A former cranberry farm in Plymouth, Mass., sold by Glorianna Davenport and her husband for conservation has become the single largest freshwater restoration project in Massachusetts, producing peer-reviewed science on how quickly degraded agricultural land can recover and helping launch a state program that has already converted roughly 500 acres of retired bog land into functioning wetland. The property, now Tidmarsh Wildlife Sanctuary and managed by Mass Audubon, supports sinuous streams, native pitcher plants, sphagnum moss, and wildlife absent during a century of cranberry production. The transformation is monitored by a live network of cameras and sensors generating publicly available data that researchers from Massachusetts to the Amazon rainforest have drawn on.
The project emerges as climate change and shrinking profit margins push cranberry growers across New England and the Midwest to abandon farms their families have held for generations — raising urgent questions about whether that land will be conserved, developed, or left to recover on its own for decades.
PLYMOUTH, Mass. — A former cranberry farm sold by Glorianna Davenport and her husband for conservation has become the single largest freshwater restoration project in Massachusetts, producing peer-reviewed science on how quickly degraded agricultural land can recover and helping launch a state program that has already converted roughly 500 acres of retired bog land into functioning wetland.
The property, now known as Tidmarsh Wildlife Sanctuary and managed by Mass Audubon, supports sinuous streams, native pitcher plants, sphagnum moss, and wildlife that were absent during a century of cranberry production. Its transformation, which restoration workers began in 2010, is monitored by a live network of cameras and sensors generating publicly available data that researchers from Massachusetts to the Amazon rainforest have consulted.
“We discovered that former cranberry farms were actually highly restorable,” said Beth Lambert, director of the Massachusetts Division of Ecological Restoration.
Turning degraded soil into wetland
Cranberry farming degrades the native freshwater wetlands that farms are built on, leaving behind sandy soil compacted over generations. At Tidmarsh, excavators sifted through that soil, old dams were removed, new waterways were dug, and more than 20,000 native plant species were planted. Ecologists who had considered cranberry farmland “ecologically dead” watched a wetland emerge within a year.
Two published studies have since documented the pace of recovery. A 2021 study of Tidmarsh and other restored sites found that water retention, soil health, and microbial communities improved rapidly within just a few years of restoration. A 2025 study by researchers at the Woodwell Climate Research Center and the University of Connecticut suggested that the sand at Tidmarsh held long-dormant native seeds that needed only to be mixed with peat to germinate.
A state program scales the lesson
The results at Tidmarsh helped launch Massachusetts’ Cranberry Bog Restoration Program, which connects farmers with nonprofits, federal funding, and conservation-minded buyers. Lambert said the state has completed construction on nine restoration projects totaling around 500 acres (202 hectares) and 10 miles (16 kilometers) of stream habitat. Eleven additional projects spanning another 500 acres are currently in planning. She said she aims to restore a further thousand acres in the next 10 to 15 years.
The urgency stems partly from economics. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of retired cranberry farms in Massachusetts grew by about 40 percent between 2017 and 2022. The crop requires cold winters and ample water, and warmer temperatures and longer droughts are challenging harvest seasons for growers from New England to Wisconsin.
“For many of these farmers, it’s their life savings and what they want to pass on to their children,” Davenport said. “It’s very complicated.”
Farmers leaving the industry can sell to conservation buyers, sell for development, or let the land sit unmanaged — a path that can take decades to produce any ecological recovery. Davenport said the window for conservation acquisition closes permanently if it is missed.
“If we don’t conserve, if we don’t protect these lands that … owners are walking away (from), we lose it forever,” she said.
A sensor network, and a climate buffer
Davenport, a retired filmmaker, created the Living Observatory, a nonprofit that describes itself as a “learning collaborative” for researchers, artists, and others documenting how former cranberry farms recover. Its website houses data from multiple restoration sites across the state, with sensors monitoring conditions from soil moisture to temperature. Gershon Dublon, a data and systems researcher and director of the group’s board, said ecologists working in the Amazon rainforest had contacted the organization asking how to deploy similar sensor networks in their own work.
Restored wetlands carry direct climate value, said Christopher Neill, a climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Center. Wetlands absorb water from floods and storms, and scientists say extreme precipitation is becoming more common in the Northeast. Sphagnum moss growing along the sanctuary’s boardwalk also absorbs and stores carbon dioxide.
Mass Audubon’s Kim Snyder, the sanctuary’s education coordinator, leads tours for birdwatchers, schoolchildren, and Plymouth residents who remember the land as farmland.
“It’s a great property to show … the scope of restoration work,” she said.
Source: Associated Press, reporting by Jamie Jiang, produced in collaboration with the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing.