Wetlands vegetation is typical of swamps, marshes, bogs. Not only are wetlands prime wildlife habitat, but they protect and improve water quality by dissipating flood energy, improving floodwater retention, stabilizing banks, increasing timber and forage production potential, accumulating plant nutrients and trapping sediment. Wetland mechanisms include direct deposition, absorption into vegetative material, adsorption onto soil or organic matter, plant uptake, denitrification and streambank stabilization. These provide for healthy microbial species and pesticide, sediment and nutrient removal. Combined with such practices as vegetative filter strips, they add diversity to a farm or ranch operation and minimize the potential of nonpoint source pollution of surface water bodies.
Management can protect, restore or create wetland areas.
You can improve a wetland by planted vegetation, improving a slope, with fencing, selective timber harvesting and debris removal. Constructed wetlands can simulate a natural wetland's ability for pollution reduction. An article in The Furrow magazine dealt with constructed wetlands, and Montana State University is studying wetland construction. Nature creates wetlands in a quiet, subtle way, but we are just learning how to engineer them. Wetlands make sense for water quality management, as evidenced by the numerous livestock operators who would tell you that when spring comes, melt-water running over frozen ground near livestock confinement facilities can be pretty brown.