Tag: salt marsh restoration (Page 1 of 2)

Fundy Monday

June 3, 2026 / k8sherren

The marquee at the Al Whittle Theatre shows Fundy Monday on the bill

This past Monday we culminated the Bay of Fundy Dykeland case study of NSERC ResNet with a big-screen near-full-house showing of our new short documentary, Sea, Soil, and Soul: The Evolving Bay of Fundy Coastline. It was magic to show it at the lovely Al Whittle Theatre, right behind where my own segments were filmed on the Bishop-Beckwith marshland. This ten-minute video was flanked by an optional survey, so we could understand how it was received, and followed by a great conversation chaired by ResNet principal investigator and documentary producer, Elena Bennett. The star of the movie and the show was Don Webster, a dykeland farmer in the Belcher Street area who sold land so that a section of his marsh could be restored to tidal wetland. Danika van Proosdij of Saint Mary’s and TransCoastal Adaptations, Tony Bowron of CBWES and TransCoastal, and I were also panelists. It was wonderful to see ResNet student alum and partners showing up to celebrate with us, and to have such an engaged group to ask questions. The audience showed such clear love and concern for their dykeland landscapes, and had a strong appetite for information to help them understand its future. Thanks to postdoc emcee Elson Galang, MES assistant Bethany Poltl, the folks from TransCoastal, from the Apple Blossom Festival (we were its final event) and from the theatre itself, for the successful event. Action shots to follow soon.

Late addition: Thanks to Wendy Elliott for the great review in the Annapolis Valley Register: Documentary on evolving Bay of Fundy coastline a fascinating watch. https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/annapolis-valley/wendy-elliott-documentary-on-evolving-bay-of-fundy-coastline-a-fascinating-watch

Ive Velikova at TransCoastal Adaptations also wrote a nice blog post about it.

Nearly a full house at the Al Whittle Theatre for Fundy Monday

New paper on the the limits of ecosystem service assumptions

September 8, 2025 / k8sherren

I’m popping my head up at the end of three weeks being locked out by Dalhousie to share news of a new ResNet paper published this morning in Ecosystems and People, Proximity, benefit transfer and trade-offs: the limits of ecosystem service assumptions in an anthropogenic rural coastal setting. I led this one but had a strong support team, including postdocs Lara Cornejo and Brooke McWherter, and Masters students Sam Howard and Alex Legault. I’m so pleased with the big picture insight we were able to glean from our relatively low-effort survey question about ecosystem service benefits from dykes, dykelands and tidal wetlands around the Bay of Fundy. Very few benefits were associated with proximity, especially for dykelands and tidal wetlands. Very different ‘hotspot’ patterns showed the limits of benefit transfer practices even within relatively close and homogenous places. Where hotspots don’t exist, for instance for tidal wetlands, this does not mean there is not benefit flow: benefits may simply be more distributed. This suggests proximity is a poor predictor of stakeholdership. And finally, assumptions of trade-offs in converting between landforms may not play out as expected: we saw many people getting the same benefits from dykes, dykelands and tidal wetlands. In the face of managed dyke realignment that converts some former dykeland back to tidal wetland, it is useful to learn that the very different landforms seem to many to belong together. With some exceptions (e.g., food, safety), this means that trade-offs may not be as significant as might otherwise be assumed, especially in places where multifunctionality is desired and the dyke remains contiguous and accessible for transportation.

Small multiple maps of hotspots and coldspots for various landforms and benefits (Figure 2 in Sherren et al., 2025, Ecosystems and People).

Atlantic Voice documentary

February 9, 2020 / k8sherren

I had forgotten about my interview with local journalist Moira Donovan until an email from a colleague alerted me that the documentary she produced for CBC’s Atlantic Voice aired this morning. The short (26 minute) documentary is called Breaching Tradition, and does a nice job of telling the story of the challenges facing Bay of Fundy dykelands. Collaborators Danika van Proosdij (SMU) and Tony Bowron (CBWES) are featured as well, and several residents of areas like Nappan and Advocate Harbour whose communities and livelihoods are threatened. Donovan also put together a CBC news article by the same name: Breaching tradition: Salt marshes replacing Nova Scotia’s dikes. This is the setting and challenging management context for the case study I am co-leading in a new 5-year national NSERC project called ResNet.

Institutional entrepreneurship paper

November 27, 2019 / k8sherren

Institutional entrepreneurship in Nova Scotia dyke realignment and salt marsh restoration, illustrated.

Congratulations to Tuihedur for his first paper from the postdoctoral fellowship that sees him working across Dalhousie and Saint Mary’s, out today open access in Sustainability. He used his knowledge of the institutional literature to ground our existing case study of the North Onslow dyke realignment and salt marsh restoration project–first written as the Canadian chapter in an OECD report Responding to Rising Seas–and analyzed it through the lens of institutional entrepreneurship. This involved synthesizing the characteristics of such entrepreneurs from the literature, mapping the existing jurisdictional responsibilities around coastal management in Nova Scotia, and demonstrating how those responsibilities were leveraged in the flood-prone Truro area. Even in the absence of coastal protection legislation, three government departments were able to collaborate to create a new ‘way of doing things’ that served their own objectives with coastal adaptation and flood mitigation as a happy by-product.

OECD Rising Seas report release

March 8, 2019 / k8sherren

OECD ad for new Rising Seas report

Last summer I led the writing of a case study on an innovative coastal adaptation project underway in Truro, Nova Scotia, a place plagued by flooding for decades. A confluence of provincial department interests enabled collaboration on a dyke realignment and salt marsh restoration project in the absence of overarching climate adaptation or coastal protection policy. That case study was Canada’s contribution to an OECD report (featuring case studies also from New Zealand, Germany and the United Kingdom). That report , “Responding to Rising Seas: OECD Country Approaches to Tackling Coastal Risk“, was released this week with a webinar from Paris (slides here). I was proud that OECD’s Lisa Danielson, who also joined us in Halifax for our workshop on the case study last November, highlighted the Truro case during the session. The report features some excellent synthesis of learnings from the four case studies, as well as some novel analysis on cost-benefit ratios for adaptation action for the world’s coasts: sadly rural areas aren’t going to pay for themselves this way, so novel finance options will be needed.

OECD’s Lisa Danielson speaks to the Truro case study at the Rising Seas webinar, March 6, 2019

Fundy Monday

New paper on the the limits of ecosystem service assumptions

Atlantic Voice documentary

Institutional entrepreneurship paper

OECD Rising Seas report release

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