The river isn’t just the water flowing between it’s two banks. The estuary below Albany includes shallow water habitats and streamside buffers in the form of floodplain vegetation.
Humans have profoundly altered many Hudson River habitats. Approximately 25 percent of Manhattan’s land area used to be tidal wetland and shallow water habitat. Overall, New York Harbor has lost nearly 300,000 acres of such habitat to landfill and dredging since European settlement began. Between Catskill and Albany, nearly one third of the river has been filled in, starting in the mid-1800s as engineers created a single, deep shipping channel through complex islands, shallows, and wetlands.
In many places, bulkheads and piles of boulders called riprap have replaced the river’s natural shoreline. Riprap is common along the railroads that line the river’s banks. The construction of these tracks in the mid-1800’s greatly altered habitat, burying wetlands and cutting bays and coves off from the river. These bays and coves silted in and became new marshes and other wetland habitats.
Few of these habitats can be restored, so protecting what exists is a priority. … given the scale of human impacts over time, it is virtually impossible for the variety and extent of the estuary’s natural habitats to ever again match what Hudson and his crew saw 400 years ago.
