Citation:

Kirk, L., J. Compton, A. Neale, R. Sabo, AND J. Christensen. How can wetland restoration efforts be best prioritized to improve water quality? Soil and Water Conservation Society Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, July 31 - August 03, 2022.

Impact/Purpose:

Wetland restoration and other conservations activities have received a great deal of attention and funding, as a tool in the toolbox for reducing nutrient loading to surface waters and coastal systems.  Yet not many studies have examined the national-scale effectiveness of multiple programs and efforts to reduce nutrients.  EPA researchers work with national nutrient inventory data as a metric of need for nutrient reductions and an index of potentially restorable wetlands as a metric of restoration suitability, to provide a method for a combined need and suitability assessment of wetland restoration efforts nationally.  This work will be presented at the Soil and Water Conservation Society Meeting in August 2022 in Denver, Colorado.  

Description:

Nonpoint agricultural sources are the main drivers of increased nutrients entering freshwaters and degrading downstream aquatic ecosystems across the US. Because wetlands have proven to efficiently remove N and P before they reach surface waters, wetland restoration on agricultural land can be an effective tool to combat nutrient water quality issues and is funded through a variety of government programs. Wetland restoration would be most effective not only where the need is greatest (i.e. watersheds with large amounts of agriculture with potential for high N and/or P loss from the landscape) but also in places with the greatest suitability for wetland restoration (i.e. landscape position with correct hydrology and soil type). We leveraged national nutrient inventory and potentially restorable wetland datasets of the continental US to find this intersection at the HUC8 scale and inform a national strategy to mitigate downstream transport of excess nutrients. As expected, the majority of priority watersheds for wetland restoration on agricultural lands are in the tile-drained Temperate Plains; however, there are also hotspots in most ecoregions nationally. We also evaluated the current extent of federally funded wetland restoration projects on agricultural lands (largest programs are the Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program, CRP, and Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, ACEP) in the context of these identified priority watersheds. Current wetland restoration is better aligned with existing wetland cover than these priority areas where need and suitability intersect, suggesting a need to devise a national wetland restoration strategy.

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