While we define the limits of the Narragansett Bay Region (NBR) in terms of physical geography-lands and waters-it is an ecosystem by virtue of the plants and animals, living resources, which reside here. Thousands of species-including about two million individuals of that most dominant creature, man-call the Bay and its watershed home. Today, the Narragansett Bay Watershed Ecosystem can truly be called an “anthropogenic ecosystem:” an environment which has been shaped, physically, biologically and chemically, by human hands.

Humans have lived in NBWE for at least 8,000 years (Taunton Wild & Scenic River Study Committee 2005). The earliest known site of human habitation is Wampanucket, in present-day Middleborough, Mass. It’s probably no accident that this Paleo-Indian village was located near the Nemasket River, a tributary of the Taunton which, even today, supports the largest anadromous fish run in the Narragansett Bay watershed. Certainly, humans have depended upon the living resources of Narragansett Bay for as long as we’ve inhabited this region. From the earliest days, we exerted our influence on the landscape, modifying its habitats to suit our needs and desires, with significant effects upon the ecosystem.

Native people in New England actively burned forests for agriculture and hunting, and constructed weirs in rivers to capture migrating fish. Yet with European settlement about 400 years ago, the scale and pace of anthropogenic modification increased greatly throughout the Bay watershed. By the late eighteenth century, colonists had cleared most of Southern New England’s original forests (Cronon 1983). Large predators were intentionally hunted to extinction-in nearby Connecticut, Israel Putnam was considered a hero for shooting the state’s last wolf in 1747 (Mashamoquet Brook State Park, 2008).

European agricultural and land use practices profoundly changed the Narragansett Bay watershed. As early as 1790, Noah Webster commented on changes in watershed hydrology, including increased flooding, resulting from land-clearing-impacts we’d associate with storm-water runoff today (Cronon 1983). Deforestation and plowing greatly increased sedimentation into rivers and streams, which were dammed extensively for water power, converting bottomland swamps into open water. By 1840, the average density of milldams in the watershed ranged from one per eight square miles in southern Rhode Island to one per two square miles in the Blackstone River sub-watershed (Walter 2008). Today, there are more than 500 dams in Rhode Island, on nearly every river and stream.

[dams map from rigis, here]

Twentieth-century development created a new set of impacts on the habitats of Narragansett Bay and its watershed, with resulting effects on living resources. Perhaps the most significant effect was urbanization, as population in the watershed doubled from roughly one to two million people over the course of the century (Nixon 2005). Coinciding with the rise of the fossil-fuel economy, this period of growth created a new class of transportation-related impacts: impervious surfaces, filled wetlands, dredged channels, “hardened” shorelines. Concurrently, modern water-supply and waste-water treatment systems came into use. Headwaters streams were dammed to create reservoirs-replacing forests, farms, swamps and villages with large open-water areas (for example, the Scituate Reservoir, principal water supply for Providence and Rhode Island’s largest body of fresh water, created in 1925 by damming the North Branch of the Pawtuxet River). Cities built waste-water treatment plants, with great benefits to public health, but causing large land-based nutrient loadings to the Bay, which had formerly been “fertilized” primarily by offshore nutrients (Nixon, 2008).

Over the past several decades, we’ve greatly reduced the pace of negative impacts on Narragansett Bay and its watershed, even as we developed a new class of beneficial impacts. During the 1970’s and 80’s, federal and state legislatures enacted a blizzard of environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act, which regulated and reduced water pollution and the destruction of wetlands. In the 1990’s and 2000’s, government agencies and non-governmental organizations began seriously investing in habitat restoration-building fish ladders, removing dams, restoring coastal and fresh-water wetlands, replanting coastal vegetation, and restoring “brownfields”-formerly contaminated industrial sites.

This chapter of the Narragansett Bay Status & Trends Report assesses the living resources of the Narragansett Bay Watershed Ecosystem, recognizing that the biology of the system is strongly influenced by the actions, present and past, positive and negative, of the people who reside in its watershed.

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