Popes Creek Waterfront Park Living Shoreline

Consideration and engagement of the community in design has been constant beginning even before the project funding was secured. Over 150 stakeholders directly engaged in the planning and Resilience Authority Outreach, including 20 high school students through the Resilience Authority’s Youth Corps.  

The award will be used to design and permit 825 linear feet of shoreline restoration on the Potomac River and 475 linear feet of bank restoration along Popes Creek. The designs are intended to mitigate sea level rise, erosion, and storm events to ensure the park’s long-term health. 

The plans for the site features vegetated headlands to reduce erosion and marsh plantings, which would stabilize the shoreline, providing increased resilience for the park and surrounding communities. This living shoreline will buffer key ecosystems of the Estuarine and Palustrine wetlands of Special State Concern and create additional critical habitat for estuarine wildlife including water birds such as herons, egrets, and rails. This effort also has the added benefit of improving water quality. The development of the waterfront park will provide the county’s first public beach access, nature and aquatic-based recreation such as fishing, kayaking, bird watching and environmental education opportunities for the community and visitors alike. 

This project is programmed in tandem with other efforts in the Future Popes Creek Waterfront Park, which will be located on 17 acres of waterfront acquired by the County in 2021. The larger park, enabled by projects and continued focus on the restoration of the waterfront, will be a new resource for the county’s roughly 175,000 residents, providing new boardwalk, biking, fishing, crabbing, and learning opportunities.