Brightwaters focuses on installing native plants to help preserve lake 

The Village of Brightwaters is paying closer attention to the natural habitat around Nosrekca Lake with a restoration project that will grow native plants in an effort to improve stormwater management.

The project, planned for this month, will replace some of the grass surrounding the lake with appropriate native plants, according to Frank Piccininni, partner and co-founder at Spadefoot Design and Construction, which the village hired to do the job.

Nosrekca is one of five freshwater lakes in the village, near Brightwaters Canal, which is on the Great South Bay. The lakes struggle with invasive species and erosion issues, said Peter Judge, a lifelong village resident who is spearheading the project. He also is heading an informal committee formed last summer that aims to plant native species and incorporate mindful landscape design to improve stormwater management and the ecological health of the lake.

“You want to be ecologically positive with your species choice so that you’re building a native habitat,” Judge, 37, said. “The more native species you plant, the more likely you are to see birds, pollinator insects and a thriving ecosystem in the park that we all love and enjoy.”

Stormwater contains a high amount of nitrogen from fertilizer and sanitation systems, among other things, Piccininni said, and "runoff from the road and the surrounding watershed have continued to erode the banks of the lake, directly contributing a large amount of sediment."

"This overloading of organic matter," called eutrophication, "results in impaired water quality, loss of ecosystem function" and the growth of invasive plants, he said. 

The planned rain gardens are the committee’s first major project, Judge said. While the current project, which is expected to take about a day, is focused only on Lake Nosrekca, the northernmost of the village lakes, the goal is to eventually tackle all the water bodies, working downstream over the next few years. 

“It’s really about using your green spaces as opportunities to knit together little pockets of habitat,” Judge said. “It’s sort of reframing the way that we look at our gardens and the way that we look at our relationship with our green spaces.”

Some of the plants that will be installed near the lake include winterberry, red maple, swamp milkweed and blue flag iris, Piccininni said.

Brightwaters Mayor John Valdini said the contract for Spadefoot's work at Nosrekca Lake is $20,000 and volunteers will participate throughout the process.

The village also recently purchased a Weedoo boat to remove lily pads and “muck” from the lakes, which has been “a growing problem,” Valdini said.

The village plans to use it to mechanically harvest weeds in the lakes starting this spring, he said.

The boat, which is the first of its kind to be owned by a Long Island municipality, cost $105,000 and the village’s department of public works crews will start training on it in early spring, according to Valdini.

Manufactured in Florida, the boat is about 12 feet long and looks "like a Bobcat for the water," with a front-end loader and sickle bar that allows the driver to cut vegetation 6 feet under, Weedoo CEO Tara Lordi said. 

The machine was invented as an alternative to herbicides and is more “affordable and efficient than spraying" the chemicals, she said. 

“When you have an overgrowth of vegetation or weeds in a lake, you have a few choices. One is to treat it with what we call herbicides, and herbicides are really dangerous; their primary job is to cause cellular death,” she said.

“The second choice is to drain the lake," but that would kill aquatic life, she said. "The third way is to use mechanical removal.”

Judge is also working with volunteers to delegate portions of the shorelines along the lakes to weed and plant native flora, including seeds he plans to distribute in the spring. 

Those interested in volunteering can email lakes@villageofbrightwaters.com. 

By Brianne Ledda

brianne.ledda@newsday.com@brianne_ledda

Brianne Ledda covers the Town of Islip for Newsday. She previously covered Southold and Greenport for The Suffolk Times and is a graduate of Stony Brook University.