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Conserving Our Submerged LandsBy Ronan Roche and Jay Udelhoven How might underwater mapping techniques, which identify important habitats, lead to true conservation action? Underwater land, often referred to as “submerged land,” has special legal characteristics that distinguish it from terrestrial land. It is common to hear that “you can’t own the bottom” when referring to lands submerged by marine waters. However, lands lying beneath coastal waters have been leased for commercial purposes for centuries and have also been bought and sold in some instances. Worldwide, nations generally hold their submerged lands and coastal waters to be the property of the state. As a result, the majority of marine conservation programs are government-driven and managed. This contrasts with the terrestrial situation, where there is a longer history of private conservation initiatives and considerable private land ownership. However, there are examples worldwide of private conservation initiatives operating in the marine environment. In the United Kingdom, where the Crown Estate associated with the monarchy owns most submerged lands, a private organization, the National Trust, leases or owns over 700 miles of intertidal and coastal lands. This means that in the United Kingdom, excluding Scotland, 10 percent of coastline is protected by a private organization. In Rhode Island, almost all submerged land is publicly owned. Land beneath the high-tide line is subject to the Public Trust Doctrine, a set of rules whose lineage can be traced through Roman to English law. As one of the original colonies, Rhode Island received title to its lands initially as a charter from King Charles II. In 1663, Roger Williams secured from the king a charter for “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” which held a land grant and included title to tidal lands. This was based upon English common law, in which the title and the dominion in lands flowed by the tide were held by the king for the benefit of the nation. The Public Trust Doctrine protects the rights of the public to use submerged lands in certain ways, even if those lands are sold to a private entity. These protected uses generally include fishing, fowling, and navigation. In the Rhode Island Constitution, protected activities include fishing from the shore, leaving the shore to swim in the sea, passage along the shore, and the now somewhat anachronistic activity of gathering seaweed from the shore. However, the constitution also provides that it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to provide for the preservation, regeneration, and restoration of the natural environment of the state. Thus there is a need for balance in the uses of the submerged lands of the state to ful- fill all of these requirements. In Rhode Island, it is the General Assembly that is the ultimate arbitrator between competing uses of submerged lands. Recent work undertaken at the University of Rhode Island (URI) Coastal Institute has been looking into how nongovernmental organizations could conserve submerged land. For example, in some states, The Nature Conservancy—an environmental organization perhaps best known for its use of acquisition and easements for land protection—has already applied its strategies to the underwater environment. It has acquired over 25,000 acres of submerged marine lands for conservation and restoration in North Carolina, Virginia, New York, Texas, and Washington State. One of the first steps in the process, just as on land, is to identify critical habitats and sites in need of protection and restoration. It is here that underwater mapping technologies, such as those being used by the BayMap and MapCoast projects, could help conservation leasing and ownership efforts to determine what areas should be prioritized or which areas contain habitats required for marine species, such as shellfish, to survive. Submerged land in Rhode Island is currently leased by the Coastal Resources Management Council mainly for shellfish aquaculture purposes. There is a long tradition of aquaculture leasing in Rhode Island. In 1844, a shellfish commission was established that had authority to lease submerged lands for oyster growing—by 1880 there were already over 1,000 acres of leased bottom in Narragansett Bay. Production reached a pronounced peak in 1910, when 20,000 acres of submerged lands were leased, and oysters made up more than half of the value of all the fisheries in Rhode Island. More recently, there has been substantial research carried out highlighting the beneficial filtering effects that oysters have on estuarine ecosystems. Chesapeake Bay is one area in which the enormous oyster populations once present are suggested to have had a crucial role in maintaining the clarity and quality of Chesapeake Bay water. There are now major efforts under way to restore these oyster reefs and help improve the ecological quality of Chesapeake Bay. More locally, the R.I. Department of Environmental Management and NOAA have used the settlement from the North Cape oil spill of 1996 to initiate the R.I. Shellfish Restoration Program, which aims to restore scallop, oyster, and quahog populations in Narragansett Bay. However, it is widely acknowledged that much work remains to be done in both conserving submerged resources and restoring shellfish populations, and as we look to the future, private conservation of submerged lands, carried out in partnership with state agencies and informed by underwater mapping efforts, could have an important role to play. Whilst mapping of ecological and oceanographic features is essential to expand current knowledge, an understanding of the ownership and human-use aspects of submerged lands is also needed to determine where appropriate actions such as development or conservation can be carried out. —Ronan Roche is a URI Coastal Institute IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) Project Trainee and a URI Marine Affairs Graduate Student. Jay Udelhoven is Senior Policy Advisor for The Nature Conservancy’s Global Marine Initiative. |
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