Hampton Roads Urban Restoration Program

In 2021, the Hampton Roads Urban Restoration Program was launched as a pilot project to identify the most effective green infrastructure practices for public and private locations in the seven cities. Since its inception, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, along with numerous partners, has completed various projects throughout the region. Below you can find more information on the design, implementation, and monitoring of these projects. 

Living shorelines are a creative and proven approach to protecting tidal shorelines from erosion. The technique consists of planting native wetland plants and grasses, shrubs, and trees at various points along the tidal water line. Plantings are often coordinated with carefully placed bioengineering materials, such as coconut-fiber rolls or oyster reefs. In the short term, hardened structures are an effective method of shoreline stabilization, but they cannot adapt to a changing environment. In addition, it has been proven time and time again that they eventually fail. With increased storm activity and sea-level rise, the life spans of hardened structures will become even shorter and more costly for property owners.  

With the rise in sea level, it is essential to provide enough space for the living shoreline to migrate landward to ensure the sustainability of the project and that nearby ecosystems thrive under changing conditions. Pairing a buffer planting with your living shoreline design will ensure the longevity of the project and bring additional beauty to the space. Riparian buffers often include trees, shrubs, grass, and flowering wetland plants.  Learn more about salt tolerant native plants.  

The McFadden Shoreline was installed in 2021 in partnership with the Elizabeth River Project. It consists of coconut fiber coir logs, loose oyster shells, and native vegetation such as Spartina alterniflora, Spartina patens, and Juncus roemerianus. Volunteers, CBF staff, and ERP staff completed the project in two weeks. The total cost was $9,370. However, the homeowner utilized ERP’s cost share funding and paid only $4,700. Check out some of the before and after shots of the project!

Additionally, in May 2024, CBF and ERP worked together to install a buffer along the living shoreline, which included a variety of marsh hibiscus, seaside tansey, blue wild indigo, little bluestem, and northern sea oats. These additions not only enhance the visual appeal for the property owner but also bring enormous environmental and resilience benefits. When paired with the existing living shoreline from 2021, this buffer created an excellent example of the mosaic approach to restoration. This new holistic perspective looks to restore entire tidal systems rather than focusing on one tidal section!

In May 2024, the owners of a unique and exciting property proposed that CBF install a wetland and upland buffer along Lambert's Creek in Norfolk, Virginia. In recent years, the Weyanoke project owners have successfully eradicated Phragmites from the area with the help of the Lafayette Wetlands Partnership. They also received grant funding from the Coastal Resilience & Tree Fund administered by the Virginia Outdoor Foundation and Wetlands Watch to plant the bare area that the Phragmites once inhabited. CBF jumped at this rare opportunity to plant a low marsh with no sand fill!

The Royall Woods living shoreline was initially installed by another party in 2019. Like gardens, these sustainable shoreline projects are full of living organisms and are subject to environmental processes. As a result, they need routine maintenance to function correctly. In July 2024, CBF staff and volunteers worked to add 30 tons of sand, two 12x10 coir logs, and 300 oyster shell bags over five days. This maintenance project also included the installation of many amazing native plants, including 500 Spartina alterniflora plugs!

The Berner Living Shoreline, located in Portsmouth, Virginia, was installed in 2023. It is a 718-foot project that consists of 400 tons of sand, 2,400 oyster castles, 1,150 bushels of loose oyster shells, 2,500 wetland plant plugs, over 100 saltbushes, and hundreds of flowering upland vegetation.

The project took roughly ten weeks to complete, with the help of more than 90 volunteers and CBF and ERP staff. The total cost was a little over $90,000. Thank you to the Virginia Environmental Endowment, distributed to CBF through the Elizabeth River Project, and the Chesapeake Oyster Alliance for providing funding to complete this project. Below are photos of the hard work that made this project possible.

Throughout this project, CBF staff was excited to help pilot a new innovative product: basalt shell bags! Rather than the typical shell bag,  NATRX company  worked with CBF to create a shell bag made of basalt rock. Basalt is a naturally occurring, common igneous rock made from the rapid cooling of lava. It also makes up over 90% of volcanic rock.

The integrity of these unique bags, which each contained hundreds of recycled oyster shells, was tested during installation and the months following the project's completion. Ideally, larvae would attach to the shells inside each bag and grow into a reef that would protect the shoreline from erosion. CBF was proud to be a part of testing the amazing product that may be the next pivotal technology in keeping oyster shells securely deposited on reefs!

