Georgia Conservancy-led salt marsh restoration projects
Georgia Conservancy is leading efforts from partners across the state to protect, restore, and conserve salt marsh habitats as a part of the South Atlantic Salt Marsh Initiative. Currently, our team is leading several restoration projects in coastal Georgia to meet these goals. These projects use nature-based solutions to address community concerns such as flooding, erosion, and storm damage.
What are nature-based solutions?
Georgia’s coast is home to beautiful beaches, pristine salt marsh, and some of the most vulnerable communities in the United States. Climate change, natural disasters, coastal flooding, and erosion threaten the homes and livelihoods of Georgians and the habitats of coastal species. These threats are often an even more significant hazard for low-income areas.
Nature-based solutions are techniques for addressing community threats such as erosion and flooding that blend local ecology and engineering. For example, using native plants in combination with well-draining soil and substrates integrates ecological and engineering principles to create rain gardens, or bioretention cells. This collaboration between engineering and ecology benefits the community by reducing standing water after heavy rainfall, promoting the expansion of local and native plants, filtering runoff nutrients and pollutants, and increasing overall community resilience to flooding events.
Nature-based solutions like bioretention cells are intended to use engineering techniques to work with nature rather than against it, improving a community’s connection to nature and increasing future resilience to climate threats.
Other nature-based solutions include living shorelines, an alternative to bulkheads when fighting coastal erosion. In heavily eroded coastal areas, living shorelines can use natural materials like oyster shells, salt marsh vegetation, coir, and, in cases of heavy erosion, low-profile concrete materials that mimic nature to mitigate erosion and prevent future damage. Living shorelines are beneficial because they absorb wave energy rather than reflect it, and they connect lowland and upland habitats in a way that mimics natural salt marshes. This technique also promotes salt marsh expansion, which is important for protecting these habitats from inundation due to sea level rise.
Nature-based solutions strengthen community resilience and benefit human and biological communities by:
- preventing unnecessary loss of life and property, disruption of local economies, and damage to cultural heritage sites from storms or climate threats
- re-connecting people with nature while improving community or property infrastructure
- improving water quality and habitat availability for important coastal flora and fauna
Howard Coffin Park Living Shoreline and Berm
Location: City of Brunswick, Glynn County
Howard Coffin Park is Brunswick’s largest park and contains numerous community amenities, soccer fields, community pavilions, and a popular ½ mile fitness trail. A small tidal creek flows through the park, past a BGC Joint Water & Sewer Commission well pump. This creek acts as a primary stormwater runoff channel for the city and connects directly to marsh habitat under Highway 17. The creek banks near the well pump and water station are currently eroding due to stormwater runoff and high-tide flooding. This high-tide flooding also affects the community’s access to the fitness trail, which is often covered with water during high tides and heavy rainfall.
This living shoreline project will use a combination of Flexamat, Coir Mat, recycled oyster shell, and natural vegetation to prevent further erosion and reestablish bankside habitat, protecting the well pump station. A berm will be constructed to protect the fitness trail, restoring community access during high tide events. In addition, the undersized culvert connecting the east and west portions of the creek will be replaced with a bottomless box culvert, allowing wildlife and vegetation to be more connected throughout the creek. The support of the Georgia Power Foundation will fully fund the design, permitting, and construction of this living shoreline for one of the most underserved cities in coastal Georgia.
Project Status: This project, which is funded by the Georgia Power Foundation, is currently under construction with completion expected by the end of July 2026. Installing this living shoreline and berm, upgrading the road culvert, installing stormwater drainage from the parking lot, and burying the water and sewer lines will improve water retention during storm events in the tidal creek, prevent flooding in the park’s recreational areas, provide habitat for the abundant oyster population in this watershed, and protect critical infrastructure. Additionally, with the native marsh vegetation and oysters that make up the living shorelines will filter stormwater runoff from the city before it impacts adjacent marshes.
Jaycee Park Wetland Rehabilitation
Location: City of Tybee Island, Chatham County
Freshwater ecosystems are a rare, but critical habitat, in coastal Georgia. Birds like egrets, herons, ducks, and storks use freshwater wetlands along the coast as sources of drinking water or as places for nesting, feeding, or sheltering. However, coastal freshwater habitats are heavily threatened by saltwater intrusion and coastal development.
