Months of extremely dry weather last summer and fall affected every corner of Delaware’s natural resources.
But not all of those effects were bad.
Covering thousands of acres in southern Sussex County into Maryland, the Great Cypress Swamp is the largest forested, freshwater wetland on the Delmarva peninsula, but trees that thrive in dryer conditions are moving in to threaten swamp-friendly trees like bald cypress.
Delaware Wild Lands manages over 10,000 acres of the swamp, and when dry weather hit last year, they saw opportunities to help continue the preservation of the swamp. .
"We were able to get in there and remove some of those undesirable tree species, which then helped us farther our restoration initiative in the future," said Marcia Fox, executive director of Delaware Wild Lands.
The dry weather also helped out some animal species, according to Delaware Wild Lands field ecologist Andrew Martin.
“Instead of this deeper standing water, we had shallower pools of water and mud flats and we ended up with a lot of visitation from wading birds in particular," he said.
Martin stresses that more water is always better than less and credits the group’s existing water capture methods in helping the swamp weather the dry conditions.
