What do students really know about the city of New Haven and its natural and living resources? Before we engage in learning what students can do to improve their environment, student will first define what they perceive as “their environment.”
New Haven:
Your
Coastal Community explores students’ relationships with their community and New Haven’s water resources. The unit introduces New Haven as an urban ecosystem and defines the student’s environment as one where air, land and water are explored. Through this exploration, we will identify problems within this environment and opportunities for students to improve their environment.
New Haven is an urban ecosystem, a place that includes all living and non-living things, which interact with one another. There are many types of ecosystems that may be as small as a tiny drop of rain water, or as large as the earth. Ecosystems commonly studied include desert, wetland, grassland tropical/rainforest, and polar. Urban ecosystems are relatively new and include all man-made and natural elements—buildings, roads, and parks, as well as trees, wildflowers and insects.
We need to define an ecosystem to better understand the organisms and how they are connected to one another. Living things interact with one another in many different ways. For example, we eat bluefish, bluefish eat smaller fish, and smaller fish eat plants. All members of an ecosystem are related through this food chain. Members of a food chain as well as man-made impacts constitute an ecosystem in this unit. We examine Long Island Sound as one ecosystem that includes the Quinnipiac River Watershed, and estuaries that themselves may be examined as independent ecosystems. The size of an ecosystem is defined by the ecologist who is studying it and is not as important as the understanding of the relationships within the ecosystem, the community.
Like many other cities in the United States, particularly those along the east coast, New Haven has changed tremendously in a relatively short time. As the city has expanded and changed, so too, has the urban community and its demands. As the population in our city has grown, so have demands for housing, food and water supplies, fuel and electricity, transportation, and sewage and waste disposal. Railroads, bridges and highways are built to transport food and raw materials into the city and manufactured goods out. The city community is not self-sufficient, but depends heavily on transportation, energy and new technology to maintain itself. The effect on the environment can be overwhelming.
Another ecosystem, which can be examined independently, or as part of our urban ecosystem, is our aquatic ecosystems that surround the city: Long Island Sound, the Quinnipiac River and New Haven Harbor. We focus on the Quinnipiac River Watershed: which begins as Dead Wood Swamp in Farmington and includes six rivers: the Quinnipiac, Eightmile, Tenmile, Harbor Brook, Wharton Brook and Muddy River. The river empties into New Haven Harbor and Long Island Sound. (Figure 3, Appendix; Additional map resources: CT Department of Environmental Protection; Coastal Resource Maps). These waters hold their own interdependent communities but, as we shall see, their well-being is so affected by the city and the surrounding population centers, they will be included as part of our study of the New Haven urban ecosystem.
The Quinnipiac River flows into New Haven Harbor, which empties into Long Island Sound. The Sound is a natural harbor and an estuary, a place where salt water from the ocean mixes with fresh waters from the rivers and land. The Sound provides a habitat for diverse plant and animal life. It also provides recreational value and serves as a major commercial corridor. This large inlet, 110 miles long, which encompasses 1,300 square miles, empties into the Atlantic Ocean. 577 miles of coastline bordering this harbor. Therefore pollution problems evident in the Quinnipiac River are magnified in the Sound.
Long Island Sound is located in the middle of one of the most densely populated regions in the United States. More than 8 million people live in the Long Island Sound Watershed. Millions come to visit as well. More than $5 billion is generated annually in the regional economy.
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The demands of so many people and business can destroy the sound if its resources are not managed.
Long Island Sound is comprised of a number of smaller ecosystems as well: shorelands, tideflats, beaches and dunes, estuaries and tidal flatlands. Shorelands are important influences on the natural systems of the coastline. The quality of freshwater draining from shorelands determines the salinity and water quality of all coastal waters. The salinity helps determine the types of plant and animal species in the estuaries. Tideflats are sandy or muddy areas exposed at low tide. They support large animal populations as well and microorganisms in the tideflats serve as natural filters for cleaning polluted water. Beaches and dunes protect marshes and uplands from storms and erosion, provide wildlife habitat and provide scenic and recreational value. Tidal wetlands, or salt marshes, trap and store energy in soil and plants. The daily movement of salt water washes microscopic organisms into the estuaries and Long Island Sound, where it serves as the primary link in the food web for marine life. Marshes also are pollution filters and remove contaminants from water flowing through them.
Estuaries are river mouths and bays where fresh and salt water meet. The mixing of waters creates a nutrient-rich habitat favorable to many forms of life, and helps to naturally clean polluted water. Nearly all of the fish in Long Island Sound are in one way or another dependent upon estuaries. Some species use estuaries as reproductive and nursery areas. They also provided habitat for blue crabs, oysters and other valuable shellfish. Because New Haven Harbor is itself an estuary, and we seek to examine the relationship of our urban and coastal ecosystems, we will further examine estuaries via a case study of oysters and the oyster industry.