In fall 2024, CBF completed installation of a living shoreline project at Bluebird Gap Farm, a city-owned park on Newmarket Creek in Hampton Va. Our volunteers helped install the 158-foot living shoreline. placing manmade logs made of natural materials, 100 tons of sand, and hundreds of bushels of loose oyster shells, and planted 1,000 wetland plugs. CBF was honored to partner with the City of Hampton to bring this project to fruition. 

Stormwater runoff is a main contributor to water pollution in urban regions. It carries a host of contaminants, including bacteria, heavy metals, and trash, through storm sewers and into local waterways. Heavy rainstorms can result in flooding that damages property and infrastructure. Gray infrastructure, such as gutters, pipes, and storm drains, have traditionally been used to transport stormwater away from residential areas to treatment facilities or directly to local water bodies. However, this infrastructure is aging, and its ability to manage large volumes of stormwater is declining across the country. In response, many communities are installing green infrastructure to improve their stormwater management capabilities. This approach results in greater resilience and provides environmental, social, and economic benefits.  

Green infrastructure filters and absorbs stormwater where it falls and can be integrated into communities at various scales. When deployed throughout a community, city, or regional watershed, it can provide cleaner air and water, flood protection, diverse habitats, and beautiful green spaces, delivering significant value for the community. 

 Information sourced from EPA’s website on Green Infrastructure 

In April 2024, CBF was informed of a low, wet area along the Lafayette Park frisbee golf course. This area was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, and mowing it risked damaging equipment. Fortunately, CBF was able to partner with the City of Norfolk to construct a stormwater wetland and maintain one of the oldest BMPs in the area.

CBF staff, volunteers, and Cox Communications staff worked together to transform this large area of land into a natural area to help drain water and beautify the space. Over the course of the project, the team installed 3,000 soft rush plugs, 75 marsh hibiscus plugs, 4 swamp azaleas, 5 button bushes, and a variety of wet-footed native trees!

During the pilot phase of the Hampton Roads Urban Restoration Program, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) reached out to the City of Norfolk Stormwater Division to explore potential partnership and collaboration opportunities.  Together, the city and CBF were able to work together to implement green infrastructures at Lindenwood and Sherwood Forest Elementary schools. These projects provided a unique and engaging opportunity for students to learn about the benefits of green infrastructure and help improve their school's property.

Justin Shafer, Project Manager with the Stormwater and Green Infrastructure Division, informed CBF about the complaints made by teachers and staff at Lindenwood Elementary School regarding an area between the playground and door that pooled with water.

Additionally, there was an adjacent area on the property where water was pooling on the sidewalk, making it slick due to the algae growth. CBF collaborated with city staff and Lindenwood’s basketball coach, Steve Dolly, to design, build, and monitor a bioswale and a rain garden to solve the problem. 

Betty Baucom, the math specialist at Sherwood Forest Elementary School and a former teacher at Lindenwood Elementary School, volunteered to assist with installing the projects at Lindenwood. The experience led her to propose that CBF evaluate the courtyard at Sherwood Forest, which had an area pooling with water, and install a rain garden on the property. To determine the wettest areas, CBF conducted a design charette with the students and performed a perk test to ensure proper drainage. Once that was complete, CBF, along with dedicated volunteers, installed the project in the spring of 2023. 

CBF is dedicated to creating unique educational opportunities for people of all ages. Naturally, when the Norfolk Public School projects began, we were eager to have students take part in creating their school's rain gardens or bioswales. Each project brought students, volunteers, and CBF staff closer to nature and each other. Here are some highlights that showcase the enriching opportunities throughout our process!

Teens With a Purpose (TWP) is a youth empowerment organization that provides a safe space for local teens to express themselves creatively and reconnect with their community. In 2013, one of the teens asked Deirdre Love, Director of TWP, if they could create a raised garden in the gravel lot across the street from their facility in Downtown Norfolk. This sparked the idea for Purpose Park!

TWP collaborated with Virginia Tech to develop a site plan for the garden. During the planning phase, it was discovered that water was pooling in certain areas. To address this issue, a rain garden was deemed necessary. In 2020, CBF allocated a small budget to install green infrastructure projects, including rain gardens, throughout Norfolk. When TWP was approached about partnering for a project at Purpose Park, they already had an ideal spot in mind! Despite facing some challenges, TWP, the City of Norfolk, VT AREC, and CBF completed the project successfully. 

After lots of hard work, the TWP rain garden has finally taken shape and continues to flourish! It has become an excellent habitat for the local environment and community. 

