National interest in wetlands has steadily increased over the past three decades. Wetlands are now widely recognized as important natural resources, vital to maintaining and improving habitat for many types of plants and animals. Numerous states and the Federal government are regulating, to varying degrees, development activities in many wetlands. Recent public opinion polls show strong public support for wetland protection and even recommend increased protection (Harris 1982). Recognizing the need for sound biological information to make informed land used decisions on wetlands, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created the National Wetlands Inventory Project (NWI) in 1974. The primary prupose of the NWI project was to produce a series of detailed wetland maps showing the location, type, and distribution of the nation's wetlands. To date, wetland maps are avaiable for 45% of the lower 48 states, 12% of alaska, and all of Hawaii. By 1979, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service recognized the need for national statistics on the current status and recent trends in wetlands of the United States and designed a study to generate these statistics. This national wetland trends study was completed in 1983 and technical and popular reports on the study's findings have been published (Frayer, et al. 1983 and Tiner 1984). Although the national wetland trends study produced reliable estimates for the Nation, it was not designed to generate reliable statistics for individual states. Additional studies would have to be conducted to provide similar results for individual states.