ERIC SANDERSON: If you had sailed up
the Bronx River in 1609, you would
have seen huge, thick forests, ancient forests
with huge American chestnut trees
and tulip trees, all kinds of fish
in the river, huge shellfish at the mouth of the river,
big oysters and clams.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
The Bronx River is a river that has
a long history of degradation and pollution,
physical changes, and then changes
to the natural environment, to the animals and the plants that
live around the river.
And there's efforts now underfoot-- it'll probably
take hundreds of years to fully implement
to try and reconstruct and rebuild the river from sort
of the bottom up.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ELAINE FELICIANO: One of the things
that we do out here on the Bronx River is bank stabilization.
CONNELL RICHARDSON: And erosion control.
ELAINE FELICIANO: We do some invasive removal.
CONNELL RICHARDSON: And we help bring back and restore habitat.
MACCEAU MEDOZILE: When we're talking about restoration,
what we have in mind is a picture from the past,
and we are trying to bring the river back
to that look or that stage.
ERIC SANDERSON: And one of the ways we can do that
is by looking at historical maps,
like some of the ones I have here.
So this map, for example, is from the American Revolution.
There's a little note here that the infantry could cross here
at low tide.
Here's the Bronx River coming down here.
These are all extensive salt marshes, estuaries for fishes,
and things that protect us from floods and so forth.
This is a map from 1851.
This is more about real estate.
Here's where Moe Paisley lived and W. Watson.
And then it shows what we're interested in,
which is the Bronx River.
And once we find the historical maps in a map
archive or a library, we scan them,
and we take it into the computer and we
do a process called georeferencing.
So we try and fit the map to a set of coordinates,
like latitude, longitude, or something like that.
One place that restoration's occurring on the Bronx River
is the Concrete Plant Park.
It's a former concrete factory.
So here we have the Bronx, and I have
these aerial photos turned on.
That is the Concrete Plant Park, this white bit
alongside the Bronx River.
And if we zoom in, here's the subway coming across
on the top of Westchester Avenue.
And this green fringe here, that's actually a salt
marsh restoration and bank development project.
And if I turn on the historical reconstruction,
you can see this all, once upon a time,
was salt marsh way back here, way up past the subway station.
And this is forest up here, and across the way
was another big stand of forest, and the salt
marsh as nearly far as you can see.
So we use all this kind of information
to reconstruct the past environment.
We take into account the physical landscape,
the topography and water courses,
and then fill in the biological parts, what the ecosystems were
and then what the species that were living in those ecosystems
were.
By looking at these maps and looking
at these reconstructions we've done on the computer,
it gives people an idea of what actually might be possible.
JANINE HARRIS: We're working on a shellfish restoration
project.
There are live oysters that live within this estuary
environment, and we're trying to offer
them more habitat to grow on.
So we're just placing out some habitat structures
today, clam shell wrapped in plastic mesh bags.
And we're hoping that we see the oysters that are actually
in this water land on our mesh bags and start to grow.
Oysters were historically an important part
of New York City's environment.
They help to filter out pollutants from our water,
and they also form a reef environment,
which creates spaces that fish species can use, crabs will
use for protection, snails.
So not just the oysters are offered protection
by a reef, but many other creatures.
So it's a very important habitat that we're
looking to see if we can kind of increase again
in New York City's waters.
STEPHEN GEPHARD: All right.
Is everybody ready?
Because when this happens, it's going to happen fast.
It's going to be pretty much over in about 20 seconds.
All right, here we go.
Go, Dave.
SPEAKER 1: Open them up.
SPEAKER 2: Here we go.
STEPHEN GEPHARD: It's unlikely that we'll ever
be able to restore the numbers of alewives
to the Bronx River that historically occurred.
But probably what's more important than restoring
the numbers of alewives is just having the species here
to fill that role they had in the ecosystem.
They are the real foundation of the food web.
They're feeding birds and raccoons and river otter.
So we're not just restoring the alewives
for the sake of alewives.
We're restoring the alewives for the sake
of the entire ecosystem.
ERIC SANDERSON: When we try and restore
an ecosystem, or a river in this case,
we're trying to restore it so that it works for as much
of nature as possible.
And so it works for the wildlife and, in the river, plants
and animals, and for people.
And it's not like you snap your fingers
and, poof, salt marsh come back to the river.
It's a lot of hard work, planting one plant
at a time, little tiny restoration
efforts, small victories.
And then eventually we'll build up.
We'll connect with each other and rebuild a river that we
can all enjoy and appreciate.
SPEAKER 3: The health of the river is getting better.
We've been monitoring the river, and the results
are getting better and better.
ELAINE FELICIANO: I've been here for three years,
but we have people from the community that have been here
for over 20 years.
And it counts more when the people from the community,
they come up to you and they even tell you the change.
Wow, This has never looked like this before.
I mean, there used to be cars in here and motorcycles.
And now they're seeing fish.
They're seeing muskrats.
They're seeing birds.
They're seeing families of ducks.
I want everyone to utilize this river.
This is wonderful.
[MUSIC PLAYING]