A couple of Northeastern University grads are twisting — literally — an invasive wetland grass into a coastal restoration hero.
Kayla Sklar and Anja Clark spend part of their day cutting down tall, plumed phragmites and bundling them into rods and other shapes to serve as bedding material on which they plant native spartina grasses.
Once rooted, the spartina helps protect the shoreline from erosion and wave action and serves as a habitat for native flora and fauna.
The endeavor is part of a coastal restoration project known as the Emerald Tutu, which uses culled invasive biomass as the substrate for native restoration and shoreline stabilization.
“It’s just a lot of problem-solving, working outside,” says Sklar, who graduated from Northeastern in 2022 with a degree in environmental science with a marine concentration.
“After I graduated, I learned about this project,” says Sklar, a nature-based infrastructure ecological engineer.
“I thought what they were doing with the coastal protection aspects of ecological restoration was really cool, and I started working for them, making these prototypes,” she says.
The phragmites bundles can be as long as 10 feet and are anchored to the shoreline with stakes and sometimes heavy rocks. The tidal flow of saltwater soaks them like sponges, which — the theory goes — makes them an excellent platform or bed on which to grow native spartina grasses.
About two dozen of these prototype plant beds are located along shorelines, including sites in East Boston.
“We’re working on experimental design” and tracking how well the prototypes for the Emerald Tutu are performing, says Anja Clark, Emerald Tutu project assistant.
She’s a 2025 graduate who majored in environmental science and landscape architecture and did a PlusOne in environmental science and policy.
Last fall, Clark also taught herself thatching and how to create a sculpture out of phragmites. It collapsed during a storm but has since become home to a family of ducks in East Boston by Chelsea Creek.
The art installation is part of the process of experimenting with using natural materials or biomass to throw up a bulwark against coastal erosion in place of materials like the rusted seawall at Chelsea Creek.
“I probably would have gone to art school if I didn’t really care about the climate crisis,” Clark says. “So it’s been really special to be part of this.”
The Emerald Tutu concept started about five to six years ago with the idea of creating floating circular mats that could form concentric rings or half-circles along shorelines to break up wave energy.
But the mats tended to shift under the weight of wetlands grasses growing on top and masses of algae below, says Gabriel Cira, Emerald Tutu project lead.
In addition, having to use kayaks to check their progress was less convenient than monitoring and maintaining living shoreline bundles planted along the coast, he says.
“The idea of the Emerald Tutu is just a placeholder for regreening the coastlines using a whole spectrum of techniques and approaches,” Cira says.
“The important distinction between (human-made) gray infrastructure and nature-based infrastructure is that gray infrastructure is strongest on day one and then weakens over time,” he says.
“The opposite is true for nature-based infrastructure,” Cira says. “It’s weakest when you first install it. But as those native marsh grass plants grow denser and denser, as their rhizomes expand and connect and anchor everything together, it just gets stronger and stronger.”
Near the Emerald Tutu’s work yard headquarters by Chelsea Creek, the scientists are growing spartina seedlings in a drainage tank basin.
Once planted into bundles of phragmites grasses or reeds, the challenge is keeping the biomass from floating away, hence the need for stakes or heavy rocks until the entire bundle becomes fully waterlogged and stays rooted in place, Sklar says.