Our Mission
Sea Friends Incorporated restores native coastal habitat, protects the water quality of Long Island’s South Shore estuary, and educates the community that depends on it.
Here is why those three things are the same job.
Freeport sits inside one of the most productive estuaries in the country.
The South Shore Estuary Reserve runs seventy-five miles from the New York City line east to Southampton: a chain of shallow back-barrier lagoons, tidal creeks, salt marsh islands, and barrier beach, separated from the Atlantic by a thin ribbon of dune. New York State designated it in 1993 as a maritime region of statewide importance.
Freeport’s waters are the Western Bays — known in the monitoring record as Hempstead Bay, the Reserve’s westernmost and most heavily developed segment. They are also missing pieces.
The mainland salt marshes and tidal creeks that once fringed this shoreline have been virtually eliminated by bulkheading and filling. What remains of the marsh here is islands. And eelgrass (Zostera marina L.) — the seagrass that once carpeted these shallows and nursed the finfish and shellfish this village was built on — is absent from the Western Bays entirely.
We are not working to prevent a loss. We are working on a system that has already lost a great deal.
Nitrogen does the most damage here.
Nitrogen reaches the Western Bays from wastewater treatment effluent, atmospheric deposition, groundwater carrying fertilizer and septic inputs, soil and sediment loss, and stormwater runoff from urban and suburban development.
The largest single source — the region’s wastewater infrastructure — is being addressed through major investment, on a scale no community group could match. That work matters. It also doesn’t touch the rest of the problem.
What remains is the diffuse share: atmospheric deposition, groundwater carrying fertilizer and septic inputs, and stormwater runoff. Stormwater is the one that moves fastest — and the one nearly every property owner in this watershed has a hand in. It doesn’t come from a pipe anyone can reroute. It comes from every lawn, driveway, roof, and parking lot, and it arrives dirtiest where there is nothing in the ground to slow it down.
Macroalgal blooms
Nitrogen feeds Ulva — the green macroalgae that blankets the shallows. Monitoring in the Western Bays documents Ulva overgrowth alongside the complete absence of eelgrass.
Hypoxia
When that algal biomass dies, decomposition consumes dissolved oxygen. The Western Bays show periodic low oxygen at depth — conditions finfish and shellfish cannot hold in.
Marsh degradation
Nitrogen enrichment weakens the salt marsh islands that buffer this village from storm surge. It is not only an algae problem: it degrades the structure of the marsh itself.
For more than a decade, the region’s clean-water plans have named the same priority: reduce nitrogen at its diffuse sources — the runoff spread across the thousands of individual properties where it originates, which no single project can capture. That is precisely what we do, one landscape at a time.
Why a garden in Freeport is water quality work.
A maintained lawn is a two- to three-inch root system over compacted soil. Rain lands on it, fails to infiltrate, sheets off, and carries dissolved nitrogen to the nearest storm drain — which discharges to the bay. The whole trip takes minutes.
Left: turf, rooting to two or three inches. Right: deep-rooted native species — a taproot, a fibrous system, and a forking woody system — descending through topsoil and sandy subsoil toward the water table. Root architecture is what determines whether rain infiltrates or runs off.
Infiltration
Deep roots and the channels left behind by decaying roots open pore structure through compacted soil. Water moves down into the profile instead of across the surface. Runoff volume drops — and runoff is the delivery mechanism.
Uptake
Nitrogen that reaches the root zone is assimilated into plant biomass rather than continuing toward the estuary. A four- to eight-foot root system intercepts a far larger volume of soil water than a three-inch one.
Microbial processing
The rhizosphere — the soil immediately around living roots — supports the microbial communities that transform nitrogen, including the denitrifying bacteria that convert nitrate to atmospheric nitrogen gas. Uptake stores nitrogen in biomass; denitrification removes it from the system permanently. Both depend on a living root zone with organic matter in it. Deep-rooted plantings build that zone, and soil design determines how much of the work becomes permanent. Turf barely starts it.
No inputs
Species native to this coast, planted where they belong, do not need fertilizer once established. A lawn is a nitrogen source. A native planting is a nitrogen sink. The same ground can be either.
Not just any plant. These plants.
Deep roots are not unique to native species. Everything else is.
Local ecotype. A species native to New York is not automatically adapted to a barrier-island coast — to salt aerosol, sand, drought, and the photoperiod at this latitude. We propagate from locally collected seed so the plants going into the ground carry the genetics that evolved here. A Schizachyrium scoparium (Michx.) Nash from Ohio and one from Long Island are the same species and not the same plant.
Host specificity. Nitrogen uptake is one job. Habitat is another, and it does not substitute. The monarch (Danaus plexippus (Linnaeus, 1758)) can nectar on almost anything and can only lay eggs on milkweed — Asclepias L. — because monarch larvae sequester the cardenolide toxins that milkweed produces, and nothing else will do. Plant the wrong thing and you have built a garden that looks like habitat and functions as a dead end.
More than nitrogen. Stripping nitrogen from stormwater is one job this palette does — it is not the only one, and not every species is here for it. These plants also stabilize eroding soil and shifting sand, soften storm surge, build organic matter in ground too poor to hold it, and feed the birds and pollinators this coast has lost. We place each species where its strengths land: deep-rooted grasses and wetland plants where the work is to slow water and take up nitrogen, and salt-tolerant coastal shrubs where the work is to hold the hardest ground and keep it living. A plant does not have to be a nitrogen sink to be doing restoration.
Design. Native plantings have a reputation for looking unkempt, and that reputation is why more of them do not get planted. We choose species to fit the goal and design the planting to read as tended and intentional. A restoration that a community will not accept is not a restoration.
Every species we plant is chosen for a job. Usually more than one.
Deep-rooted grasses
- Little bluestem — Schizachyrium scoparium (Michx.) Nash
- Switchgrass — Panicum virgatum L.
- Indiangrass — Sorghastrum nutans (L.) Nash
Where water collects
- Buttonbush — Cephalanthus occidentalis L.
- Sweet pepperbush — Clethra alnifolia L.
- Winterberry — Ilex verticillata (L.) A.Gray
- Blue flag iris — Iris versicolor L.
- Tussock sedge — Carex stricta Lam.
- Soft rush — Juncus effusus L.
Host & nectar
- Butterfly milkweed — Asclepias tuberosa L.
- Eastern swamp milkweed — Asclepias incarnata L. ssp. pulchra (Ehrh. ex Willd.) Woodson
- Blunt-leaved milkweed — Asclepias amplexicaulis Sm.
- Coastal Joe Pye weed — Eutrochium dubium (Willd. ex Poir.) E.E.Lamont
- New York ironweed — Vernonia noveboracensis (L.) Michx.
Coastal edge
- Northern bayberry — Morella pensylvanica (Mirb.) Kartesz
- Beach plum — Prunus maritima Marshall
- Bitter panicgrass — Panicum amarum Elliott
Restoration that ends when we leave isn’t restoration.
Stormwater arrives from every parcel in the watershed. No organization plants its way out of that alone — and nobody protects what they do not understand.
So the education is not an add-on to the restoration. It is the restoration, on a longer timescale. When a student plants milkweed, watches monarch larvae find it, and learns why a garden three miles from the water changes what reaches the bay, that student becomes someone who makes different decisions about their own ground for the rest of their life.
That is the multiplier. It’s why we work with schools first, why our plantings carry species labels, and why we would rather run a workshop with twenty neighbors than install the same bed alone.
The estuary needs more habitat doing this work.
Schools, homeowners, municipalities, and land managers — if you have property in this watershed, you can help protect the estuary. And if you are in Freeport, you are in this watershed.