With a final tree-planting event conducted at the end of October, volunteers and conservation professionals completed the restoration of Potomac River shoreline at Naval Support Facility (NSF) Indian Head and the base’s Stump Neck Annex.

The conclusion of the week-long tree-planting project on Oct. 27 marked the successful end of the five-year, $20 million project that protects both the environmental health of regional waters and $54 million of Navy infrastructure on the installation.

The story began in the 1990s, when erosion collapsed a road and threatened mission-critical structures at NSF Indian Head. In 2003, the Navy proposed a plan to protect both its assets and the environmental quality of the Potomac River. The solution, a living shoreline of breakwaters, sills and native vegetation, has set the standard in the
Chesapeake Bay region for environmental stewardship.

While the Navy provided funding for the construction of the living shoreline, volunteers from several organizations, led by the National Aquarium Conservation Team, played a key role in planting the native vegetation that not only protects threatened land, but also provides habitat for river life.

“This is the largest and longest project the team has taken on,” said Charmaine Dahlenberg, project manager for the National Aquarium’s Conservation Team. Since construction began in 2007, volunteers from a diverse group of conservation-minded organizations, such as AmeriCorps and the Maryland Conservation Corps, partnered with the Navy and the National Aquarium Conservation Team to turn the vision of a living shoreline into a reality.

Dahlenberg praised the efforts of her organization and the volunteers who supported her. “The Conservation Department at the Aquarium is a team of five women and we do everything when it comes to logistically planning these events,” she said. “When it comes to the hard physical work, we would never get it done unless we had our volunteers… and it is extreme physical work!”

Volunteers worked through many challenges, not least of which were planting and tending to native vegetation during the hot summer months. While the gratification is not quite instant, the project’s large scale and multiyear timeline allowed the conserva