Member Highlight: St. Mary's River Watershed Association

For this Member Highlight, the Coalition’s Maryland State Lead, Marisa Olszewski, interviews Emma Green, General Manager of the St. Mary’s River Watershed Association. Their edited conversation follows.

What city and state is your organization based in?

St. Mary’s River Watershed Association (SMRWA) works across the 73.78 square miles of the St. Mary’s River watershed, which is entirely contained in St. Mary’s County. This benefits SMRWA’s advocacy efforts, allowing us to focus our efforts within a single local jurisdiction. Our work mainly takes place in the field. On a typical day, we will launch a boat from the docks at St. Mary’s College or work at our field site in Lexington Park, but we also have an office in Great Mills. 

Are there other local environmental organizations with which you work?

The St. Mary’s River Watershed, courtesy of the Maryland Department of the Environment.

We are the only environmental organization focusing all our efforts in the St. Mary’s River and its watershed. We work closely with the Friends of St. Clements Bay, the St. Mary’s River Yacht Club, and Coastal Conservation Association. Other organizations we work with include Patuxent Tidewater Land Trust, Greenwell Foundation, Southern Maryland Chapter of the Sierra Club, and the Southern Maryland Resource and Conservation Development. Most of these work across Southern Maryland. 

Tell us about the mission of your organization.

The mission of our organization is to protect, improve, and promote the sustainability of the St. Mary's River Watershed through the collaborative efforts of economic, agricultural, environmental, social, cultural, and political stakeholders in the community.

I love our mission because it specifically compels us to form collaborative partnerships. We do that with all sorts of constituents. We’ve worked with developers and watermen. And we have a board of Directors that represents many diverse interests, but who can all come together in the interest of a healthy river. 

What is one of your current projects you are the most excited about?

A reef ball in its first year.

Our biggest and most successful project is the five-acre reef site. In progress since 2013, it sits adjacent to St. Mary’s College of Maryland. It was built as an experimental reef with different reef substrate including some reef balls and some concrete rubble (including some from demolition of the SMCM Sailing Director’s front porch). Comparative treatments have allowed for robust studies of the site (and its proximity to SMCM means it has been the focus of lots of research). 

One sign of its success: at the start of the project we set the reef balls with larva purchased from Horn Point Laboratory, but now it’s growing just by natural recruitment.  

Who does all the work that goes into placing and monitoring 2500 reef balls? 

It is a whole lot of manual labor. I am the only full time staff. But we host summer interns to assist with our field work. They only spend about 10% of their time in the office. And we’ve been able to do monitoring of the reefs with these interns through the support of a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant. Through that monitoring we discovered on average 75 adult oysters per every square meter and a spat set (baby oysters) too high to count. 

What efforts relevant to clean water are you hoping to focus on in the future? 

A bucket brigade oyster planting in Breton Bay in September 2023.

I am hoping for us to do more in terms of communications, especially around how to build reefs. We would like to produce videos on how to build reef balls and other parts of our work we’ve become experts in. We are also deploying low cost remote water quality buoys with the help of some dedicated volunteers. These buoys will be deployed in areas that the Maryland Department of Natural Resources had been interested in restoring, but the reef sites were too small for them to justify the expense. The buoys will help demonstrate if the sites could be successful for future reef restoration efforts. We’ve previously seen incidents of low oxygen at the sites, so deploying water monitoring buoys will help inform how persistent that low oxygen is. 

What do you hope to gain from being a member of the Coalition?

We appreciate and hope to gain from resource sharing among members, learning new ideas and new approaches to doing things. We appreciate the opportunity being a Coalition member offers to make connections and extend where each organization is lacking capacity.