On 1/1/2003, Toby Fiander posted:

Below my signature substitute is an item from the New York Times which outlines new guidelines for wetlands in the US.  There are a couple of people on the list who have an interest in wetlands now.

When I was in the US in 1995, I had the great fortune to go to several wetland places that almost no one else goes to.  The St John's River Valley Authority blokes took:  a professor from the University of Western Sydney, the then Mayor of a Certain Place, its (now former) engineer, a PWD engineer (now retired) and a consultant paying his own way (me) to Blue Cypress Lake in swamp boats.  Mine happened to be piloted by the head of the division and so we go to do legitimately all the things that muglairs only dream about in an exquisitely beautiful place that defies adequate description... and nearly sank on a tight turn in the middle of alligator infested nowhere, but that story will have to wait for a bottle of wine, probably.

Actually, I seem to have spent half my life up to my knees in swamp - Macquarie Wetlands, Barmah Forest, Lachlan Swamps, and even learning to survey in a swamp at Dargyl.  I spent a couple of interesting days at the end of a certain reservoir near Robertson - looking for the bunyip (and a rare orchid) ... as one does.

There is a serious case for protecting wetlands.  NSW has some legislation aimed at exactly that and some of the right noises are made, but we have a long way to go.  For example, the blokes from St John's (local pron. is Sayent Jarn's) River authority could not understand the Aussie pre-occupation with phosphorus removal in wastewater, because phosphorus has not been in US detergents for a couple of decades as a result of public pressure fostered by Ralph Nader.

Protection of wetlands is taken seriously in the USA - the Everglades research program had a budget of similar scale to the entire research budget of a small university.  That does not seem to have stopped development but it has made the issue of what changes to land use actually do a bit more prominent.



NEW YORK TIMES ITEM
In response to criticism that the federal government was failing to meet its goals for wetlands conservation, the Bush administration today revised its guidelines to the Army Corps of Engineers for mitigating the loss of wetlands from development.

The new guidelines require a "watershed-based" approach in which the wetland needs of an entire watershed are taken into account, rather than only the site of the development.

For example, if a developer destroys 10 acres of wetlands, he can no longer just plant 10 acres of trees nearby. Instead, the corps must advise the developer if other, more potentially valuable areas in the watershed need replenishing, even if the acreage does not match precisely what would be lost.

"It's an effort to look at the overall need within the watershed and go through a process to restore the functions and values of the types of wetlands that are being lost," said Ben Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the Environmental Protection Agency.

But environmentalists said that the new guidelines were not binding and that they gave too much leeway to developers.

"They've left a lot of room for abuse," said Julie Sibbing of the National Wildlife Federation. "There isn't the technology to determine the trade-off in wetlands functions, so you don't know if what you're building will be successful or better than the wetland. This is a fancy way of couching the watershed approach, but it will result in losses."

Wetlands, which include bogs, marshes and swamps, are essential to well-functioning ecosystems because they filter drinking water, retain flood waters, support a diverse array of wildlife and provide homes to fish and shellfish. Destroying wetlands can increase floods, cause stream pollution and result in the loss of valuable habitat.

Along with the E.P.A., the Agriculture, Commerce, Interior and Transportation Departments reworked the guidelines in the face of criticism of the Bush administration's policy.

The National Academy of Sciences and the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, had long criticized the government's approach to wetlands. When the Bush administration announced a new policy in October 2001, though, it did not include recommendations from these reports, thus drawing complaints that Mr. Bush was straying too far from the goals - set by his father's administration in 1989 - that there be no net loss of wetlands.

The administration's revised guidelines include 16 new steps to improve the restoration of wetlands.

[ends]

>
> Actually, I seem to have spent half my life up to my knees in swamp -
> Macquarie Wetlands, Barmah Forest, Lachlan Swamps, and even learning to
> survey in a swamp at Dargyl. I spent a couple of interesting days at the
> end of a certain reservoir near Robertson - looking for the bunyip (and a
> rare orchid) ... as one does.

>
> There is a serious case for protecting wetlands. NSW has some legislation
> aimed at exactly that and some of the right noises are made, but we have a
> long way to go. For example, the blokes from St John's (local pron. is
> Sayent Jarn's) River authority could not understand the Aussie
> pre-occupation with phosphorus removal in wastewater, because phosphorus

> not been in US detergents for a couple of decades as a result of public
> pressure fostered by Ralph Nader.

Toby replied:

I have been to Tuckean Swamp, but I have never paddled there. Fire can be quite damaging to peat swamps but seems to be common. The bloke who told me about the bunyip at Wingecarribee (one grey afternoon before I was due to start work on my own, when he knew it would scare me the most probably) was actually more concerned that I did not fall, boots and all, into any of the flooded burn holes in the peat.

