In 1993, the Army obtained a permit to install new machine-gun ranges on lands legally defined as wetlands. The permit required the Army to construct mitigation wetlands to compensate for the natural wetlands lost. Chris Urban gathers data on water levels in one of the constructed wetlands. Since then, staff and graduate students of the CWC, including Christopher Urban, M.S. candidate in ecology, have monitored conditions in the four created wetlands and compared them to conditions in three natural, or reference, wetlands. They mapped the sites, gathered baseline data on soil chemical and physical properties, conducted plant surveys, and installed groundwater monitoring wells.
Wetlands continue to be destroyed at the expense of human development.
This leaves the success of most mitigation wetlands questionable. The creation of wetlands where there weren't any can be especially difficult, because this assumes that the new wetland will serve equally well in the same capacity as the destroyed wetland. This is virtually impossible, especially for forested wetlands, since these systems require decades to mature. Consequently, most current wetland mitigation does not trade equivalent wetlands, so a marsh wetland might replace a forested wetland. By gathering information on abiotic ecosystem development, we hope to contribute to the design and success of wetland mitigation projects.