Unforgettable
For a long time, people thought of the Christina as Delaware’s “forgotten river.” Those who thought of it all, that is.
“Most people who live in this part of northern Delaware probably see it on a daily basis, but don’t even notice it,” said Jen Adkins, of the Christina Conservancy. “I-95 goes right alongside it.”
It lacked the mystique of its tributaries, the iconic upper Brandywine and the “wild and scenic” White Clay. In the wake of the industrial era, its banks were left highly developed, and highly contaminated.
Now after decades of work by numerous organizations to clean up and redevelop the riverfront, the Christina River is at a turning point.
“There’s this feeling that some rivers are so polluted, they are just never going to be healthy again,” said Adkins. “But we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for the Christina River.”
That light came into view a year ago this month, when the Delaware Department of Natural Resource and Environmental Control (DNREC) convened numerous agencies, partners, and scientists working in the watershed at a workshop to take stock of progress.
Adkins said there were two “eye openers” at that meeting: one, that a clean river was within reach — “as in, within our lifetimes” — and two, that with all the focus on cleaning up and redeveloping land, no one had really been focusing on the river’s ecological potential.
“That’s where the concept for this plan came from,” Adkins said, referring to the Lower Christina-Brandywine River Remediation Restoration and Resilience Plan — CBR4 for short — a recipient of a 2020 Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund grant. The plan will lay out a blueprint for completing the transformation of the lower Christina River into a thriving ecosystem that can sustain the communities of wildlife and people that depend upon it.
“Some of Wilmington’s most historic and vulnerable neighborhoods are located along the banks of the lower Christina and Brandywine rivers” — the latter converges with the Christina right before it meets the Delaware — “including Southbridge, and the East Side and Northeast,” Adkins said. Alongside them are some of the city’s newest neighborhoods, where Wilmington’s Riverfront Development Corporation has transformed former industrial sites through cleanup and redevelopment.
Long-time residents of these neighborhoods, predominantly African American and working class, have faced public-health threats from contamination, and threats to their homes and infrastructure from chronic flooding. They have also been a driving force behind efforts to address these problems. In 2018, the City of Wilmington received a nearly $3 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to support the South Wilmington Wetland Project, known as the wetland park.
Slated for completion this spring, the project will restore 14 acres of degraded wetland to a high-functioning freshwater tidal wetland habitat with a trail system, enhancing coastal resiliency, improving soil and water quality, and restoring habitat for a variety of fish and aquatic wildlife. The wetland park will also include boardwalks and paths that link up with the walkways and bikeways of the Riverfront.
Adkins explained that the vision behind the CBR4 plan is to build on and connect projects including the wetland park, the Russell W. Peterson Urban Wildlife Refuge just up river, a new multi-site national park that includes Old Swede’s Historic Site, and even other Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund projects, like work to restore fish passage led by Shad 2020 on the Brandywine.
“There’s a lot going on in this area, and there’s a real opportunity to look at this system holistically — to make a plan where the river and its health are central,” she said.
That plan will build on others underway in the city, including implementation of a new comprehensive plan and future riverfront redevelopment. “As new sites develop, we can work with the Riverfront Development Corporation to get projects on the ground that have mutual benefits for people and wildlife — projects they can implement as part of their development.”
There is evidence that the demand from wildlife is growing in the area. At the workshop last September, Delaware Department of Natural Resources presented the results of fish surveys they had conducted in the Christina.
“I was just amazed at how many fish are here — American shad, river herring, muskie — and how much their numbers are increasing already with improving water quality,” Adkins said.
What’s the draw? The Christina offers something unique. “It’s the last true freshwater system in Delaware — everything down along the bay has some level of salt-water intrusion at this point,” explained Matt Sarver, an ecologist who will be leading the terrestrial and wetland habitat restoration aspects of the project. Another partner, the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, will be heading things up on the aquatic side.
“It’s key habitat, and there are a number of species of greatest conservation need, both state and regional, that are closely linked to those tidal marshes, including some species that aren’t really found anywhere else in the state,” he said.
In addition to restoration, Sarver will help organize some of the community engagement aspects, including a citizen-science effort to help fill in the blanks about native species that are returning to the area as the prospects improves.
“I’ve been out to an enhancement project area near the landing for the Kalmar Nyckel (a tall ship that serves as a kind of floating classroom) a few times, where we got funding to do significant planting of native species,” he said. “The ecological uplift there is pretty amazing: the insect diversity, the migratory birds that are stopping to feed — there was nothing there before.”
At sites with no formal monitoring, data that documents this kind of recovery can help make the case for future projects.
“These little postage-stamp size projects can be really significant, particularly for invertebrates like native bees and monarch butterflies, when you start to piece them together across the landscape,” he said. All the better if residents are partners in collecting this data, which they can do with apps like iNaturalist.
“We’re excited to get people thinking differently about the river here in Wilmington, as a living, wild resource,” Adkins said.
The grant program comes at the perfect time to support this transition.
“If we had tried to do something like this 10 or 15 years ago, we couldn’t have done it. There were so many underlying issues that had to be addressed first,” Adkins said. “Now we have this opportunity to come up with a forward looking plan.”
Far from forgotten, the Christina is the future of South Wilmington.
This story is part of an ongoing series highlighting projects supported by the Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund that show when it comes to creating a sustainable future for wildlife and people, the whole is great than the sum of its parts.
