Evaluating design and verifying compliance of wetlands created under section 404 of the Clean Water Act in Oregon

Permit specifications, construction plans, and field measurements were used to examine the correlation between design and conditions "as-built" in a population of 11 palustrine emergent marshes created in the metropolitan area of Portland, Oregon, between 1980-1986. The projects ranged from six months to almost seven years in age. Data on planned and existing hydrology, wetland area, wetland shape, slopes of banks, and vegetation were collected for each site. Information on the plans for each site was gathered from the Section 404 permit files of the Portland District Office of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the permit files of the Oregon Division of State Lands. Results indicate that none of the wetlands studied were designed or constructed as permitted. Hydrology could not be evaluated since the information in the permit files was inadequate. There was a cumulative loss of 1.48 ha (3.6 acres), or 29% from the 5.10 ha (12.6 acres) that was to be created. Seven of the created wetlands had very regular shorelines; four had irregular shapes. The predominant slope as-built was gentler then what was to be built as determined from the construction plans and permit specifications for nine of the eleven projects (82%). For 45% of the sites (5/11) the predominant slopes to be built and as-built were steeper than the 5:1 maximum recommended in the literature. Vegetation to be planted did not occur on the sites. The proportion of species found on the created wetlands that were to be planted ranged from 0% to 7%. The differences between the plans and specifications in the project file and the as-built conditions point to the need for verification of projects in both the planning and construction phases of the permitting process. The planning phase should focus on the development of a realistic approach using information from the scientific literature and past projects. The construction phase should culminate in the production of an as-built plan. This would allow immediate checks to ensure that critical features have been included as intended, e.g., wetland area, vegetation type. It would also document any corrective measures that were taken due to unanticipated events during construction. As-built plans of the project would ensure that the details of the actual wetland created were available for future reference in addition to the conceptual design

More than just trees: Assessing reforestation success in tropical developing countries

Rural communities in many parts of the tropics are dependent of forests for their livelihoods and for environmental services. Forest resources in the tropics have declined rapidly over the past century and therefore many developing countries in the tropics have reforestation programs. Although reforestation is a long-term process with long-term benefits, existing evaluations of the success of these programs tends to focus on short-term establishment success indicators. This paper presents a review of reforestation assessment that highlights the need to not only consider short-term establishment success, but also longer-term growth and maturation success, environmental success and socio-economic success. In addition, we argue that reforestation assessment should not be based on success indicators alone, but should incorporate the drivers of success, which encompasses an array of biophysical, socio-economic, institutional and project characteristics. This is needed in order to understand the reasons why reforestation projects succeed or fail and therefore to design more successful projects in future. The paper presents a conceptual model for reforestation success assessment that links key groups of success indicators and drivers. This conceptual model provides the basis for a more comprehensive evaluation of reforestation success and the basis for the development of predictive systems-based assessment models. These models will be needed to better guide reforestation project planning and policy design and therefore assist rural communities in tropical developing countries to alleviate poverty and achieve a better quality of life

Wetland Assessment: Beyond the Traditional Water Quality Perspective

Use of water chemistry or water quality data as the sole indicator to determine if aquatic ecosystems meet restoration objectives or Clean Water Act criteria is not possible for wetland resources because surface water presence varies across wetland types. The 2011, National Wetland Condition Assessment (NWCA) assessed 967 sites representing 25,153,681 ha of wetland across the conterminous US. Surface water could be collected at 537 sites representing only 41% of the wetland population area and under-representing particular wetland types. These results motivated the authors to introduce the concept of aquatic resource quality, the condition of an ecosystem based on the integrated assessment of physical, chemical, and biological indicators, as the goal of monitoring and assessment of aquatic systems. The NWCA is an example of the use of aquatic resource quality. The survey successfully reported on wetland condition using a biotic indicator (the vegetation multimetric index) and the relative extent and relative risk of stressors using 10 physical, chemical, and biological indicators to report on aquatic resource quality. The NWCA demonstrated that aquatic resource quality can be consistently evaluated regardless of surface water presence. Consequently, we recommend aquatic resource quality as the goal of aquatic ecosystem monitoring and assessment

