Building a More Resilient Shark River Watershed

Danielle McCulloch, Executive Director

How communities, agencies, and partners are working together to turn resilience planning into action.

American Littoral Society Executive Director Danielle McCulloch speaking at the Shark River Watershed Tour for New Jersey Flood Safety Week

After a summer of intense storms and repeated flash flooding across Monmouth County, the need to prepare communities for future flooding is increasingly clear. In the Shark River watershed, the American Littoral Society is working with five municipalities, Monmouth County, state agencies, community organizations, and technical partners to help coordinate that work.

On August 24, the Society worked with NJDEP and Monmouth County to organize a tour of the Shark River watershed as part of New Jersey Flood Safety Week. The tour brought decision-makers into the field to see where flooding is occurring, hear directly from communities, and explore how restoration and nature-based solutions can become part of a larger regional resilience strategy.

Participants included a broad group of public leaders, including Belmar Mayor Caitlin Donovan, Avon-by-the-Sea Mayor Ed Bonanno, Wall Township Mayor Erin Mangan, Monmouth County Commissioner Erik Anderson, Assemblywomen Margie Donlon and Luanne Peterpaul, and staff representing U.S. Senator Cory Booker and Congressmen Frank Pallone and Chris Smith.

They joined NJDEP Commissioner Ed Potosnak, Chief Resilience Officer Nick Angarone, municipal officials from all five Shark River communities, and regional partners to see flooding concerns and restoration opportunities firsthand.
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Having local, county, state, and federal leaders together created an important opportunity to compare priorities across municipal boundaries and discuss the funding, policy, and agency coordination needed to move resilience projects forward.

NJDEP Commissioner Ed Potosnak

​Seeing Solutions on the Ground

During the tour, Society staff shared both the history of the Shark River and examples of what resilience can look like on the ground.

Executive Director Danielle McCulloch discussed how oyster reefs, sandy shorelines, marshes, and other natural features historically helped buffer the watershed and how communities can move from isolated projects toward a more coordinated regional strategy that uses dredged sediments, community participation, and innovative tactics and partnerships.

At the South Riverside Living Shoreline in Neptune Township, Restoration staff Zack Royle and Julie Schumacher showed how sediment placement, planted berms, dunes, and native vegetation can stabilize shoreline, restore habitat, and help protect South Riverside Drive and nearby homes.

Zack discussed the opportunity to work with NJDOT to use clean dredged sediment more strategically throughout the watershed. Julie highlighted another essential part of successful restoration: long-term community relationships and trust, including the Society’s partnership with the Shark River Cleanup Coalition and local leaders.
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The site illustrates a central principle of our work: projects can provide benefits for both people and wildlife when restoration and community resilience are planned together.

Habitat Restoration Project Manager Zack Royle and Habitat Restoration Coordinator Julie Schumacher

​Bringing the Watershed Together

As Commissioner Ed Potasnak emphasized, flooding does not stop at municipal borders. Neither can resilience planning.

Capt. Al Modjeski and other Society staff helped reconvene the Shark River Environmental Roundtable to bring Avon-by-the-Sea, Belmar, Neptune City, Neptune Township, Wall Township, Monmouth County, state agencies, scientists, and community organizations around the same table.

The Roundtable gives municipal leaders a place to identify shared challenges and pursue solutions that may be difficult for any one community to tackle alone. Those conversations helped create the foundation for the regional work now advancing through Monmouth County and the Resilient NJ Municipal Assistance Program, with partners including Monmouth University’s Urban Coast Institute.

​Our role is often to connect the pieces: local priorities, restoration expertise and experience, community voices, agency expertise, funding opportunities, and partners who can help move good ideas toward implementation.

The Flood Safety Week tour grew from that work. Society staff helped NJDEP and Monmouth County shape the route, coordinate municipalities and agencies, invite elected officials, and select sites that showed both the challenges communities face and the solutions already taking shape.

​Turning Dredged Sediment into a Resource

One of the most promising opportunities in Shark River is finding better uses for clean sediment already being removed from navigation channels.

The Society, Monmouth County, Shark River communities, and other partners are working with NJDOT’s Office of Maritime Resources to better connect routine navigation dredging with shoreline and habitat restoration.

Instead of treating dredging and resilience as separate issues, suitable sediment could be used to rebuild marshes and beaches, stabilize eroding shorelines, create protective shoals and islands, and support living shorelines and other nature-based projects.

The longer-term goal is to connect future dredging cycles with restoration needs across the watershed treating sediment as a resource and using public investments in navigation to produce additional benefits for habitat and community resilience.

The Society is pursuing additional funding to create a watershed-wide Coastal Resilience and Beneficial Use Plan for Shark River. The proposed work would evaluate flooding, shoreline change, habitat, dredging cycles, sediment resources, navigation needs, and community priorities. The team would identify potential restoration and sediment-placement sites and advance priority locations toward conceptual design.

Potential projects could include marsh restoration, living shorelines, bay beach restoration, strategic sediment placement, marsh islands, shellfish habitat, and other natural and nature-based approaches. Municipal officials, residents, businesses, marinas, agencies, and community organizations would help determine which projects rise to the top.
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The goal is to identify the problems, agree on priorities, develop projects, line up sediment and funding, and move toward design and on-the-ground construction.

Habitat Restoration Coordinator Julie Schumacher

Resilience Also Requires Better Rules

Building resilience also means prioritizing policies to support safer communities.
While New Jersey is spending significant public resources to address flooding that already exists the state also needs to ensure that new development does not create tomorrow’s flood problems using yesterday’s assumptions.

That is why the NJPACT REAL rules are an important part of this conversation. The rules update New Jersey’s flood, coastal, stormwater, and wetlands standards to better account for future sea-level rise, heavier rainfall, and changing flood conditions. Infrastructure and development being built today should be designed for the conditions they are likely to experience over their useful lives. Designing for future conditions can help reduce avoidable flood damage and the long-term costs borne by homeowners, communities, and taxpayers.

The REAL rules were adopted January 20, 2026, but DEP is currently considering an extension of the period during which qualifying projects can continue under the older standards. That extension proposal is still listed as pending adoption.
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For communities like those surrounding Shark River, resilience requires investing in solutions for existing vulnerabilities while adopting strong, science-based standards that avoid creating new ones.

The Work Behind the Projects

Much of resilience work happens long before construction begins.

It starts with bringing communities together, building trust, coordinating with agencies, finding technical partners, pursuing funding, navigating permitting, and continuing to move good projects forward when the path is complicated.

The Society does not do that work alone. Progress in Shark River is possible because municipal leaders, residents, state and county agencies, scientists, nonprofit organizations, elected officials, and many other partners continue to show up and work together.

Support for the American Littoral Society helps us play a connective role in that process: staying at the table, bringing decades of restoration experience to the conversation, and helping turn community priorities into projects that can make a difference on the ground.

A more resilient Shark River will not come from one tour, one grant, one rule, or one organization. It will come from people and institutions working toward a shared vision and then doing the difficult work of turning that vision into action over the long term.
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That is the work we intend to keep doing.

Habitat Restoration Project Manager Zack Royle speaking to Channel 12 News

​In the News

• Severe storms lead to flooding in parts of New Jersey — ABC7 New York
• Can recreating nature in the Shark River stop pollution and flooding? — Asbury Park Press
• Rehabilitating the Shark River — Asbury Park Press