The irony of the urban canopy shows itself sharply on poor air days. A network of 7,000 street trees — dominated by pin oaks — pulls nearly 12,000 pounds of pollutants from the air each year. Yet pin oak (Quercus palustris) ranks among the northeast's most ozone-sensitive species, and today's unhealthy ozone levels are doing exactly what the trees are meant to prevent: damaging the leaf tissue that filters the air.
Chronic ozone exposure wounds leaves from the inside, reducing their ability to photosynthesize and to absorb the particulates the canopy depends on to be effective. The trees keep working — they have no choice — but at a rising metabolic cost. With today's air quality forecast to persist through the end of the month, and every surface water body in the area federally impaired, the strain accumulates quietly in the leaves overhead.
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The Hackensack Meadowlands hold one of the more significant terrapin populations remaining in the region. The estuary provides the right combination of brackish tidal habitat and upland nesting areas, though development has reduced and fragmented both. Terrapins here share their wetland margins with red-winged blackbirds singing from the phragmites tops, with great blue herons standing still in the shallows, and with ospreys working the open water above. All of these species are part of the same tidal system, drawing on the same productive estuary in different ways. The terrapin's role is particular: she moves nutrients and energy between the water column and the upland, and her eggs, whether they hatch or are predated, become part of the terrestrial food web above the tide line.
If you are near any of the tidal margins around Jersey City right now, look at the sandy edges, the gravel shoulders near marsh, the dry elevated ground above the water. A nesting female leaves a distinctive track, a wide drag mark with alternating flipper prints on either side. The morning light is still low enough to cast shadows across the ground. You might find one.
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have all been recorded around this part of the harbor in the past two months, cormorants among them on Quay and Franklin Streets, a few blocks from the site. A walkway is what turns all of that from something happening out of sight into something people can watch, learn and speak up for.
The DEC is accepting comments through August 27. Comments go to Jeanette Rodriguez at DEC Region 2 (
dep.r2@dec.ny.gov
,
718-482-4997
). This is the window to shape how the space gets built: where the walkway meets the water, whether the edge invites people to stop and look at the river or just pass by it, and what habitat the new bulkhead and riprap offer below the waterline.
The
Newtown Creek Alliance
, a watershed group based nearby at the Newtown Creek-East River confluence, works this exact stretch of shoreline and would be a natural voice on how the access is designed. Anyone who uses this waterfront has until August 27 to weigh in.
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