FW: NEW on-line publication -- Society of Wetland Scientists' "White Paper" re: Wetland Management 

for Mosquito Control 

Meredith William H. (DNREC) 

to: 

Allison Wiedeman, Jack Faulk, Susan Lewis 

07/29/2009 03:45 PM 

Show Details 

History: This message has been replied to and forwarded. 

Allison/Jack/Susan – per the e‐mail below and the attachment above (that I’ve now also shared with the AMCA

Board and several other AMCA members as shown in my cover e‐mail below), I’m also providing you with this

new material coming from the Society of Wetland Scientists (SWS), in order to further help with EPA’s effort to

develop NPDES permits for aquatic pesticide use.  This is in response to your call for some examples of BMPs

pertinent to aquatic pesticide use.  What’s contained herein could be viewed as some BMP‐like

recommendations now coming from the SWS for how mosquito control should be performed relative to

environmental compatibility concerns when working in wetland habitats.  While only a relative small portion of

this paper deals directly with mosquitocide use (either for larvicides and adulticides), it nonetheless provides

information about what is essentially an IPM approach to mosquito control, including indicating where pesticide

use fits in.  

Cheers, BILL.

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AMCA BOARD plus other AMCA folks – fyi – re: Society of Wetland Scientists’ new on‐line “White Paper” titled

“Current Practices in Wetland Management for Mosquito Control.”

The 19‐pp. paper in the attachment above represents final completion of a “rather contentious” 5‐year

effort within the Society of Wetland Scientists (SWS), undertaken via auspices of the SWS’s “Wetland Concerns

Committee” and which is now posted on‐line and publicly accessible on the SWS’s website, in the Publications

section under SWS Position Papers dealing with Wetland Concerns, at

http://www.sws.org/wetland_concerns/docs/SWS‐MosquitoWhitePaperFinal.pdf.   Efforts might soon

commence to also pursue this paper’s publication in the SWS’s journal Wetlands, or in the SWS’s bulletin

Wetland Science & Practice (formerly the SWS Bulletin).  

Overall, I think the SWS final product is pretty well done, and should have some substantive impact

within the community of wetland professionals and beyond.  The paper provides an overview of topics such as

mosquito biology/ecology; “risk assessment” in its broadest sense; and various mosquito control strategies –

e.g. passive approaches; biological controls; insecticide use (larvicides and adulticides); along with various

source reduction habitat manipulations, including basin design and topographic configurations for created

wetlands or stormwater management facilities, water‐level management, and vegetation management.  There’s

even a couple of paragraphs about Open Marsh Water Management (OMWM) dealing with source reduction

habitat modifications in coastal wetlands.  An effort was also made to try to distinguish between what types of

mosquito control strategies might be acceptable for judicious use in “natural or lightly managed wetlands,”

versus what could be more aggressively employed in “heavily managed wetlands.”    

Purpose and utility of this paper ‐‐ what this “White Paper” probably most represents is the following:

  

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• A good overview of how modern‐day mosquito control operations interface with wetland environs,

which should prove to be of much informational value to >4000 SWS members who make a living as

wetland professionals (including federal or state agency wetland regulatory personnel, academic‐ or

government‐based wetland scientists and researchers, private sector wetland environmental

consultants, wetland or environmental engineers, and natural resource or natural lands managers).  

Many of these SWS members have been woefully unaware about the “what, why, how, when and

where” of modern‐day mosquito control practices relative to wetland habitats ‐‐ this “White Paper”

should now be a significant tool to help better inform and educate these folks.

  

• Should help to influence how our mosquito control profession and our modern‐day control practices

are now perceived both inside and outside the SWS, with the latter to include many federal or state

wetland regulatory agencies and environmental NGOs or “environmentalists”.  And for those entities

“on the outside,” our now having the SWS’s imprimatur regarding these mosquito control matters

should also help bolster the credibility and gravitas for what’s said about these topics (that is for

whatever credibility and gravitas the Society of Wetland Scientists’ name might bring to bear).   

  

Who crafted this paper? – a workgroup team of SWS members of varying composition over the years has been

working on this “White Paper” since its inception in 2004, with the following 6 mosquito control‐oriented good

folks entering into the fray and staying with it – Nancy Read (Metropolitan MCD, Minn.), Roger Wolfe

(Connecticut Mosquito Control), Gabi Sakolsky‐Hoopes (Cape Cod Mosquito Control Project), Jorge Rey (Fla.

Med. Entomol. Lab), Bill Walton (Univ. California at Riverside), and yours truly (Delaware Mosquito Control).  

Another workgroup member that some of  you might know is Aimlee Laderman (Yale Univ. and Woods Hole

MBL, an Atlantic white cedar swamp ecologist).   The 5 other workgroup participants who stayed with this

project until its completion included 4 private sector wetland environmental consultants (respectively from MO,

TX, OR and MD) primarily having wetland creation or restoration interests, along with a USFWS biologist from

Illinois.  The final version of the “White Paper” was edited by a recent SWS Past‐President, Pat Megonigal

(Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, MD), who in large measure also functioned late‐in‐the‐game as a

“referee.”    ☺

  

A bit of a fractious undertaking ‐‐ given the diversity of outlooks and opinions about these matters within the

SWS and hence in our workgroup too, this undertaking was admittedly a bit of a contentious, fractious effort.  

But in the end we’ve now produced a product that those of us who stuck with this endeavor can now applaud,

or at least accept in terms of its having some good information utility warranting widespread dissemination.  Are

the contents of our paper 100% satisfactory to all collaborators involved?  Of course not.  But there’s now a

consensus that the many good things in this paper seemingly far outweigh whatever few minor problems might

still remain; and there’s a strong feeling that there’s now more to be gained here by our proceeding to widely

disseminate this important information, as opposed to our keeping it bottled up if we continued to fret over the

collective acceptability of every last word [i.e. you don’t want notion of the perfect to become enemy of the

good].  And if you think that those of us who participated in this endeavor might now have a whole new

appreciation for what the word “collaboration” actually means and entails, that be putting it mildly!   ☺

  

  

  

  

  

  

      

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