Fair Haven Beach State Park is a popular summer destination for relaxing on the beach, kayaking or taking a walk. The park sits west of Oswego along the Lake Ontario shoreline. According to New York state, it gets almost 185,000 visitors a year.<\/p>\n
Staff members are working to remove some of the invasive species crowding the park.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s not the plants\u2019 fault that they’re here, but invasive species do create a lot of issues for us,\u201d said Charlie Ippolito, a biologist with New York State Parks and Recreation.<\/p>\n
One of Ippolito\u2019s priorities is protecting the natural habitats at the park.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, the sand from the lake, the wind blows it into the fence, and it piles up directly behind it,\u201d said Ippolito.<\/p>\n
In this case, that work meant building a fence to help dunes form, providing areas for turtles to lay their eggs.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we have a decent amount of beach grass planted and that helps maintain the structure of the dune,\u201d said Ippolito.<\/p>\n
Staff are also pulling out weeds that don\u2019t belong and planting native species like beach grass.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd a lot of people see the grass on top and think that it’s maybe only a foot below, but you can see from here all the way down, we have roots all the way down. This is like a cobweb of roots,\u201d said Ippolito.<\/p>\n
One unwelcome visitor at the park is Japanese knotweed. According to New York State Parks and Recreation, from 2020-22, the park was able to reduce the knotweed by 70%.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you leave one leaf or one inch of stem, like something like this in the area, it can over a few years, it can start to colonize,\u201d said Gabby Landry, environmental stewardship technician with New York State Parks and Recreation.<\/p>\n
All this work by Ippolito, Landry and their team is funded by a Sustain Our Great Lakes grant from National Fish and Wildlife for more than $200,000.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re working to restore more than 300 acres of dunes, bluffs, wetlands and forest in the park, with a long-term goal by 2030 to reduce invasive cover plants to less than 5%.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy job is to, in part, to kind of make those areas still accessible and still usable by the patrons, but with an ecological twist,\u201d said Ippolito.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re also working to remove water chestnut and swallowwort from the park. Work started earlier this year and will continue through 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fair Haven Beach State Park is a popular summer destination for relaxing on the beach, kayaking or taking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[22996,257,3242,28813,9,11,10,49,51,50,12,200],"class_list":["post-304763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-app-environment","tag-central-ny","tag-environment","tag-krystal-cole","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-news","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}