Jaycee Park is the largest park within the City of Tybee Island, GA. The park offers recreation fields, walking trails, a disc golf course, a playground, and community pavilion spaces for local island residents and 1.7 million+ visitors to Tybee Island annually. A freshwater creek runs through the park and serves as a stormwater retention system for the local area, which is known to experience significant flooding during heavy rainfall or storms. The creek also experiences saltwater intrusion from the adjacent marshes under Solomon and Van Horne Ave., threatening the freshwater status of this habitat.
Project status:
With financial support from Amazon’s Project Lorax, Georgia Conservancy and the City of Tybee partnered to design a wetland rehabilitation project along the creek of Jaycee Park. This project will install an array of freshwater and salt-tolerant vegetation along the 700 linear feet of the southern portion of the creek. By using local plant species tolerant of both freshwater and saltwater, this creek will continue to thrive as a coastal freshwater wetland for bird species, without permanently limiting salt marsh plants from migrating into the park if threatened by sea-level rise. The addition of these plantings also filters stormwater runoff from the local area of pollutants and excess nutrients, and increases the park’s stormwater capacity with a lower risk of erosion. The initial phase of this project, which included removal of the invasive vegetation, has been completed. Native vegetation planting is scheduled for Fall 2026, after the summer tourism season.
Martha Randolph Stevens Park Living Shoreline
Location: Unincorporated Liberty County, Seabrook Village
More than 50 years ago, 11.8 acres of upland and salt marsh were gifted to African-American trustees of Liberty County, GA, who established the Martha Randolph Stevens Park. Locals affectionately refer to it as “The Public Landing” or “Stevens Landing,” where people gathered for swimming, crabbing, cooking, weddings, family reunions, and more. The Public Landing and surrounding salt marsh are a treasured relic and landscape in an underserved community that has had little voice in the future of their historic land. However, over the following decades, the property was repeatedly vandalized by members of the surrounding communities. The cost of repeated repairs was too high for the community to sustain, and the park was abandoned.
In 2021, the Seabrook Village Foundation began restoration efforts at the park to preserve its history and reopen it to the community. However, after completing $60,000 in renovations to its community center, a site inspection revealed that erosive currents and stormwater runoff had created a dangerous cliff and a destabilizing gully. The severe erosion of the banks of the tidal stream posed a threat to both the restored building and public safety, and the park was closed once again.
Through a partnership between the Seabrook Village Foundation and Georgia Conservancy, the Martha Randolph Stevens Park project emerged as an urgent need and top community priority due to the imminent property damage and habitat loss. In addition to the current challenges, SASMI GIS Analysis and SLAMM modeling demonstrate that the park will be essential in facilitating future marsh migration.
Together, the Seabrook Village Foundation and Georgia Conservancy are working to preserve this cultural relic and restore waterway access for a vulnerable community by constructing a 300-foot living shoreline and a bioretention area. The project prevents stream bank erosion, restores oyster habitat, and eliminates structural threats to the community center caused by erosion.
Project status: The initial phase of living shoreline construction at Martha Randolph Stevens Park was completed in November 2025. This phase graded the heavily eroded banks to an appropriate slope and stabilized them with “Flexamat” material – a low-profile, gridded concrete mat. Our team also added bioretention cells, also called rain gardens, to naturally filter water run-off from the community center.
In Spring 2026, the next phase of construction will begin as our team prepares for the oyster growth season. Recycled oyster shell will be added to the shoreline to act as habitat for oyster reef growth, and salt marsh vegetation will be replanted in the spring growing season.
Oyster shells for this project were recycled from all over the state by our partners at Shell to Shore and our local partners at the Seabrook Village Foundation. In March, over 30 volunteers gathered to bag up these shells into biodegradable mesh net bags! These volunteers bagged more than 300 bags of shell, weighing about 30 lbs each, and they will be placed on the outer edges of the living shoreline to encourage natural oyster reef growth.
When this project is complete, this oyster-based living shoreline will prevent future erosion, restore marsh vegetation and oyster reefs, and be used as a coastal ecology teaching tool for local summer camps and classes. These benefits allow this community to enjoy coastal access for generations.
Click here to read more about the Martha Randolph Stevens Living Shoreline
