Squeezed between rising seas and landward development, many of New Hampshire’s salt marshes are in danger of disappearing. The New Hampshire Salt Marsh Plan was designed to help us all protect, restore, or study salt marshes. You can use the Plan, along with your community’s values and priorities, to identify specific management strategies to help sustain our salt marshes. Staff at the Great Bay Reserve are here to help you put the Plan to work.
User Guide
This short report introduces the marsh resilience scores and explains how to use them.
Viewer
Tidal wetland resilience scores are visually displayed on an interactive map.
Management Options Table
The table summarizes management options based on a marsh’s current condition, vulnerability to relative sea level rise, and adaptation potential.
About the Plan
The New Hampshire Salt Marsh Plan is a suite of products that help provide a comprehensive look at the resiliency of our tidal marshes. The products all originate from a geospatial analysis of current condition, vulnerability, and adaptation potential that is comparable across sites.
The Plan combines high-resolution land cover data from NOAA with local data sets to generate 224 marsh units across coastal New Hampshire. Data associated with more than 20 metrics is used to rank the current condition, vulnerability to sea level rise, and adaptation potential of each marsh unit. Each ranking is associated with one of eight categories of resilience, each with its own set of recommendations for management.
With this information, you can compare the relative resilience of different marshes, locate marshes for which a particular management tool may be most effective, and assess the potential return on investment of different restoration and conservation strategies.
This map shows the overall marsh resilience scores for tidal wetlands across the New Hampshire Coastal Zone.
How We Can Help
Staff from the Great Bay Reserve are available to provide technical assistance to municipalities, restoration practitioners and others interested in using the New Hampshire Salt Marsh Plan for land use, conservation, restoration, or research planning. Technical assistance can include conversations to discuss the data and the implications or the development of a customized map or analysis to support planning. These maps can help you communicate an important threat or opportunity related to the marshes you care about. Or, we can help scientists design monitoring and research projects that advance our understanding of how quickly we are seeing changes to our marshes and why.
CONTACT
Rachel Stevens, Stewardship Coordinator and Wildlife Ecologist, rachel.a.stevens@wildlife.nh.gov
Cory Riley, Manager, Cory.A.Riley@wildlife.nh.gov
Lynn Vaccaro, Coastal Training Program Coordinator, Lynn.E.Vaccaro@wildlife.nh.gov
CHRIS PETER, Research Coordinator, Christopher.R.Peter@wildlife.nh.gov
Resources to help you use the Plan
All the results and products are available through the Viewer
Download the GIS data through GRANIT
Example applications can be found in the User Guide
Data sources and methods are explained in the Data Notes
Draft products can help with site level planning:
Applying the Plan
New Tools to Track Coastal Change
Over the last few years, the Great Bay NERR has worked with partners to develop a standardized method for monitoring marsh migration in New Hampshire. The mechanisms of salt marsh migration are not well studied in New England and implementing a monitoring program provides a platform for advancing the collective knowledge about drowning and migrating marshes, and how to best manage these rare coastal habitats in our state.
Strategies for Facilitating Marsh Migration: Workshop Report
On March 11, 2026, Great Bay NERR hosted a virtual workshop on Strategies for Facilitating Marsh Migration Workshop. A summary report and recordings of workshop presentations are now available to share lessons learned from the emerging field and inform local and regional restoration efforts.