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A Nova Scotia Nature Trust project on Hemeons Head conservation lands encompasses a beach cleanup and taking the first step to tackle an invasive flower in the rich bird habitat.

Stewardship assistant Becky Parker said the area in Shelburne County near Lockeport is owned by Acadia University and was acquired by the Nature Trust as part of a conservation easement in 2013. It contains sand and cobble beach, sand dunes, coastal headland, tidal marshes, sandflats and mudflats, an extensive lagoon, freshwater wetland, bogs, barrens and coastal forest.

Parker said there’s significant speciesat-risk habitat on the property as well as a huge amount of undeveloped coastline.

“So the property itself has a lot of value, conservation-wise,” she said.

“The project we’re working on this year has to do with the management planning around the property. Once a property is acquired, whether it’s an owned property or an easement, it goes through a monitoring process where we inventory everything on the property and assess its real conservation value, and then we do management planning to protect the features of the property into the future.”

For this property, the Nature Trust was able to secure some money from Environment Canada’s Environmental Damages Fund so they will get to writing the management plan after doing some restoration work.

This summer they started with the beach cleanup focused on marine debris that had washed up over the years. With the help of the community, Nature Trust staff and volunteers gathered more than 400 pieces of garbage from the beach.

“The area is close to many popular fishing grounds and over time it’s accumulated a large amount of lobster traps, plastic fishing gear and lots of other garbage from non-fishing sources,” Parker said. “So we planned to inventory the garbage that was coming off the property to see what kind it was and how much was there and how quickly it was accumulating over time, and did a public outreach event to take the garbage off the property.”

That part of the project has just concluded and, highlighting the importance of preserving habitat, Parker said one of the birds spotted in the area at the time was a Baird’s Sandpiper that she called a unique find for the area.

Next up is an experimental restoration on an invasive rose starting this Saturday, again hopefully with the help of volunteers. People who want to participate should show up at Black Point Beach between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.

“There’s this rose on the beach there, it’s called rosa rugosa, the Japanese Beach Rose,” Parker said. “We don’t know a lot about it in Nova Scotia which is a problem, I guess, for us — we need to manage it — but also kind of exciting because we now get to do this experiment on it.

“The rose, we think, has been in Nova Scotia since the early 1900s, maybe a little bit before. But we think that it’s invasive. It’s invasive in parts of western Europe and they’ve had trouble with it in the States in similar environments.

“The beach has some limited sandy areas that are piping plover habitat and on the other side of the beach, there is this huge salt marsh where a number of other important bird species are living. So the beach is important to protect for a number of reasons but the piping plover habitat was one of our concerns. The rose, because it grows in the area between cobble and sand, we thought could be a threat to plover or other habitat.”

The plan is to do cutting and tarping of the rose plant and monitor the patch over the next couple of years.