On July 28, 2009, the students enrolled in the Flax Pond Summer Institute performed field observations at Flax Pond, a salt marsh in Old Field on the North Shore of Long Island in order to contribute to monitoring of long term changes in the marsh. The attached KMZ file documents their observations. Note that the variety of environments at Flax Pond can be discerned within the aerial imagery.

Twenty waypoints were collected in the field with a Garmin GPSMap 76CSx hand-held GPS device with tracking turned on. Observations were made at each of the points and recorded on data sheets. In the lab, the GPS data was saved in GPS eXchange Format (GPX) format. The resulting GPX file was then opened in Google Earth and saved in KML rather than KMZ format so that the data could be edited by hand. In the text editor (Notepad) the <name> elements, which contained the waypoint numbers, were edited to identify the features which had been noted at those locations. The file was saved, opened in Google Earth, then finally saved in KMZ format.


The flood tide delta at Flax Pond on July 21, 2008. Photo by Sandy Richard. Click photo for Flickr photo page.

Coverage by intertidal vegetation at Flax Pond has gradually decreased in area over the past several decades, possibly due to the growth of the flood tide delta, which may be constricting tidal flow, causing the low tide level to be higher in elevation than previously. This could be drowning the vegetation in the lower part of the tidal range.

Flickr Photographs from the Program

For information on this and other possible causes of tidal wetlands loss, see:
NYSDEC: Tidal Wetlands Losses
NYSDEC: Jamaica Bay, Queens County, NY
NYSDEC: Nassau and Suffolk Counties

See also Flax Pond, Old Field, New York.