What in the world is a wetland?
The word “wetland” can refer to a variety of ecosystems, including swamps, marshes, bogs, floodplains and ponds. Generally speaking, wetlands are *lands* that are *wet* (that is, covered by water) at least some of the time. It’s a big group, and this impressive crew of landscapes are a very big deal.
While all wetlands are different, there are many services they can provide:
- They protect coastlines, absorbing storm surge and high tides while dampening wave forces and preventing floods from spreading.
- They filter water, allowing sediment to settle out and providing healthy environments for plants to turn carbon dioxide to oxygen and for microbes to break down pollutants.
- They don’t just clean water, they conserve it: wetlands allow water to seep into the ground, preventing it from evaporating. These supplies are called base flows, and in dry seasons they keep rivers flowing.
- They provide critical habitat to keystone and threatened species.
- They fight climate change! Wetlands act as major carbon sinks thanks to their rich soils and biodiverse plant communities. Thanks to their heavy presence near coasts, they also often absorb sea level rise.
There are efforts across the world to conserve wetlands, in order to preserve one or more of the many services they provide. Additionally, researchers and engineers are evaluating whether the power of wetlands can be harnessed to provide even more of these environmental benefits, from carbon sequestration to flood prevention.
American Wetlands Month is held in May, recognizing the major impact these ecosystems have on our world. At the recent N-EWN Partner Symposium on May 22-24, we dedicated a session to talks about conserving, restoring, and utilizing the power of wetlands.
Explore the talks below to learn about the research N-EWN members are doing in wetlands today:
Sand Seepage Wetlands as a Way to Increase Our Wetland Inventory and Improve Our Surface Water Resource – Joseph Berg, Biohabitats
Sand seepage wetlands are novel wetland systems that use pulsed stormwater flows to initiate and sustain wetland hydrology and providing surface water treatment, while also creating a diverse wetland habitat and supporting associated biotic communities. The design approach uses seepage pools/reservoirs to collect and store pulsed flows and riffle grade control structures to retain water at higher elevations and use this created to head to drive the surface water through a carbon-rich granular hyporheic bed that supports microbial processes. In addition to cooling and cleaning the water, supporting a variety of wetland habitats from submersed and emergent communities through wetland shrub and tree communities, this approach also attenuates peak discharge and extends time of concentration. In the presentation I will review two successfully implemented projects, one in an agricultural watershed troubled by poultry production in the vicinity of Ocean City, Maryland constructed ten years ago and one site historically used for rubble dumping in an urban watershed in the vicinity of Hackensack, New Jersey constructed last year. These systems can be a great alternative to regional stormwater detention ponds, delivering opportunities for engagement with nature through the incorporation of trails and overlooks, creating opportunities for immersive engagement in wetland habitat.
Developing a Numerical Model to Predict the Nutrient Removal from Borrow Pits Wetlands in the Middle Missouri River Basin – Mohamed Gaballah, UGA
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), in collaboration with local partners, constructs and maintains an extensive levee network along U.S. rivers, including the lower Missouri. During the repair, maintenance, or realignment of these levees, substantial amounts of fill material are sourced locally from “borrow pits”. Some of these borrow pits have been transformed into wetlands to improve habitat conditions. Notably, certain agricultural drainage ditches have been redirected through these newly created wetlands to enhance water quality, primarily by removing nutrients, before discharge into the Missouri River. Presently, these wetlands are not specifically designed for nutrient retention, and the water quality benefits derived from this practice have not been quantified. The objective of this research is to assess the potential water quality improvements associated with rerouting agricultural drainage through the established constructed wetlands in the lower Missouri River basin. The aim is to contribute to the enhancement of the design of these nature-based solutions. Consequently, a monitoring program focusing on the hydrology and water quality of these borrow pits is being implemented. The intention is to develop and calibrate a numerical model that can assess various design alternatives, offering recommendations to optimize nutrient removal within these wetlands. Additionally, the feasibility of extending these wetlands along the river for the same purpose will be investigated. The outcomes of this study will assist USACE in prioritizing locations for constructed wetlands and refining their design to maximize water quality benefits.
