Rating Wetland Efforts

Once, the rivers of Southern California wended their way toward the sea through wide green swaths of willows and cottonwoods. Coastal inlets cradled rich caches of muddy marsh, schools of fish and swooping sea birds.

Now those rivers run through concrete channels, and filled-in salt marshes are topped with pricey oceanfront condos. With 90% of the state’s wetlands drained, diked or filled, regulators and builders have struggled in recent years to save the remaining 10% or create new ones.

Their efforts will be scrutinized Tuesday by a National Academy of Sciences panel of experts touring six Orange County wetlands that have been saved or restored. The panel is conducting a national study of how effectively people can restore or replace wetlands. The results, expected next spring, should indicate how well U.S. regulations protect the nation’s long-ignored wetland ecosystems.

The overarching question the scientists face is how closely a wetlands artificially restored by engineers and ecologists resembles a naturally occurring wetlands in the same region.

Federal permits that allow wetlands to be dredged or filled generally require that for every wetlands acre lost, two acres must be restored. Key to that system is that restored wetlands must be able to function like their natural counterparts and match the habitat destroyed.

“You don’t take an acre of wetlands and replace it with an acre of cattails,” said Susanne Jacobson, the study’s project director and a program officer with the National Research Council, the research arm of the National Academy.

Since California ranks among the states with the most severe wetlands losses, the study could have major ramifications here, prompting changes in how landowners “mitigate” or compensate for wetlands destroyed to build homes, offices and highways.

“This is going to be one [study] that very much affects the future policies of how we mitigate the impacts of development,” said J. Charles Fox, assistant administrator for water at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, one of the government agencies that requested the study.

Some projects to be inspected Tuesday are working relatively well, said wetlands ecologist Mark Sudol, a former project manager with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who is scheduled to help lead the tour. Sudol spent six years studying 70 Orange County wetlands-mitigation sites as part of his 1996 dissertation for UCLA.

One of the more successful sites on the tour route is the Canada Gubernadora ecological restoration area in southern Orange County, a project of the Rancho Mission Viejo Co., Sudol said. Another site, a county effort in Lower Peters Canyon, has flourished because it has a natural water source, he said.

But visitors will also walk across a field of bare earth and withered grasses in Laguna Hills that was supposed to be a wetlands fed by hoses. The spigot literally was turned off years ago, and most wetlands plants died. The field still contains pieces of black irrigation hose.

The water shut-off was legal because the wetlands was created with a federal permit requiring the developer to monitor the site for only five years, said Sudol, who studied the site as part of his dissertation. He cautions against using artificial irrigation to create or restore wetlands, urging, instead, that water come from a natural stream source.

Where to locate wetlands, and how to water them, is only one of many problems facing the scientists working on the national study, called “Mitigating Wetlands Losses.” The scientists also are reviewing how a project’s success can depend on its location, size, soil and types of vegetation and animals.

National wetlands policy has grown more sophisticated in recent years, experts say.

The nation lost an estimated 458,000 acres of marshes, swamps and other wetlands each year from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, and an estimated 290,000 acres in the 1970s and 1980s. Then agencies such as the EPA and the Army Corps began recognizing the importance of wetlands in preventing flooding, protecting clean water and creating havens for birds and fish.

That new awareness in the late 1980s contributed to President Bush’s campaign pledge of “no net loss of wetlands.” The Clinton administration has tried to go further to ensure there’s a net increase in wetlands, Fox said. Nevertheless, he said, 30,000 acres of wetlands are lost annually through projects permitted by the federal government.

Any attempt to increase the acreage of U.S. wetlands faces formidable odds. A mere 0.01% of the wetlands lost since European settlement has been restored in the last seven years, according to Army Corps reports.

The study was requested by the EPA, the Army Corps, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, all involved in wetlands regulation.

The 13-member group already has toured wetlands projects near Orlando, Fla., and Northbrook, Ill.

“Someone has asked us for the best scientific answers that an independent body can do,” said Jacobson, “and we will give those answers.”

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Tour Info

The wetlands tour is open to the public. Meet in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel, 690 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach at 7:45 a.m. Tuesday. Bus seats are limited. Guest speakers will discuss wetlands issues at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday in the boardroom of the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center, 100 Academy Drive, next to UC Irvine.

* Information about the National Academy study, tour and meeting: https://224.nationalacademies.org/cp.nsf/57b01c7b1b6493c485256555005853cf /df86f4d49504694185256847001086a5?OpenDocument. Or you can contact Susanne Jacobson at sjacobson@nas.edu or Leah Probst lprobst@nas.edu.