Charles River Floating Wetland

The Charles River Floating Wetland, a 2018 Design Grants winner, explores an ecological intervention to reduce harmful algal blooms in the Charles, which threaten the river’s health and limit the feasibility of swimming. Reducing nutrient pollution remains a vital method for preventing blooms, but this approach depends on increasingly complex solutions. Ecological interventions, like the floating wetland, offer an alternative and complementary strategy. Experiments have shown that for water bodies like the Charles, algal blooms can be understood as a symptom of a broken food chain. The project aims to strengthen the missing link—zooplankton populations—by providing additional wetland habitat.

In June 2020, in partnership with MassDCR, the team installed the floating wetland in the Charles River in Cambridge downriver of the Longfellow Bridge. The team then spent the following two summers collecting data. At the end of 2022, team member Max Rome concluded research for the pilot stage of the project with his doctoral dissertation at Northeastern University. In March 2023, the Charles River Conservancy will publicly share the results at an event co-hosted with the MIT Museum: an afternoon of activities for all ages followed by a program celebrating the success of the pilot project and sharing a vision for additional floating wetlands in the Charles River.

In addition to this research milestone, the team continued the project’s public engagement and education efforts. In 2022, 14 kayak groups explored the floating wetland, and the team hosted educational events and distributed 170 floating wetland kits to sixth grade classrooms.

Learn more at thecharles.org/floating-wetlands.