In 2021, TWP, CBF, and the City of Norfolk planted native trees at Purpose Park. Unfortunately, due to poor soil conditions, the trees did not survive. TWP and CBF then worked together to secure grant funding from the Virginia Department of Forestry to remediate the soil and plant native trees on the lot. In December of 2024, the soil remediation was complete, and CBF and TWP “HIPterns” planted native trees to provide shade to this vacant lot.

TWP’s HIPterns are part of the organization’s Horticultural Internship Program. Along with the beautification of a blighted community, HIPterns become teachers, leaders, and learners. This program creates pathways for youth to effect change in their community and in the world, creating much-needed beautiful spaces, cleaner air, and inspiration.

Trees play a crucial role in our environment by storing carbon and releasing the oxygen necessary for our survival. Unfortunately, many of the world’s trees have been lost due to activities such as logging and clearcutting, which prepare the land for construction, mining, or agriculture. This significant loss of forested areas, combined with various human activities, has greatly contributed to climate change over the past few decades, causing severe disruption to our already fragile ecosystem.

At the Hampton City School Science Fair, held at the Virginia Air and Space Science Center on March 22, 2023, Betsy McAllister, the STEM Teacher Specialist Educator in Residence at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA), met with a group of fifth graders from Machen Elementary School. These students presented a project that focused on studying erosion on their school grounds, and they won first place! They expressed their concerns about their findings and were passionate about addressing the erosion problem. The students concluded that planting native plants would be the best solution. Inspired by their enthusiasm, Betsy contacted the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the City of Hampton's administrators to help bring the students' project idea to life. In the spring of 2024, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the City of Hampton Public Schools received funding from the Arbor Day Foundation and Enterprise Mobility to implement the students' vision! Over the course of five days in November 2024, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and its partners planted 120 trees at four Hampton City schools: Machen Elementary, Paul Burbank Elementary, Jones Middle School, and Francis Asbury Elementary. This initiative aimed to protect the grounds from erosion and enhance student access to green spaces that improve air quality and beautify their learning environment.

Hidden along one of the many paths near CBF's Brock Environmental Center, staff and volunteers installed a unique pollinator garden to celebrate the life and work of CBF's dear friend, Libby Norris. Since its creation, Libby's Garden boasts many native species that bloom every year! CBF holds several events to plant, maintain, water, and improve the space year-round.

Recently, CBF partnered with the Virginia Beach Environmental Studies Program and Norfolk Botanical Garden to create a fun addition to this unique garden: a native seed library! Here, the public can find free native seeds with detailed information about each species. Students worked together to create and install this feature and frequently participate in maintenance. Today, it continues to be a great educational resource for students and citizens alike.

It is important to ensure that all projects are functioning correctly, which requires continuous monitoring and maintenance. However, our staff is small and unable to keep a constant watch on all projects. Therefore, we developed a monitoring system that allows community members to submit images of the projects to give us an idea of the current state. This system will help us assess if maintenance is necessary and ensure each project functions properly.

Some sites are located on private property and monitoring must be done by the site's point of contact (usually the property owner or CBF staff). This point of contact will receive quarterly email reminders to submit a monitoring survey for their site. For sites available to the public, a yard sign with a QR code connected to the site's CBF Urban Restoration Monitoring Survey is there to allow the public to assist with monitoring. If you happen to visit one of these sites, please help us keep them thriving by snapping a few photos and submitting them in the survey!

Additionally, all sites have a weather alert system that will send an email to the site's person of contact when a weather event may cause damage to the site. The contact person will then be encouraged to submit a monitoring survey after the weather event has passed. This allows CBF to act quickly if a site is in need of maintenance! If you would like to be a point of contact for one of our public green infrastructure sites and receive email reminders to participate in monitoring, please email Lisa Renée Jennings at ljennings@cbf.org.

Once monitoring photos are submitted and then approved by a CBF staff member, they will be available to the general public through the  Hampton Roads Green Infrastructure Monitoring Dashboard.  You'll then be able to see your photos alongside progress photos from other community members. At CBF, we rely on citizens and volunteers to help implement, monitor, and maintain our projects. Community efforts are essential to making these sustainable and effective projects possible!

CBF staff will begin installing a living shoreline along Pine Cone Harbour on the Hampton River. Funded by the Blocker Foundation, the first phase of this project will involve the installation of 1,076 linear feet of living shoreline oyster sill and will start in the spring of 2025. 

