This photo shows the 10-acre created wetland adjacent to Fort McHenry. The seawall barrier is visible in the upper left of the photo. The wood and trash that accumulates during very high tides and following precipitation events is evident.
	Citizen volunteers work alongside U.S. Park Service employees to remove accumulated woody debris and trash. The Park Service provides heavy equipment to move tires, pilings, and other heavy items that float over the seawall and deposit on-site.

In 1997, Coastal America designated the National Aquarium in Baltimore as a Coastal Ecosystem Learning Center for the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The first priority of the new Conservation Program was to focus its regional programming on the Chesapeake Bay, and the Aquarium is focusing on wetlands restoration activities, and communicating vital conservation messages to the two million people it reaches annually through visitor and education programs.

As a flagship project, the Aquarium identified a tidal wetland adjacent to Ft. McHenry as an ideal living laboratory for research and outreach education on Chesapeake Bay species diversity and ecosystem health. The wetland was created more than a decade ago as mitigation activity, has received little monitoring to date to determine functional success, but has accumulated large amounts of marine debris during normal tidal activity.

The restoration project included the following:

Over the past century, the Chesapeake Bay has lost hundreds of acres of tidal wetlands due to human related and natural factors. The National Aquarium in Baltimore initiated a wetland restoration project on Barren Island to help offset losses and restore critical habitat in the Bay region. In addition, Barren Island represents a unique opportunity to restore habitat by putting dredged material from channel maintenance to beneficial use. The Baltimore District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was completing a periodic channel maintenance activity in the nearby Honga River, which was coupled with this restoration project.

The project included filling large, geotextile fabric "tubes" with sand and placing them strategically just offshore of the existing shoreline. Between these tubes and the shore, material dredged from the channel maintenance activity was pumped to fill in and recreate lowland and intertidal marsh habitat. Once the material consolidated and drained, the Aquarium used its Aquarium Conservation Team of trained and motivated volunteers to complete the planting and monitoring of the Barren Island site.

Adding to this restoration activity, research scientists from NOAA’s Southeast Region Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina, were involved, testing various planting schemes to monitor whether planting arrangement affects the functionality of the restored wetland site. These studies assessed how regular versus irregular plant placement affect the formation of interstitial channels and water flow throughout the wetland, a key path for tidal species that use these habitats.

A restoration project was designed to test this method, and to continue the use of volunteer divers in SAV restoration efforts. The novel approach of using "micropropagation," a laboratory-based method of reproducing numerous propagules from one parent plant, was the first step to provide the needed plant material. Following grow-out of the plant shoots in a controlled setting, material was transplanted to sites selected as having conditions that would support SAV survival.

Although propagules grew very well in sterile lab conditions and developed extensive roots throughout the cocoa mat planting medium, staking the large mats successfully to the soft bottom to counteract wave energy proved troublesome, and roots did not grow down through the mats into soft bottom substrate as well as hoped.