September is starting with a bang. APCC has been awarded $15 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Transformational Habitat Restoration and Coastal Resilience Grant to support planning, design, and implementation of five wetland restoration projects on Cape Cod. APCC has spent the past 50 years building our scientific expertise, capacity, and partnerships, to be able to develop, fund and implement major projects like these. This award is the culmination of much of that effort and will support the environmental and clean water initiatives we continue to advocate for on Cape Cod.
Building on our successful partnership-based approach, APCC’s Ecosystem Restoration Program will lead this effort, working in close collaboration with the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve (WBNERR), the Harwich Conservation Trust, the Compact of Cape Cod Conservation Trusts, the towns of Dennis, Mashpee, and Falmouth, and other local and regional partners engaged on these projects. Collectively, the project partners have leveraged an additional $5.25 million in funding to complete this work.
The funding will support salt marsh restoration at Weir Creek in Dennis and Oyster Pond in West Falmouth, along with river and cranberry bog restoration at Hinckley’s Pond in Harwich, Red Brook on the Mashpee/Falmouth border, and the upper Quashnet River in Mashpee. These projects also are intended to complement priority fish passage restoration supported by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service and the Cape Cod Conservation District. This includes replacement or improvement of the fish passage structure at John’s Pond on the Quashnet River upstream of the former bogs, as well as four structures along the Herring River in Harwich both upstream and downstream of Hinckley’s Pond. Together these projects will restore habitat, connectivity and improve resilience from the headwaters to our coastal estuaries.
Funding of this nature is truly transformative. Multi-year funding of this scale is unique and hard to come by. At APCC our goal is to fill critical gaps in capacity and funding, and this award secures funding to support these five projects over the next four years to see them through to completion. The long-term goal of the project is to collectively restore an estimated 220 acres of wetland habitat, 181 acres of pond habitat, and 2.2 miles of river and shoreline habitat.
We are especially proud that APCC’s project was the only one selected by NOAA in Massachusetts and represents roughly 5 percent of the funds awarded nationally. This award reflects the recognition locally and now nationally that APCC’s Ecosystem Restoration Program is second to none and delivers quality projects on time and on budget. More than anything else, this award enables APCC and its partners to deliver meaningful environmental improvement to important resources on Cape Cod.
