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Special report: Vanishing wetlands

Are these both wetlands?

A federal report touting a big gain in wetlands counts artificial ponds. But U.S. and state agencies don't weigh them equally.

By MATTHEW WAITE and CRAIG PITTMAN
Published March 31, 2006

[Times photo (2003): Mike Pease]

Wetlands -- marshes and swamps like this one in Lutz, bogs and salt flats -- are protected under the Clean Water Act.

	[Times photo: Times files]
	A retention pond, such as this one in Inverness, handles runoff from buildings and parking areas.

By counting golf course ponds and ornamental lakes as wetlands, the federal government announced Thursday a massive gain in the number of wetlands nationwide, the first such gain ever reported.

But a chorus of critics called the report misleading, saying the nation lost wetlands without those man-made bodies of water.

More than 520,000 acres of wetlands were wiped out from 1998 to 2004, according to the study done by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

But the report contends that the losses were offset by creating more than 715,000 acres of new wetlands, mainly artificial ponds that do not provide the same environmental benefit as wetlands.

Federal officials hailed the results as a positive sign.

"Although the overall state of our wetlands is still precarious, this report suggests that nationwide efforts to curb losses and restore wetlands habitats are on the right track," said outgoing Interior Secretary Gale Norton.

And as for the ponds, Norton said: "People like having ponds as an amenity. . . . Even ponds that are not a high quality of wetlands are better than not having wetlands."

Environmentalists, who attacked the study for a month before its release, said it is a mistake to equate man-made ponds with natural swamps and marshes.

"You can build as many ponds as you want, it's not going to make up for what we're losing," said Julie Sibbing, a wetlands expert at the National Wildlife Federation.

Not even the federal agency in charge of protecting wetlands, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, considers such ponds to be a replacement for wetlands, and neither do the state agencies in charge of regulating wetland losses.

"That's something we all tend to agree with," John Hall, who ran the corps' regulatory division in Florida for 15 years, told the St. Petersburg Times in 2004. "They may have wetland attributes but they're not, generally speaking, what we like to see as wetland mitigation."

Wetlands - marshes, swamps, bogs, salt flats and dozens of areas that have wet soil and plants that thrive there - are supposed to be protected under the Clean Water Act because they are vital for water supplies, flood control, pollution filtering and wildlife habitat.

In 1989 President George Bush declared the nation's policy on wetlands would be No Net Loss - whatever is wiped out will be replaced. The policy proved so popular that it has been embraced by both Presidents Clinton and Bush. President Bush two years ago promised to go beyond No Net Loss and add millions of acres more wetlands.

But a study by an arm of the National Academies of Science pointed out five years ago that no one knows how well No Net Loss is working because no agency has complete and reliable data on the nation's wetlands. And most of the efforts to make up for wetland losses end in failure, the scientific study found.

Mitigation - making up for wetlands losses - is the linchpin of the No Net Loss policy. Even research by the corps paints a dim picture on what's being done to offset losses.

In New England, researchers for the corps found that forested wetlands that were being destroyed by development were most often replaced with shallow ponds, devoid of the trees that were lost. Other corps studies found projects that were supposed to make up for wetlands losses lacked any wetlands at all.

And congressional investigators have found that the corps cannot ensure the 40,000 acres of wetlands restoration work required each year since 1983 is taking place.

That, critics of the report say, is the problem: No one is really keeping track of the wetlands. And Thursday's report doesn't help.

"The report clearly doesn't assess the quality or conditions of the wetlands or the replacement waters," said Royal Gardner, a former corps attorney who teaches environmental law at Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport. "Even if we see progress in terms of acreage, that doesn't necessarily tell us we have a net gain in wetlands functions and values. At the end of the day, that's what's important."

All research, including Thursday's report, suggests that wetlands losses continue.

"Without the increased pond acreage, wetland gains would not have surpassed wetland losses during the time frame of this study," the Fish and Wildlife study said. "The creation of artificial freshwater ponds has played a major role in achieving wetland quantity objectives."

Because of how it was conducted, Thursday's study didn't break down figures by state. A St. Petersburg Times investigation last year found that Florida lost about 84,000 acres of wetlands to development from 1990 to 2003.

Among the critics of Thursday's study was Ducks Unlimited, a hunting advocacy group that has been pushing wetlands protection for decades. It was at a 1989 Ducks Unlimited conference that the No Net Loss policy was announced.

D.A. Young, the executive vice president of Ducks Unlimited, said the study "shouldn't provide reason to think an overall victory on wetlands conservation is being achieved."

"We should all be concerned about America continuing to lose quality wetlands and the benefits they provide," Young said.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.

[Last modified December 13, 2006, 17:49:16]