Reinventing Nature-based Solutions for Treatment of Domestic Wastewater – Amanda Ludlow, Stantec
Across the United Kingdom, tightened permit limits are placing pressure on water companies to introduce new nutrient removal schemes. Traditional ways of treating stormwater and wastewater can be expensive and use a lot of energy especially under high flows conditions. Stantec is utilizing its expertise with treatment wetlands and other nature-based solutions to develop holistic catchment-based approaches to address degraded water quality and protect our clients assets.
While treatment wetlands have been around for decades, recent research has gained an appreciation and further understanding for the complexity of a wetland environment and the benefits brought about by its natural biodiversity and resiliency. Bringing nature back as an integral part of wastewater solutions can lead to a more sustainable and resilient future.
Stantec is working with various water utilities in the UK to design Treatment Wetlands for domestic wastewater treatment and combined sewer overflows to maximize the benefits of restoration ecology by incorporating enhanced biodiversity and habitat creation built into the topography of the landscape. Treatment wetlands are being designed to provide biological treatment to a secondary treatment requirement for all or parts of the flows and/or used as a tertiary treatment process to ‘polish’ flows.
This presentation will provide an overview of two case studies utilizing treatment wetlands for wastewater treatment: (1) Yorkshire Water Services (YWS) Clifton Wastewater Treatment Works and (2) United Utilities Southwaite Wastewater Treatment Works.
Identifying Potential Sites for Wetlands via Causality-Based Data Imputation and Knowledge Transfer – Yoonhyuk Choi, ASU
Wetlands (swamps, marshes, bogs, floodplains, and estuaries) are pivotal in shaping their surrounding ecosystems by providing a diverse spectrum of benefits, including floodwater storage and retention, protection against storms and hurricanes, stabilization of shorelines, water purification, and carbon fixation. Yet, how to detect potential sizes for wetlands and utilize them is a challenging question. Wetland site detection involves a decision process assessing various parameters, including land use type, soil characteristics, water table depth, and potential evapotranspiration. Traditional techniques primarily depend on domain expertise, yet this expertise-driven decision process is especially difficult considering the heterogeneous nature of wetlands and their diverse use contexts. While model-driven approaches are promising, it is computationally expensive and data may be sparse. This comprises spatio-temporal and contextual sparsities, such that some locations have missing data for months or even years due to data collection issues. Moreover, a model learned in one context (one location, considering one particular end goal) may not be directly transferred to a different context. We therefore propose a novel approach towards the identification of potential sites for wetlands through causality-based data imputation and prediction with context-informed knowledge transfer. To address the data sparsity issue, we first discover underlying causal structures among the covariates and utilize them for data imputation through knowledge transfer from contexts with richer data to sparse ones. Finally, we build causally informed models for the identification of potential sites for wetlands, to enhance the explainability of our method.
Optimizing the Natural Infrastructure Benefits of Conservation and Restoration – Elizabeth Guthrie, Ducks Unlimited
Wetland conservation and restoration holds the potential to provide important sustainability benefits to both people and wildlife. Ducks Unlimited has partnered with the University of Georgia to develop science-based information to raise the profile of the role of wetland conservation and restoration as a means of increasing societal resilience to floods, droughts and storms. This partnership evolved to help answer the clear need for data and data-driven tools to enable coastal and riverine adaptation on the scale necessary to address the impacts of current and future natural hazards. There is a critical need to develop natural infrastructure design guidance and develop scalable, repeatable measures and models of natural infrastructure project performance in a way that pairs practitioners like Ducks Unlimited and our project partners, with academic partners.
We present here multiple case studies that illustrate how this partnership has been utilized to address these needs through existing and planned conservation and restoration projects. For many projects, monitoring performance and outcomes represents a significant unknown that is necessary to improve methods and standards and understand the costs and benefits for conservation and restoration activities that aim to optimize natural infrastructure benefits. Future research, partnership, and funding needs are discussed in the context of accelerating natural infrastructure implementation through this approach.
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