortality. Invasive species like the European green crab also prey upon mussels that are already weakened by heat and other stressors. While long-running monitoring programs like NOAA’s Mussel Watch track contamination and health indicators in mussels, climate-driven changes and pollution remain an overarching concern for this foundational species.

The five regions within the MassBays National Estuary Partnership are tracking blue mussel abundance across the state. While we have started to develop protocols and monitor the rocky shorelines to collect present-day data in each of the five regions, we’re looking to the MassBays network to provide YOUR mussel stories to help us better understand where mussels used to be historically. 

Have you noticed mussels in your area?

If you’ve noticed a change in mussel abundance in the area, please consider taking this brief survey to tell us more!

Take the Survey Here!

Click here to register to attend the

2026 Merrimack River Water Quality Roundtable

Register for APCC's Pond Health talks at appc.org/events