I found an old Nature Conservancy magazine from summer 2008 lying around and starting poking through it. One article, “Just Add Water,” turned out to be a treasure trove of information about current experiments with restoring wetlands. I could probably quote bits and pieces of this article for weeks, but for now I’m focusing on the concept of wetland mitigation banks. Here’s a rather long quote from the article:

Developers have traditionally offset wetland losses with man-made replacement wetlands on their own properties. But such replacements rarely provide the ecological benefits of those that have been restored.

“Wetland  mitigation banks,” by contrast, allow multiple developers to pool their money to restore large-scale, high-quality wetlands. The Conservancy helped pioneer the wetland mitigation bank concept in 1992 when it created the Disney Wilderness Preserve, south of Orlando, Florida. The project has been funded by the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority and the Walt Disney World Corporation, which has so far provided about $41 million.

There the Conservancy bought and restored 11,500 acres of pine flats, oak scrub and wetlands that had been ditched and drained for cattle ranching and logging.

The article goes on to detail some of the methods used to recreate “natural” water flows at the preserve. Suffice it to say that blowing up dikes and dams isn’t always the best solution. Sometimes it’s best to leave them in place.

I’ve always mistrusted the idea of wetland mitigation. You can’t just go out and dig a hole, fill it with water, add some water-loving plants, and expect to get an ecosystem as valuable as the one you just turned into a subdivision. But the wetland mitigation bank could be a viable concept. It could replace some of the wetlands lost to development with wetlands that have the potential to be as high-quality ecosystems as the ones lost.

And how many acres of wetlands are being lost? According to the article, at present there are 108 million acres of wetlands in the lower 48 states. About 113 million have been lost since European settlement, or about 50%. However, in some states where farming is important, close to 90% of wetlands may have been lost. In my home state of Missouri, for example, 87 percent of wetlands in the Mississippi River drainage have been developed. I find that percentage hard to believe.