Running Past the Marsh: Choosing a Trail That Protects It

The Shortcut Through Cattail Marsh

1The Westbrook Middle School cross-country team trains on a 3.0 km loop in the town's nature preserve. Part of the loop runs along the edge of Cattail Marsh and crosses Willow Brook, the stream that drains the marsh and flows on to the town's reservoir. Over the years, that stretch has become a wide strip of bare mud. After rain, runners swing around the puddles, so the path keeps getting wider, and several runners have twisted ankles there.

2The marsh does a lot for the town. Its plants slow down rainwater and trap soil and other particles before they reach the brook, which helps keep the reservoir water clean. The marsh also stores floodwater, and red-winged blackbirds, marsh wrens and several kinds of frogs nest or lay eggs among its cattails in spring. Its plants also shelter insects that many young birds eat.

3Coach Hamid Sadeghi asked the preserve manager how to fix the trail without harming the marsh. Team captain Lucía Ortega and two teammates then helped a preserve biologist collect data. In May they counted bird nests in equal-sized plots at three distances from the path. Each plot was a 20 m by 20 m square, and all three were in the same kind of cattail stand. After a heavy storm, they also collected water from the brook just above and just below the place where the path crosses it, and the biologist measured the sediment, the soil carried in the water.

4The preserve has a grant of at most $50,000 for the project, and the team's training loop must stay between 3.0 and 3.5 km long. Among the designs that stay within those limits, the board will choose the one that does best at keeping the brook clean, protecting nesting birds and giving runners safe footing, in that order of importance. The path must also be usable in every season. A preserve engineer estimated how each of four designs would do.