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Written on: May 15th, 2019 in Outreach
by Alison Rogerson, Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Program
In our Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Program we speak so often about the ecosystem services that wetlands provide or the beneficial functions wetlands perform daily. We rattle them off in varying order “provide vital habitat for plants and wildlife, improve water quality, protect our coasts, act like a sponge to store floodwater, sequester Carbon from the atmosphere”.
We do this so often, that sometimes we forget to take a step back and explain what exactly we mean and how exactly wetlands work. For example, how can a wetland clean water?? Wetlands are muddy and sometimes stinky. How on earth could a wetland clean my water?
Wetlands are magicians. In their own, natural, wonderful form, they magically filter out and pull aside an assortment of nasty stuff that you and I don’t want in our streams, bay and ocean, or as we kayak and fish.
What can wetlands help filter out from our waters, you might ask?
How wetlands work. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
A magician rarely reveals their secrets, but in this case we’re spilling the beans. Wetlands remove nutrients through a combination of complex physical and biological processes. Let’s break it down (pun intended)..
Wetlands are like sponges and are great areas for holding onto water. They are also areas where the speed of water flow is drastically reduced and sometimes even stands still. As the water sits in the wetland, nutrients can be removed from the water in a couple of ways: they can simply sink down and settle on the soil surface, be released into the atmosphere or be trapped in the soil as the water filters its way slowly down through the ground.
As you can see, soils play an important role in this physical process. One of our favorite marsh metaphors to use in presentations is that wetland soils are like a strainer or sieve. We hold up a pasta strainer and kids look at us like we’re crazy but really, it fits. Just like the strainer, wetland soils have lots of tiny holes, nooks and crannies (think English muffin) to trap impurities and toxins. This process allows the cleaner water to continue on through, entering the stream or bay or even our underground aquifers.
A simplified illustration of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles in a wetland (modified from Kadlec and Knight (1996), “Treatment Wetlands”; images from IAN, University of Maryland).
There are also biological processes occurring in wetlands that can help to clean our waters. Plants, algae, and bacteria can use and transform nutrients that have sunk onto and in the soil to grow big and strong and create future generations.
Bacteria (or microbes) are really neat organisms that do some fancy biogeochemical processes called nutrient transformations. Ammonification, nitrification and denitrification are examples of nutrient transformations that turn not-so-great chemicals into less harmful ones or into a useful nutrient for plants. All of these processes are facilitated in many places throughout a wetland.
Healthy microbes also need a good source of carbon for their growth and energy and wetland plants serve as a key source of carbon! So the take home message is that these bacteria rely on wetland plants, and a wetland planted with lots of native plants (as opposed to an open pond) is going to be capable of the most nutrient transformation.
If you’re thinking that this is interesting but doesn’t affect me, you might be surprised to learn that approximately 25% of the State of Delaware is made up of wetlands, and that from where you are reading this right now, there is probably a wetland within a mile of you. This means that a wetland is hard at work for you right now trying to keep up with all the demands we place on them.
There are a few things you can do to lighten their load, so to speak.
Let the magician put on a show uninterrupted and we can all enjoy cleaner, healthier waters!
Written on: May 14th, 2019 in Wetland Animals
Guest writer: Clare Sevcik, DNREC’s Nonpoint Source Program There are so many charismatic animals that make Delaware waterways their home. Most people living in Delaware can easily recognize a few of the most popular species: bald eagles, osprey, blue crabs, horseshoe crabs, beavers, river otters, and many more. But there are many more animals living […]
Written on: May 14th, 2019 in Wetland Assessments
by Alison Rogerson, Wetland Monitoring & Assessment Program Our Roots In 1998 the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control’s (DNREC) Environmental Scientist, Amy Jacobs (now with The Nature Conservancy), took part in a grant project held by the Delaware chapter of The Nature Conservancy and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. This project developed […]
Written on: May 8th, 2019 in Wetland Animals
by Erin Dorset, Wetland Monitoring & Assessment Program Birding is always exciting in Delaware. While some bird species are year-round residents, many others are migrants traveling along the Atlantic Flyway. This keeps things interesting, as it allows birders to see a very wide variety of species throughout the year. A lot of these awesome birds […]
Written on: March 11th, 2019 in Outreach
by Brittany Haywood, DNREC Wetland Monitoring and Assessment Program One part of our job is going out into the public and explaining simply our research and the benefits of wetlands. We often use the saying, “wetlands are like sponges” to describe their ability to absorb water, but recently we’ve been asked exactly how that is […]
Written on: March 11th, 2019 in Wetland Restorations
Guest writer: Jules Bruck, University of Delaware Great things come naturally in Laurel, Delaware including the new green infrastructure treatments that are popping up along the Broad Creek – home to the future Laurel Ramble. This past summer the Sussex County Conservation District broke ground on a parcel of land in the center of the […]
Written on: February 27th, 2019 in Outreach
by Brittany Haywood, DNREC Wetland Monitoring & Assessment Program Wetlands are a part of our everyday lives. They are in the landscape silently helping to control flood waters, clean our drinking waters and protect us from damaging storms. Knowing what wetlands are, where they are, how they work, and what can and can’t be done […]
Written on: February 21st, 2019 in Wetland Assessments
by Erin Dorset, DNREC Wetland Monitoring & Assessment Program Back in 2016, you were introduced to Delaware’s Appoquinimink River watershed and the types of stressors that we were looking for in our wetland health assessments. At that point, we had recently wrapped up our field work in that watershed, but we hadn’t yet completed any […]
Written on: December 4th, 2018 in Outreach
by Brittany Haywood, Wetland Monitoring & Assessment Program Working in wetlands takes a certain breed of people, the kind that has to have a sense of humor. You have to deal with interesting smells, sticky conditions, and bugs that manage to find their way into unwanted places (such as your eye or nose). But if […]
Written on: December 3rd, 2018 in Wetland Assessments
Guest Writer: LeeAnn Haaf, Partnership for the Delaware Estuary Sea levels are rising in the Delaware Estuary– we’ve already observed its effects. Over the last couple decades, we have seen dramatic losses of tidal marsh acreage and documented the death of trees bordering those tidal marshes. We know that the last hope for a lot of […]
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