Evaluating the Potential Effectiveness of Compensatory Mitigation Strategies for Marine Bycatch

Conservationists are continually seeking new strategies to reverse population declines and safeguard against species extinctions. Here we evaluate the potential efficacy of a recently proposed approach to offset a major anthropogenic threat to many marine vertebrates: incidental bycatch in commercial fisheries operations. This new approach, compensatory mitigation for marine bycatch (CMMB), is conceived as a way to replace or reduce mandated restrictions on fishing activities with compensatory activities (e.g., removal of introduced predators from islands) funded by levies placed on fishers. While efforts are underway to bring CMMB into policy discussions, to date there has not been a detailed evaluation of CMMB's potential as a conservation tool, and in particular, a list of necessary and sufficient criteria that CMMB must meet to be an effective conservation strategy. Here we present a list of criteria to assess CMMB that are tied to critical ecological aspects of the species targeted for conservation, the range of possible mitigation activities, and the multi-species impact of fisheries bycatch. We conclude that, overall, CMMB has little potential for benefit and a substantial potential for harm if implemented to solve most fisheries bycatch problems. In particular, CMMB is likely to be effective only when applied to short-lived and highly-fecund species (not the characteristics of most bycatch-impacted species) and to fisheries that take few non-target species, and especially few non-seabird species (not the characteristics of most fisheries). Thus, CMMB appears to have limited application and should only be implemented after rigorous appraisal on a case-specific basis; otherwise it has the potential to accelerate declines of marine species currently threatened by fisheries bycatch

Light dependence of Zostera marina annual growth dynamics in estuaries subject to different degrees of eutrophication

Author Posting. © The Authors, 2005. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B. V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Aquatic Botany 84 (2006): 17-25, doi:10.1016/j.aquabot.2005.05.014.In temperate, shallow systems with clear waters the temporal dynamic of eelgrass (Zostera marina) growth is closely associated with the seasonality of irradiance at the water's surface. It has been recently suggested that increasing eutrophication, via light attenuation by increased algal growth, may disrupt the close temporal association between eelgrass growth and surface irradiance often found in pristine sites. Here, we test this hypothesis by examining the coupling between eelgrass growth dynamics and surface irradiance over an annual cycle in four shallow estuaries of the Waquoit Bay system (Massachusetts, USA) that have similar physical characteristics, but are subject to different land-derived nitrogen loading rates and the intensity of eutrophication sustained. Contrary to our hypothesis, the results show that, in general, most measures of eelgrass demographics were positively correlated with surface irradiance in all four estuaries. Out of the 45 regression models adjusted between irradiance and demographic variables (density, plastochrone intervals, and above- or below-ground biomass, growth, and production, on both a per shoot and areal basis), only 9 of them were non-significant, and only 6 of those corresponded to the eutrophic estuaries. Most notably, we found a lack of correlation between shoot density and irradiance in the eutrophic estuaries, in contrast to the strong coupling exhibited in estuaries receiving the lowest nitrogen loads. Experimental evidence from previous work has demonstrated severe light limitation and other deleterious impacts imposed by macroalgal canopies on newly recruiting shoots in the eutrophic estuaries, likely contributing to the lack of correlation between shoot density and irradiance at the water's surface. Because the range in eutrophication encompassed by this comparison includes the range of conditions at which eelgrass can survive, the relatively consistent temporal coupling between surface irradiance and most eelgrass demographic variables found here may also be a feature of other shallow temperate systems undergoing increasing eutrophication, and indicates a measure of plant recruitment (density) to be one of the first parameters to become uncoupled from light reaching the water's surface.This research was supported by an Environmental Protection Agency STAR Fellowship for Graduate Environmental Study (U-915335-01-0) and a National Estuarine Research Reserve Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (award number NA77OR0228) awarded to JH. We thank the Quebec-Labrador Foundation Atlantic Center for the Environment’s Sounds Conservancy Program and the Boston University Ablon/Bay committee for research funds