Phosphorus is still in detergents in Australia, although if you choose your brand carefully, it is possible to get one with less phosphorus, than some others.

I gave a page a while ago on the Lanfax site outlining results of a survey of brands for sodium as well as phosphorus. Bob Patterson has done some excellent work on on-site disposal of wastewater. Try here and search on the word "laundry" or "detergent". The document is a PDF near the end of the publications page:
http://www.lanfaxlabs.com.au/


On 5/1/2004, Ray Stephens wrote:

extracted from and forwarded:
Pet News from Local Vet.

Might be of interest to some....

3. Wetlands Conservation


Wetlands, a term which encompasses wet ecosystems as diverse as as inland billabongs and coastal salt marshes, are a vital home for a huge range of animals and plants - for instance, 75% of the fish that we eat spend part of their lives in coastal wetlands.

The issue is that many wetlands are threatened and need our help. The good news is that people are working to restore and protect these areas to great effect. Here's how to get involved:

1. Sign up with Conservation Volunteers Australia. They link volunteers with all sorts of conservation projects around Australia.  You can volunteer for as little as one day or a week or more - you choose. Some of the projects are in fabulous locations - so good you could make a holiday out of it. Start by going to their site and seeing what's available
www.conservationvolunteers.com.au

2. Help the Platypus Conservancy
This is the leading Platypus research body in Australia which works to monitor, understand and protect the Platypus in urban areas as well as the bush. To get involved or find out more click here.

Some excellent additional resources:
www.wetlandcare.com.au
For teachers and students, the wetlands training booklet


On 16/6/2006, Toby Fiander wrote:

[Ascends soap box]

Supposing you were wanting to keep track of the condition of wetlands in a particular catchment.  Sounds worthy.  Even sounds like someone should have done it long ago, perhaps as a continuing program.  Good ideas have a way of sounding like that, don't you think?  But there are a couple of difficulties.  Here is one.

Most of the current methods of doing so involve an implicit comparison, at least according their literature, with "pristine wetlands".  Where do you suppose we are going find one or more of these?  Bruce Chessman, who has one of these indices called SIGNAL based on collecting and identifying a sample of macroinvertebrates, says there aren't any pristine wetlands.

The NSW Healthy Rivers Commission, now sadly defunct, has a more sanguine approach.  In this case it might be expressed as a wetland has desirable characteristics if the community says it does, which rather leaves wetland condition indices out in the cold, as they tend to be one time determinations on comparison to some particular apparently fixed standard.

There are indices that can have this sort of community standard applied with some effort, though the application is an external mechanism to the method itself.  One might even argue that the evolution of the characterisation methods over the past decade is one way of coping with changes to community expectation without acknowledging the change in community values and understanding.

Why then is the Victorian Dept of Conservation & Environment (or whatever it is called this week) developing, with great trouble and expense, an index of wetland condition that, according to its documentation, uses as a reference standard, the condition of wetlands at the time of European settlement?  And this is after a lot of community meetings, which one might have thought would draw attention to the evolution of community standards where wetlands are concerned!  So... exactly which records are going to use to characterise the pre-European wetlands?  Isn't the whole point of establishing the indices to keep track at manageable cost of something where almost no real data currently exists?

I have just read a bunch of papers by notable people in this area of ecological restoration which seriously ignore the circularity that is involved in the logic of referring to long ago when there was no data.  They were even published in semi-reputable journals.  To be fair they do address in come cases what is meant by "River Health".  But then, as if exhausted by the effort, blithely go on referring to something for which there does not seem to be any data.... at best the database is miniscule and anecdotal.

Australia has been very poor at managing its wetlands for any environmental objective and the case for keeping track of just how badly wetlands are still being treated is overwhelming.  But I just can't swallow the idea that with no data, a reference standard is going to be developed.

I have recently written an essay for assessment on this topic.  I am sure it is going to go over like a lead balloon, but I can't help that.  It is high time some people really interested in ecology from a commonsense point of view spoke up against nonsense.

Ecological management is everyone's business and if we leave it to people with an apparent axe to grind, we are going to get more lousy management.

The soap box is now free.


and:

<snip>

Anyway, as to the indices, I have prepared another paper looking at the SIGNAL 2 index for a group of riverine sites near Tumut.  SIGNAL was developed by Bruce Chessman, and others.  He is the bloke who said that there is no such thing as a pristine wetland in Australia (my words, not his, though his were similar, I think).  There are a couple of interesting things about this exercise, but I will leave that for another time, because I really need to write it on another piece of paper, not this one.

<snip>