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In this season of extreme heat and violent thunderstorms, many Georgians are squeezing in a last beach trip to one of Georgia's beautiful coastal barrier islands. Too many of us are unaware of either the beauty or the ecological uniqueness of these coastal features, how they protect Georgia, or how the islands themselves are protected.
Despite being one of the largest states east of the Mississippi, Georgia has only about 100 miles of coastline, edged with vast acres of marshland and 14 major barrier islands. These islands impact both the ecology and culture of Georgia. While Georgia’s barrier islands bear some differences from other islands along the east coast, they are also similar to each other. They all have evidence of early Native American settlements. Most were farmed with plantation-style slave labor; then they were mostly abandoned as unprofitable until the late 1800s when very wealthy Americans purchased whole islands for development or family retreats.
Barrier islands hug the shoreline of a good bit of the eastern coastline of North America, but Georgia’s barrier islands have certain special qualities. Through flukes of nature, our barrier islands, which stretch from Tybee Island near the South Carolina border to Cumberland Island near Florida, both protect our coastline from storms and normal wave and tidal action and help create a vital marshland ecosystem.
To read more about these islands, the Georgia Coastal Atlas has a wealth of information on the ecology and history of each island. It is a collaborative project of the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and the Emory Environment Sciences Department. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources has additional information about the formation of the islands and their importance.
While barrier islands exist throughout most of the Eastern coastline, Georgia’s islands are unique in several ways. First, our islands tend to be larger and closer together, providing more protection to the coastline.
"Because of these islands, which are grouped fairly close together, storms tend to stay out a little further offshore," Kathryn Kolb, Executive Director of EcoAddendum, said. “It's a little harder for them to get traction and come right in and hit the coast the way they might in Florida or some of the other coastal edges of eastern North America. There’s a softer transition from ocean to land that protects the shore. Another protection is that the barrier islands are fairly large, and we have a large network of them.”
In addition, because of silt deposits from several rivers, most of the islands are not eroding as severely as some of the barrier islands in South and North Carolina, and some islands are actually growing bigger because of continuing silt deposits. For example, Little St. Simons Island is growing from silt washed down the Altamaha River.
There is evidence of indigenous people living on most of the larger barrier islands from around 2000 or 3000 BC. Beginning in the 16th century, first the Spanish, then the French, and later other Europeans arrived. Some brought slaves for plantations on many of the larger barrier islands. Yet even with slave labor, the Europeans found that these plantations were not very profitable. As owners abandoned the islands, the islands began regenerating toward their original state.
After the Civil War, the stories of these 14 barrier islands start to diverge. Some, like Jekyll and St. Simons, were purchased for development as wealthy tourist destinations. By the 1950s and early 1960s, bridges were built to Jekyll, Tybee, St. Simons, and Sea Island; this helped increase the demand for tourism and further development.
Other barrier islands like Sapelo, Little St. Simons, and Ossabaw were maintained by wealthy families for retreats. Decades later, nine of the 14 barrier islands have been preserved in various ways from further development.
“The reason that some of our barrier islands are as protected,” said Megan Desrosiers, President and CEO of One Hundred Miles, “is because, in the past, landowners have decided to either sell them to conservation buyers or the National Park Service as with Cumberland Island, for example, or donate them to the [Georgia] Department of Natural Resources as with Ossabaw, or to put conservation easements on them, as with Little St. Simons. So each island has a different reason for its level of protection. And on the coast of Georgia, we have 14 barrier islands, and nine of them have some sort of protection, whether private or public protection…. So there are no [uniform government] policies that protect the islands from being developed. It's the status of ownership,” Desrosiers added.
Despite the different levels of development and types of protection, all the Georgia barrier islands have a shared ecology and importance in the ecosystem of our 100 miles of coastline. In addition to providing a barrier to protect the mainland from the force of waves, the islands help create coastal marshlands. Together, the islands and the marsh provide habitats for mammals, shellfish, and fish and are home to hundreds of varieties of shore birds. The islands are also a critical path for a host of migratory birds, butterflies, and dragonflies. And sea turtle nesting, especially for the Loggerhead Turtle, is increasing.
Unlike many of the other states’ barrier islands, Georgia’s nine undeveloped islands along our coastline provide a unique string of relatively undisturbed natural environments. “What I think is really significant is the value of the size of the ecosystem that is left undisturbed,” Kolb explains. “A lot of times, humans think, ‘We have this little two-acre park, and that's okay.’ But it's not okay because you cannot have fully biodiverse natural ecosystems in small areas; you can't have native species with the flexibility to migrate from one area to another. The ability for wildlife to survive must include large tracts of undisturbed, unbroken natural places. Nature cannot survive in little boxes strewn along a developed landscape.”
We have these protected island gems by almost accidents of history, but we also have four barrier islands: Tybee, Jekyll, St. Simons, and Sea Island, which are not protected to the same extent. All of these have bridges to the mainland and privately owned land governed by county zoning and other regulations. While not protected in the same way the other nine islands are, these islands certainly permit easier access by a wider variety of the public. “And state policy really can make a difference on the already developed islands because that's where the pressures of development by people that already live there are really coming face to face with issues like erosion and issues like shoreline hardening, such as sea walls, and flooding,” said Desroisers.
Jekyll Island has a unique structure. It was purchased by the state of Georgia in 1947, and the Jekyll Island Authority was created a few years later with a mandate to manage commercial development as a public-private partnership on no more than 35 percent of the island. The legislature added the stipulation that accommodations must be kept affordable for Georgia citizens.
Each of the Georgia barrier islands has a similar geography and ecology and is part of an important ecosystem. Yet there exist intrinsic differences that Kolb also describes. “Each island just has its own feeling or its own vibe. You can put your feet in the sandy soils, and you can look up into the same species of trees, but there's just a different feeling on every single Island, even though they all look a little bit the same--oaks with Spanish moss, sable palms and saw palmettos, and a lot of marsh grass and fiddler crabs and herons and so forth on each island. Even though it looks similar, the feeling of every island is a little bit different. And that’s hard to find words to describe.”
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