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Special report: Vanishing wetlands

Agency shrinks as grip on wetlands data slips

The National Wetlands Inventory office in St. Petersburg may close, even as staffers struggle to update aging maps.

By CRAIG PITTMAN and MATTHEW WAITE
Published May 22, 2005

ST. PETERSBURG - In 1976, a new federal agency opened in Florida to map every wetland across the country. The staff figured they'd be done in two years.

They were wrong.

Three decades later, the National Wetlands Inventory has mapped about 90 percent of the nation's swamps, marshes and bogs, including all of Florida's.

But most of its maps for fast-growing Florida are now 20 years out of date.

"I wish we had a staff," said Norm Mangrum, who has worked there 24 years. "We could update the whole state. Most of it desperately needs updating."

Meanwhile, despite a promise by President Bush that the agency will produce a new report by the end of this year, a move is afoot to close its largest office, in St. Petersburg.

NWI is an arm of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It does most of its work from a building in the back corner of the sprawling Koger Center office park, a stone's throw from the Internal Revenue Service.

A handful of biologists spend their days peering at color-coded aerial photos, drawing lines on a computer and occasionally going into the field for verification.

They post the results on a Web site relied upon by myriad planning and regulatory agencies (http://wetlands.fws.gov/)

But lots of places classified as wetlands in the 1980s are now covered by houses, malls, big-box stores, churches, schools, farms and mines. Florida was one of the first states mapped, but the staff has yet to revise its maps for 65 of the 67 counties.

"In a state that's growing as fast as Florida and has that many wetlands, that's a really serious issue," said Ron Larson, author of Swamp Song: A Natural History of Florida's Swamps.

The agency started its inventory in the 1970s because, "Congress decided they needed to know how many wetlands there were and where they were," recalled Blake Parker, one of its first employees. "They wanted to get a trend of what was happening."

Back then, federal officials from different regions defined wetlands differently, leading to inconsistencies that could pose legal problems, Parker said. So besides mapping wetlands, the agency was supposed to train federal employees on defining wetlands, he said.

Leaders of the federal wildlife agency picked St. Petersburg for the main office because it suited the training mission. It was close to a major airport and offered easy access to a wide variety of wetlands for training. In his four years, Parker said he held 30 classes a year.

Early on, Parker said, agency officials had high hopes of completing all their mapping duties quickly. They expected to use high-resolution satellite imagery gathered by the government, but were blocked.

"We were told, "Sorry, that's classified information,' " Parker said.

That meant analyzing aerial photos, which was far more difficult, quadrupled the cost and slowed the process to a crawl, Parker said.

In its glory days in the 1980s, the St. Petersburg staff numbered more than 30, and contractors did much of the actual mapping. But the training fell by the wayside and its budget was repeatedly cut. Under President Clinton, the budget was halved and has never fully recovered, staffers said. The contractor they depended on went bankrupt.

The 2004 and 2005 budgets were $4.6-million each.

Today the staff is down to 14 people at the Koger Center, plus seven scattered around the country, said Charlie Stowers, who works in Atlanta.

Staffers now use computers to draw maps; available technology surpasses its current techniques. University and corporate researchers routinely use software, analysis techniques and digital images to automatically delineate wetlands. Areas that take wetlands inventory staffers months to map could be finished in hours.

Still, the agency's work is considered vital. Last year the president promised that the agency will produce its next national status report by the end of this year. But Bush did not propose extra money, so the staff hopes to persuade other federal agencies to help.

"We're having to tin-cup on the funds," said Greg Pipkin, who has been with the inventory since 1980.

In the meantime, the Fish and Wildlife Service proposes closing the St. Petersburg office and spreading its duties around the country, Stowers said.

If it happens, Parker said that could mean different regions using different wetland definitions again.

The staff is completing an update of booming Southwest Florida. The aerial photos vividly show the loss of wetlands, even though new wetlands were supposed to be created to offset the losses. Man-made wetlands rarely compensate, staffers say.

"You start out with, say, beautiful cypress areas, then bring in a golf course," Mangrum said. "You had something for wildlife, and now you've got a square pond."

Touring Lee and Collier counties to verify their work, agency staffers saw how quickly wetlands were disappearing.

"We'd pull over to do soil borings," said NWI biologist Dave Lindsey, "and we were about getting run over by dump trucks."

[Last modified December 14, 2006, 18:37:23]