Scientists to Study O.C. Wetland Success Stories

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 seabirds.

Now those rivers run through concrete channels, and filled-in salt marshes are topped with pricey oceanfront condos. With 90% of the state’s historic wetlands drained, diked or filled, regulators and builders have struggled in recent years to save the remaining 10% by preserving and rejuvenating wetlands or creating 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, due next spring, will judge just how well current U.S. regulations protect the nation’s long-ignored wetland ecosystems.

The big question: how closely a wetland artificially restored by engineers and ecologists resembles a naturally occurring wetland in the same region.

Federal permits that allow wetlands to be dredged or filled generally require that for every wetland 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.

Because California ranks among the states with the most severe wetland 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 units that requested the study.

Some projects to be inspected Tuesday are working relatively well, said wetland 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 wetland mitigation sites as part of his 1996 dissertation at UCLA.

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

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

The water shut-off was legal because the wetland 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.

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.” They also are reviewing how a project’s success can depend on its location, size, soil, and types of vegetation and animals found there.

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

The nation lost about 458,000 acres of marshes, swamps and other wetlands each year from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, and about 290,000 acres in the 1970s and 1980s. Then agencies such as the EPA and the Corps of Engineers 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 produced President George Bush’s campaign pledge of “no net loss of wetlands.” The Clinton administration has tried to go further, establishing a future net increase, Fox said. But even today, 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 have been restored in the last seven years, according to Corps of Engineers reports.

So the study was requested by four federal agencies involved in wetland regulation: the EPA, the Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The 13-member group already has toured wetland projects near Orlando, Fla., and Northbrook, Ill. Its report is due next spring.