Coastal Habitat Conservation and Restoration

We own and manage over 300 acres of salt marsh on Edisto Island, giving us an important opportunity to be responsible stewards of these habitats and support any needed habitat conservation and restoration efforts. Furthermore, these salt marshes are identified as high priorities for birds and people in Audubon’s Coastal Carolinas Blueprint, highlighting the need for a science-based approach to resilience. To address this need, our Coastal Program began monitoring these marshes in 2025 by collecting data about the sensitive bird and plant species that inhabit them. Monitoring breeding marsh bird presence and abundance is a cost-effective way to gain insight into the condition of salt marshes because marsh birds are habitat specialists that act as indicator species for the health of the ecosystems they rely on for every stage of life. Rapid assessments of marsh vegetation can also provide clues about marsh condition, and by watching trends over time in vegetation cover and breeding marsh bird abundance, we can better understand local marsh health trajectories. These data will help us make informed decisions about managing these habitats and can also help us better support other local conservation partners. Monitoring data will help us understand local population trends of vulnerable tidal marsh bird species as well. 

Additionally, we are working with several partners to restore habitat at a retired shellfish farm on Edisto Island as part of a mitigation project. The habitat restoration is currently in the planning phase, and our role is to provide ecological and land management expertise during the planning and implementation phases and eventually to take over as stewards of the land. As such, our Coastal Program began conducting pre-restoration monitoring at this site in 2025, including breeding marsh bird surveys and rapid vegetation surveys. This data will be used to help inform restoration design and will eventually be compared with post-restoration data to understand how habitat conditions have changed as a result of the project. Lessons learned on this habitat restoration project will provide a model for Audubon and conservation partners to build from to expand similar resilience work along the South Carolina coast.