The New Jersey Meadowlands Commission (NJMC) is pleased to announce that it has been named the recipient of a Chapter Award from the New Jersey Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (NJASLA) for the design of the Commission’s River Barge Park.

The Chapter award – the NJASLA’s highest honor – acknowledges the Commission for creating an ecologically sustainable site design by integrating strategies for stormwater management, habitat restorations, reclaimed timber and energy efficiency.

The Commission will receive the award at the NJASLA’s annual meeting in Atlantic City next week, marking the 28^th time that the NJMC has been honored by the NJASLA for its design of Meadowlands District parks.

River Barge Park, located along the Hackensack River in Carlstadt, opened in May 2012. The 5.5-acre park provides the first public access to the river from its western banks in southern Bergen County in decades. The NJMC preserved the property, which was once slated for residential development.

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Yesterday, we asked you to count the number of Black-crowned Night Herons in the above photo. The answer is nine. (see below).
Closeup of the upper left part of the frame follows, for you naysayers out there. Congrats to Patrick Carney for getting the right number, although there's probably another one in the somewhere… Horned larks, not so much.)

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As we reviewed the Meadowlands Nature Blog posts from this past year, we realized just how many awesome images we posted from nature photographers.

In an effort to showcase these talents, and to get more folks to appreciate the natural beauty of the Meadowlands, we have started a new feature: "Monday Photographer Showcase."

We invite photographers to send in three of their favorite Meadowlands images, a brief bio, a little squib about why they love photographing here, and a link to their online pages. (A photo of yourself would be great, too!)

Images must be from the Meadowlands, and should be around 150K.

If you don't watermark them, we'll add a copyright for you. Email your photos to jim.wright@njmeadowlands.gov, and feel free to suggest ways to make the showcase better.

We'll give it a try, and keep it going for as long as there's interest out there.

So far, we have showcased three photographers:

Paul Sullivan, Roy Woodford and the Bongiornos.