Wetland Restoration/Enlargement

The importance of wetlands is finally being acknowledged, unfortunately not by everyone. Wetlands improve water quality by filtering overland flow and capturing pollutants, help reduce flooding by temporarily storing water, recharge groundwater and provide vitally needed habitat for wildlife.

Pennsylvania is estimated to have lost 28,000 acres of wetland between 1956 and 1979 a period when the U. S. Department of Agriculture actively encouraged drainage. The state now has a policy of “no net loss” of wetlands and there is funding available to restore and create wetlands.

In 2000 my office obtained funding to restore wetlands in a small drainage where there had been beaver ponds over a hundred years before. Here’s the process in scans of old slides (unfortunately some are not good) –

Closer to home, along the river there’s a large wetland that has developed over hundreds of years in an old river channel. That large wetland had a number of smaller outlying ephemeral wetlands which had been drained, plowed and planted to agricultural crops over the last several hundred years.

The large wetland and adjacent fields are now in public ownership; most of the old fields were planted in grasses and forbs to recreate the meadows that had once occupied much of the river’s floodplain.

In 2024 funding was obtained to restore and enlarge some of the smaller wetlands that had been destroyed by agricultural use –

Heavy equipment was brought in and work began –

The bottoms of what would become wetland were left “lumpy/bumpy” to create microhabitats –

Finally, those big piles of soil that had been removed were smoothed and seeded –

In the midst of an otherwise very dry summer several inches of rain fell and the new wetlands began to fill –

It was only a matter of days until wetland vegetation had begun to regrow and wetland dependent species were using the area –

Now Pennsylvania has a few more acres of wetland, downstream communities will see a bit less flooding, wildlife will have more space to live and we naturalists have another place to wander and see mammals, birds, dragonflies and other wetland wildlife.