The oyster sill will be created using 4,692 oyster castles, which are 30-pound concrete blocks designed to form a three-dimensional modular structure that will protect and enhance the existing marsh. In addition, 850 bushels of recycled oyster shells will be placed channelward of the oyster castles to provide additional habitat and support for the sill. These shells were collected through CBF’s Save Oyster Shells program. 

Furthermore, 660 Natrx Basalt Rock Bags, filled with recycled oyster shells, will be deployed as part of the Pine Cone Harbour living shoreline project. These basalt rock bags offer strength and stability while being environmentally inert and safe.  

Fortunately, the marsh that the oyster sill will protect is healthy and shows minimal signs of erosion along its edges. Therefore, we hypothesize that there is enough suspended sediment within the Hampton River for sand to naturally accumulate behind the oyster castles. This should eliminate or greatly reduce the amount of sand backfill needed to achieve the desired elevation for Spartina alterniflora to flourish. However, we anticipate that the grade will not be uniform across the entire project footprint. To reach our goal of adding 9,514 square feet of low marsh habitat to this project, we anticipate needing to bring in some fill and plant in bare areas. This will be phase two of the project, which we expect to start in the summer of 2026.

The Pine Cone Harbour Living Shoreline project marks the first collaboration between the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Hampton Roads Oyster Team and the Urban Restoration Team. Both teams are implementing projects directly offshore from one another. This partnership ensures that all habitats along the tidal slope, from subtidal areas to the riparian buffer, are considered as an integrated whole. By addressing these ecosystems comprehensively and treating each section as part of a larger mosaic, the project aims to achieve effective implementation and lasting improvements in water quality. 

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation and residents of Mallard Point, a condominium association located along the Hampton River, are seeking funding to install a 700 linear-foot living shoreline that will add 3,300 square feet of oyster habitat as well as add/enhance 16,720 square feet of low marsh and high marsh habitat.

The oyster sill will be constructed using 3,000 oyster castles, which are 30-pound concrete blocks designed to create a three-dimensional modular structure that will protect and enhance the existing marsh. Additionally, 350 bushels of recycled oyster shells will be placed channelward of the oyster castles to provide extra habitat and support for the sill. These shells were collected through CBF’s Save Oyster Shells program. Furthermore, 650 Natrx Basalt Rock Bags, filled with recycled oyster shells, will be utilized as part of the Mallard Point Living Shoreline project. These basalt rock bags provide strength and stability while being environmentally inert and safe.  

Once the oyster sill is installed, CBF will contract with Environment Quality Resources (EQR) to use their "sand thrower" to shoot sand onto the shoreline. This machine will move 977 tons of Vulcan Tri-City Blend sand onto the shoreline in just under two weeks. See photos of equipment being used on the Berner Project below.

Spartina alterniflora, the most common wetland grass found in low marshes, does not grow below mid-tide. As sea levels rise, the mean low water level also increases, pushing the marsh toe upland. Shorelines with a gradual slope, typically those that are naturally occurring and low-energy, allow the marsh to migrate upland. If a tidal wetland is adjacent to a bulkhead, riprap, or any other hardened structure, the elevation change is too drastic to permit natural migration. This results in the drowning of tidal wetlands.

Low sill shoreline projects, such as Mallard Point, are designed with a grade that supports marsh migration. However, to maintain the wetland acreage for the project's intended lifespan, it is essential to install a buffer. If the property owner maintains the current location of the mow line, the wetlands could become constrained and ultimately disappear.

Once the shoreline portion of the project is complete, we also would like to convert 15,700 square feet of turf grass to a native vegetated buffer directly adjacent to the shoreline project.

Volunteer opportunities throughout the month of April in Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Virginia Beach.

Join the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in doing a little maintenance on our existing green infrastructure projects! To ensure these projects continue to function properly and maintain their beauty, maintenance is essential. We need volunteers to help with tasks such as pulling weeds, removing invasive species, laying down mulch or pine straw, and planting in bare areas. All are welcome! Minors must be accompanied by a parent/guardian. Use the link below to register and get more information about each volunteer date!

Volunteer opportunities May 8th - July 10th in Hampton, Va.

Join the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in the installation of a 1,000-linear-foot living shoreline oyster sill at Pine Cone Harbour Condominiums along the Hampton River. This project will involve placing 4,692 oyster castles, 720 bushels of recycled oyster shells, 650 Natrx Basalt Shell Bags, and 22 coconut fiber coir logs, each measuring 12 feet by 16 inches. The installation will take place from May 8 to July 11, with various volunteer opportunities available each week. So, skip the gym for a day or two and help CBF with our largest shoreline project implemented by the Hampton Roads Urban Restoration team to date!